LAUSR

The protection of the right to life of a human person has been one of the most influential political and legal norms since the end of the Second World War, invoked in national constitutions and various sources of international law. While contemporary empirical social science research is still primarily engaged in investigating the causes and factors that contribute to human rights violations (such as extrajudicial killings, torture, and enforced disappearances), analysts and scholars tend to treat the plausible causes of genocide as distinct from those Bregular^ human rights violations. Notably, it appears that much of the recent scholarship focuses on a wide range of plausible causes and conditions that facilitate the state agent’s episodic commission of those human rights violations, while the general causes of genocide tend to attract lesser scholarly and policy attention, especially among social scientists. Yet the empirical puzzle pertaining to the causes and conditions of genocide is an extremely important topic not only for social scientists but also to policymakers; a more reliable social scientific understanding of genocide could potentially help states and global governance institutions prevent such phenomenon. Hum Rights Rev DOI 10.1007/s12142-016-0448-9