Barbara Harff

Barbara Harff (born in Kassel, Germany; Ph.D. Northwestern University, 1981) is Professor of Political Science Emerita at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2003 and again in 2005 she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on the causes, risks, and prevention of genocidal violence.

Harff’s dissertation at Northwestern University applied the international legal doctrine of humanitarian intervention to genocide. It was published in 1984 as a monograph on Genocide and Human Rights Before joining the US Naval Academy faculty in 1989 Harff held academic positions in the Department of Legal Studies, LaTrobe University, in Melbourne, Australia; and the University of Illinois Chicago campus; she retired from the Naval Academy in 2005.

In the early 1980s, Harff began to develop a dataset on cases of genocide and political mass murder since 1945 to demonstrate that genocidal killings were far more common than widely believed. She identified and profiled 46 instances through 1985 This list provided the basis for systematic comparative analysis by her and others.

Harff’s list of cases included mass killings that targeted political groups such as the victims of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–75) and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (1981–82) for which she termed the word politicide. The inclusion of these episodes along with genocidal killings targeting ethnic and religious groups has been largely but not entirely accepted by other scholars and by policy makers. However mass killings of political groups remain outside the legal definition of genocide formulated in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948.

From 1995 Harff served as senior consultant to the White-House initiated State Failure (now Political Instability) Task Force whose data set on state failures included her cases of genocide and politicide. In her work for the Task Force she designed data-based analyses of the preconditions and accelerators of genocidal fillings for use by the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Her risk assessment model for genocide and its application to contemporary conflict situations was published in 2003.

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