Gregory H. Stanton
Founding President and Chairman
Dr. Gregory H. Stanton is the founding president and chairman of Genocide Watch. From 2010 to 2019, he was a research professor in genocide studies and prevention at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia, USA. From 2003 to 2009, he was the James Farmer Professor in Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Dr. Stanton founded Genocide Watch in 1999. He was the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project and is currently the founder (1999) and chair of the Alliance Against Genocide, the world’s first anti-genocide coalition. From 2007-2009, he was the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Dr. Stanton served in the U.S. State Department (1992-1999) where he drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, and the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war.
In 1994, Dr. Stanton won the American Foreign Service Association’s prestigious W. Averell Harriman Award for “extraordinary contributions to the practice of diplomacy exemplifying intellectual courage,” based on his dissent of U.S. policy on the Rwandan genocide. He wrote the State Department options paper on ways to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice in Cambodia.
After leaving the State Department in 1999 to found Genocide Watch, Dr. Stanton was deeply involved in the U.N.-Cambodian government negotiations that brought about the creation of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, for which he drafted that court's internal rules of procedure.
From 1999 to 2000, Dr. Stanton served as co-chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court. In 2000, he published a proposal to establish an Office for Genocide Prevention at the UN. With other members of the International Campaign to End Genocide, he met with U.N. officials to lobby for the proposal. In 2004 in Stockholm, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the creation of the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide.
Before he joined the State Department, Dr. Stanton was a legal advisor to RUKH, the Ukrainian independence movement, where he was named the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America’s 1992 Man of the Year. He was the chair of the American Bar Association Young Lawyer’s Division Committee on Human Rights and a member of the A.B.A.’s Standing Committee on World Order Under Law.
Dr. Stanton comes from the lineage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a women’s suffrage activist, and Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery leader. Actively involved in human rights since the 1960s when he was a voting rights worker in Mississippi, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Ivory Coast and as the Church World Service/CARE Field Director in Cambodia in 1980. He has been a law professor at Washington and Lee, American University, and the University of Swaziland.
Dr. Stanton has degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Law School, and a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2001-2002).
