The Rwandan genocide of 1994 took place over one hundred days (from April through July). During this time period, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were murdered with untold numbers suffering from other offenses (e.g., rape, torture, intimidation); this rate exceeds that of the Holocaust and it makes this the "most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Gourevitch 1998).

Conventional wisdom holds numerous opinions about the patterns, structure and reasons that lay behind these events. Unfortunately, most efforts rely upon the investigation of a limited number of locations, over a specific period of time and from a limited number of sources, but this provides us with only a partial view of what occurred; in short, we have ended up with a fragmented and contestable understanding.

The GenoDynamics project (run by Professors Christian Davenport and Allan Stam), attempts to address this limitation. Housed at the University of Maryland, GenoDynamics aims to collect all available information on discrete actions undertaken during the Rwandan genocide (e.g., instances of rape, torture, beating, abduction and killing). This information is being compiled from a broad array of human rights NGOs within and outside of Rwanda as well as government ministries. Additionally, GenoDynamics will engage in systematic analyses of these data to understand causal explanations of participation, relative degrees of violence, "oases of humanity" (when individuals saved others) as well as patterns of temporal and spatial diffusion.

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