About This Lesson
This interdisciplinary unit examines the third stage of genocide, Discrimination, through the experience of the Hazara ethnic minority and of women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Rather than treating discrimination as individual prejudice, students investigate how law, custom, and political power are used to strip a group of rights, and how those legal and institutional patterns function as measurable early-warning indicators of atrocity. The unit draws on prevention scholarship (Straus, Waller, and the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect) to move students from recognition into reasoned judgment: after mapping risk and simulating midstream prevention, they write an evidence-based position paper arguing what should be done. The unit is grounded in Gregory Stanton’s “Ten Stages of Genocide.”
