The Sentinel Project early warning system (EWS) is a two-stage process. First, it examines the structural characteristics of a society that predispose it to genocide. Second, it monitors ongoing events to track the development of genocidal processes. For the last several months, our Research Team has been busy concentrating on the first stage. The team has drawn on models of genocide designed by scholars such as Barbara Harff, Ted Gurr, and Ervin Staub during a comprehensive literature survey. The result is a list of genocidal risk factors which will inform the first stage of the process.
Many models of genocidal risk share similarities, so the next step is to merge overlapping risk factors, remove those which are inappropriate for our work, and emphasize the strengths of different models. This will always be a work-in-progress subject to constant review and improvement as the EWS is put into operation in the future, but the Research Team has come even closer to building a working first version which will soon be ready for use.