Dr. Gregory H. Stanton comes from a long line of human rights trouble makers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a founder of the women’s suffrage movement in America, looked down from his great-grandfather’s mantelpiece, like Queen Victoria, exercising a stern moral authority over all who passed. Elizabeth’s husband, Henry Brewster Stanton, was a lawyer prominent in the international anti-slavery movement, wealthy enough to employ servants to assist with their many children, allowing Elizabeth and Susan B. Anthony to travel about, agitating. His lineage reaches back to Brewster of the Mayflower, who landed in Massachusetts in 1620 to escape the English when they were still religious.
Stanton has numerous academic degrees of dubious utility, including a J.D. from Yale, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, where he also earned a certificate in bartending. He professed law at Washington and Lee University and American University from 1985 to 1991. He served in the U.S. State Department from 1992 to 1999, where he won the “career suicide award” from the American Foreign Service Association for his dissent from US policy on the Rwandan genocide. He wrote U.N. Security Council Resolutions 955 and 978, which created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He founded the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale Law School in 1982, Genocide Watch in 1998, and the International Campaign to End Genocide in 1999. He was President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars from 1997 – 1999.
Stanton has published numerous articles on genocide in obscure journals. In 2001 – 2002 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He was the James Farmer Professor in Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia, until the university President terminated the Professorship to save money. He is currently an unpaid Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution of George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia. He is writing a textbook, The Eight Stages of Genocide, but in twelve years has yet to finish it although it will be short.
