Intergenerational Survivors of Genocide and Mass Atrocities

This unique volume brings together intergenerational survivors of genocide and mass atrocities, who are actively engaged in producing knowledge related to their lived and inherited experiences, to share their stories. Centering survivor positionality as a source of epistemic insight rather than bias, the book examines how intergenerational experiences shape scholarship, pedagogy, advocacy, healing, and atrocity prevention practice.

Contributors reflect on the benefits, risks, and ethical tensions of this focal positionality while offering concrete recommendations to reduce harm and strengthen support across academic, humanitarian, and policy domains. Organized thematically, the volume explores personal and communal ways of knowing atrocity, identity, and moral inheritance, and the structural conditions under which survivor-scholars work. The book is divided into three parts, including teachings about one’s own lived experiences, narratives about positionality and identity, and navigating and improving conditions for intergenerational survivors in knowledge production.

Exploring how intergenerational experiences impact the production of knowledge on atrocity violence, this book will appeal to scholars and students of genocide and mass atrocity prevention, memory studies, transitional justice, peacebuilding, and related interdisciplinary fields.

Dr. Saghar Shahidi-Birjandian is the Founder of Collaborative Structural Change, a Founding Partner of Mediated Solutions, and Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. As a scholar-practitioner, Saghar’s work focuses on context-sensitive, survivor-centered problem analysis for strategy development in transitional justice and atrocity prevention, with publications in Genocide Studies and Prevention and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Dr. Sarah Snyder is a Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, a lecturer at Goodwin University, and a founding member of Collaborative Structural Change. She published Trauma Beyond Time: Temporal Constructs in Holocaust Testimonies, examining intergenerational trauma and memory in Holocaust survivors and their descendants.