Greg Stanton Fights Genocide -- and Genocide Haunts Him

Greg Stanton has spent a career researching and fighting genocide. He speaks candidly about the psychological toll of this line of work and managing the PTSD which he confronts to this day.

Stanton is a descendent of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and as you'll learn from this conversation, the human rights gene runs strong in this family. His father was a liberal preacher and civil rights activist, and Greg tells me the most dangerous place he's ever worked, to this day, was registering black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s. Greg is the founder of the NGO Genocide watch. His career as a genocide scholar and activist began in the 1980s as an humanitarian worker in Cambodia, and he recounts collecting evidence of war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. Greg served for many years in the State Department as well, including in Rwanda to help establish the war crimes tribunal following the 1994 genocide. We kick off discussing an ongoing genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq and Syria. The subject matter of this episode is pretty heavy and i just want to thank Greg for being so open and honest about the emotional challenges he's faced throughout his career. This is a rebroadcast. The episode originally aired in August 2016.