About
The Why Project · read what you consume
We live in unusually polarized times, and the stakes are not abstract: voters and ordinary people are deciding questions that affect millions — even billions — of lives, from war and migration to rights and the economy. They are deciding them while immersed in the most sophisticated, best-funded persuasion machine ever built, delivered through algorithmic feeds and paid for by every side.
As a society we have not yet learned to read it. A generation ago we ate whatever the package promised; over time we learned to check the label and ask what was actually in our food. We have not yet built that same instinct for the content we consume through a screen.
The Why Project exists to help build it — by getting people to ask one question, why, and showing what it looks like to follow that question all the way down. It is a growing collection of works: research into the loaded words we argue with, the numbers we quote, and the sources we trust. The first deep dive is the genocide record: an analytical, source-cited ledger of genocides past, present, and at risk, built around the 1948 Genocide Convention and designed to read like an official briefing document — structured, cited, and explicit about uncertainty.
What this is
- A comparative record of genocide cases with casualty ranges, documented Article II acts, evidence of intent, and recognition status — each linked to sources.
- A transparency layer for the organizations and individuals whose determinations shape how we understand these events — including their funding, affiliations, and credibility caveats.
- An evidence database of quotes and statistics, tagged to specific legal elements (killing, intent, scale, recognition, etc.) so the same data can power case dossiers, act accordions, and the raw-data ledger.
What this is not
This site does not issue legal verdicts. Recognition status varies by determining body — a case may be judicially adjudicated, politically recognized, scholarly consensus, alleged, or contested. Casualty figures are widely-cited estimates shown as ranges to reflect genuine scholarly uncertainty. Inclusion here is documentation and analysis, not a finding of guilt or innocence.
How the data is organized
Cases
Each genocide case — location, parties, casualty estimates, documented acts, intent evidence, Stanton stage, and recognition notes. Click any row on the main record to open a full dossier.
Authorities
Courts, UN bodies, research institutes, and scholars whose determinations appear in the record — with profiles covering independence, funding, affiliations, and linked cases.
Primary sources
Links to authoritative documents and archives from courts, UN bodies, perpetrator governments, targeted-group institutions, and international responders — the raw material from which quotes are later extracted. View the full ledger on Raw Data.
Evidence
The canonical dataset: every quote and cited statistic, tagged to the legal element it supports. View the full ledger on the Raw Data tab. New items can be appended to this store and are schema-validated before they appear on the site.
Status
This is a prototype with a hand-curated seed dataset of twelve cases. The evidence store is designed to grow — including via automated ingestion — with provenance fields and validation to keep additions safe. For the analytical frameworks behind each column and tag, see Methodology.