Northwestern Professor Receives Stockholm Prize

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University Professor John Hagan has been awarded the 2009 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his pioneering application of advanced crime measurement techniques to the analysis of genocide in Darfur and the Balkans.

Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, professor at Northwestern University School of Law and co-director of the Center on Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation.

Hagan and the co-recipient of the prize, Raul Zaffaroni of the Supreme Court of Argentina, will share the prize money, $113,264.

Hagan pioneered the application of advanced crime measurement techniques to the study of genocide in his empirical work on violence in Darfur and the Balkans in 2003–05. Using systematic methods of estimating deaths from surveys administered by nongovernmental organizations and the U.S. State Department, Hagan led research studies that found that widely circulated murder estimates in the tens of thousands in Darfur should have been in the hundreds of thousands. Reported in the journal Science and in more than 100 newspapers worldwide, his estimate of between 200,000 and 350,000 deaths transformed public comprehension of the tragedy in Darfur.

Hagan's team also showed evidence of racial motivation in the violence, with little of the counter-insurgency defense claimed by Sudanese authorities. Hagan's book "Darfur and the Crime of Genocide," co-written with Wenona Rymond-Richmond of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008.

The Stockholm Prize also recognizes Hagan's earlier study of the development of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, published in his book "Justice in the Balkans."

His research interests include the collateral effects of imprisonment and cross-national study of the legal profession. As a Guggenheim Fellow, he studied the migration of American Vietnam war resisters to Canada, which resulted in the book Northern Passage. Another book, Mean Streets, tracked the lives of 500 homeless youth in two cities and received the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

More information about Hagan's Darfur research is available in the winter 2009 issue of the American Bar Foundation's newsletter Researching Law (www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/abf_rl_win_09_final.pdf).