[2] Born in Kassel, Germany, Harff's Ph.D. dissertation at Northwestern University in 1981 applied the international legal doctrine of humanitarian intervention to genocide.
Harff's list of cases included mass killings that targeted political groups such as the victims of China's Cultural Revolution (1966–75) and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (1981–82), for which she termed the word "politicide".
[5] She also developed an early warning model to identify local, national, and international events that help turn high-risk situations into full-fledged genocidal killings.
She applied this model, which identified some 70 categories of actions, to information on events that preceded mass atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[7] Other publications include Ethnic Conflict in World Politics[8] and Essays in Honor of Helen Fein (2007), coedited with Joyce Apsel and published by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.