International Association of Genocide Scholars

According to the IAGS, its origin is based on the scholars who studied genocide in the 1980s including Helen Fein who published "Accounting for Genocide" in 1979 and Leo Kuper who published "Genocide" in 1982, and a genocide conference organised by Israel Charny in Jerusalem in 1982. The IAGS itself was created in 1994, initially with the name Association of Genocide Scholars and holding biennial conferences in the United States and Canada. In 2001, the name was changed to International Association of Genocide Scholars along with a change in the bylaws requiring at least one officer to be from outside of North America, and that the biennial conferences be "regularly" held outside of North America. The original group of scholars was small, with the first conference, held in June 1995 at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in the US, taking place in a single room with about fifty participants. According to Jack Nusan Porter, the Williamsburg conference included Porter reading a paper by his colleague Steven T. Katz that led to major controversy at the meeting about whether the Holocaust was "the only 'true' genocide".

According to Porter, IAGS finances were managed "carelessly" prior to Porter becoming the treasurer in 2007 and Greg Stanton becoming president of the IAGS, which led to the financial management returning to "a firm footing". During Stanton's presidency, IAGS leaders visited Erbil to prepare a conference in Brussels on the Anfal campaign, a massacre of Kurds in Iraq under Saddam Hussein that Porter views as a genocide.

A parallel genocide researchers' association, the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), was created in 2005. Jack Nusan Porter describes INoGS as a split from the IAGS, mainly by European researchers, for two reasons: the researchers who created INoGS viewed IAGS as concentrating too much on declarations rather than research; and a public conflict occurred between Israel Charny and Martin Shaw over the assessment of Israel's role in the Deir Yassin massacre and its occupation of Palestinian territories. Charny described the creation of INoGS as occurring independently of IAGS, stating, "There was no prior collaboration with IAGS about the development of INOGS."

Another publishing split occurred with the creation of the journal Genocide Studies International, in association with the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights at the Zoryan Institute.

Since 2011, all IAGS conferences have been held outside the US. Conference locations have included Buenos Aires (2011), Yerevan (2015), Brisbane (2017), Barcelona (2023). The most recent IAGS conference was hosted by the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre in October 2025.

Historically, the IAGS was criticized in the field who saw it as overly pro-Western and incorrect that robust military intervention by the West was a successful tactic to prevent genocide, as well as the implicit assumption that Western countries were not the perpetrators of genocide. Jürgen Zimmerer argued that instead of genocide being an aberration, perhaps "the world system is itself the root cause of genocide". A number of scholars, including Zimmerer, founded INoGS as an alternative to the IAGS.