Research Expertise and Interest
human rights, war, International Criminal Law, Forensic Sciences, International Criminal Justice
Research Description
For the past thirty-two years, Stover has focused his professional work on the investigation of war crimes and human rights abuses in over a dozen countries.
Throughout the 1990s, Stover led forensic missions to Bosnia and Croatia to investigate mass graves for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Evidence collected from these investigations contributed to the conviction of several suspects responsible for the Vukovar and Srebrenica massacres. After the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Stover conducted a survey of mass graves throughout the country for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Stover is a former executive director of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which received the Nobel Prize in 1997.
Stover has published the following books: The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar, with photographer Gilles Peress (Scalo); Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell, with Christopher Joyce (Little, Brown, Inc.); The Breaking of Bodies and Minds: Torture, Psychiatric Abuse, and the Health Professions, co-edited with Elena Nightingale (W.H. Freeman, Inc.); Medicine Under Siege in the former Yugoslavia 1991 -1995 (Physicians for Human Rights); Landmines: A Deadly Legacy (Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch); A Village Destroyed: May 14, 1999 -- War Crimes in Kosovo, with Fred Abrahams and Gilles Peress (University of California Press, 2002); The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague (University of Pennsylvania Press); My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge University Press), co-edited with Harvey Weinstein; and The Guantanamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices (University of California Press, 2009), with Laurel E. Fletcher.
His articles and photographs have appeared in the British Medical Journal, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Science, The Washington Post, Parade Magazine, New England Journal of Medicine, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, The Journal of the American Medical Association, New Scientist, The Lancet, American Scientist, Historical Archaeology and other professional journals. In 1992, he co-produced a NOVA-WGBH documentary on the search for the graves of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bolivia.
During the war in Iraq (March and April 2003), Stover monitored compliance by all parties to the conflict with the 1949 Geneva Conventions on behalf of Human Rights Watch. He returned to Iraq in February 2004 to investigate a mass grave which contained the remains of women and children killed during Iraq’s Anfal Campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s.
Stover is currently researching and writing a book on the pursuit of war crime suspects from Nuremberg to 9/11.
