Life
Des Forges was born Alison B. Liebhafsky on August 20, 1942, to Sybil Small and Herman A. Liebhafsky. She married Roger Des Forges, a historian at the State University of New York at Buffalo who specialized in China, in 1964. Des Forges earned her B.A. in history from Radcliffe College in 1964, and her M.A. and a PhD in the same discipline from Yale University in 1966 and 1972. Her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation both addressed the impact of European colonialism on Rwanda. Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931, her dissertation, was published posthumously in 2011. Describing the politics of the court during the reign of Yuhi Musinga, it shows how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries and traders.
She specialized in the African Great Lakes region and studied the Rwandan Genocide. She was also an authority on human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Burundi.
Des Forges left academia in 1994 in response to the Rwandan Genocide, to work full-time on human rights. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, and became the senior advisor at Human Rights Watch for the African continent.
She died on February 12, 2009, in the air crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407, en route from Newark, New Jersey, to her home in Buffalo, New York.
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