The biennial Lemkin Award honors Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the term "genocide" and exponent of the UN Genocide Convention. The award recognizes the best non-fiction work focusing on genocide, crimes against humanity and other gross human rights violations, and on strategies of prevention. 

The 2021 recipients are Alison Crosby, Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and former Director of the Centre for Feminist Research (2014-2019) at York University in Toronto, Canada and M. Brinton Lykes, Co-Director, Center for Human Rights & International Justice and Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology at Boston College. Their book Beyond Repair? Mayan Women's Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm explores Mayan women’s agency in the search for redress for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state in the early 1980s at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. It draws on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women who are seeking truth, justice, and reparation for the violence they experienced during the war, and the women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries for over a decade.

Introduction and comments by CLIHHR Director Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum (Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law); ISG President Joyce Apsel (NYU); and ISG Executive Director Ernesto Verdeja (University of Notre Dame). A discussion and audience Q&A with the authors will follow.