Why Look at Perpetrators?

A Seminar with Kjell Anderson, Ugur Ümit Üngör, and Susanne C. Knittel.

The figure of the perpetrator occupies a paradoxical position in contemporary society, characterized by a constant oscillation between fascination, repugnance, demonization and, in some cases, sympathy. There has been a growing interest among scholars in diverse fields in the figure of the perpetrator and about questions of guilt and responsibility for mass violence.

In this seminar, the three speakers will present their current research in the context of their respective disciplines, sociology and law, history, and comparative literature, respectively.
The three speakers are all members of the Perpetrator Studies Network, founded by Susanne C. Knittel and Ugur Ümit Üngör, and in addition to presenting their own work, the speakers will also present the network and its ongoing activities.

Kjell Anderson is a researcher and lecturer at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. He is also currently the Second Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. His research is comparative and interdisciplinary with a particular focus on perpetrators of mass atrocities. His forthcoming monograph, The Criminology of Genocide (Routledge 2016), involves interviews with perpetrators of mass atrocities in several countries.

He is currently researching Islamic State atrocities against minorities in Iraq, in particular the Ezidi, Shabak, and Christians communities. He recently traveled to northern Iraq with Irene Massimino and Elisa von Joeden Forgey on an exploratory fact-finding mission. The mission met with leaders from minority communities, visited sites of violence (such as Sinjar), and interviewed victims of Islamic State-directed violence.

Ugur Ümit Üngör is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Utrecht University and Research Fellow at the NIOD: Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. He has published on aspects of genocide, the Armenian and Rwandan cases, as well as on mass violence in Syria.

He is currently leading an NWO VIDI project that examines the involvement of paramilitaries in mass political violence. Pro-state paramilitaries appeared during the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s, e.g. in Serbia, Turkey, and Chechnya, and more recently in the Syrian civil war. The project examines the development of paramilitary groups in various conflicts as they emerged, functioned, and disappeared, and thereby aims to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on perpetration.

Susanne C. Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. In her research she explores questions of memory, commemoration, and cultural amnesia. Her current research focuses on the figure of the perpetrator in Germany and Romania.

Her NWO-VENI project, Faces of Evil: The Figure of the Perpetrator in Contemporary Memory Culture traces the figure of the perpetrator through post-1989 memory culture in Germany and Romania, where the joint legacies of Fascism and Communism render questions of perpetration and victimhood inherently ambiguous and complex. She analyses the role of perpetrators in literature, drama, film, and at documentary exhibitions in order to elucidate how these cultures create narratives about their own history through which they negotiate questions of complicity and collaboration in order to ascribe or disavow guilt and responsibility.

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Image from the exhibition Faces of Evil by Hans Weishäupl (http://www.faces-of-evil.com).

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This seminar is supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and Cultures, Citizenship, and Human Rights.