Out now: JPR Issue 6.2!

Special Issue: Researching Perpetrators, Revisited.

Edited by Erin Jessee and Kjell Anderson.

This special issue, edited by Erin Jessee and Kjell Anderson, continues the critical conversation on methods and ethics in perpetrator research initiated in their 2020 edited volume Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). The contributions to the special issue present a diverse array of methods and approaches to perpetrator research – from oral historical and ethnographic to neuroscientific and archival. They also expand the discussion beyond well-researched cases of genocide to include relatively understudied mass atrocities, for example in India or in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The issue features an introduction by the editors, followed by five research articles: Peace and conflict studies scholar Dixita Deka discusses assassinations employed by the Indian police in the 1990s to defeat the insurgent organization United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). Deka explores the challenges of ethnographic research across conflict lines, including interviews with surviving family members and police officers who were responsible for assassinating and disappearing alleged ULFA supporters. In her discussion of the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, legal scholar Carola Lingaas highlights issues of transparency, translation, and access, with a focus on the comparative underrepresentation of the testimonies of the genocide’s Hutu perpetrators. Her analysis raises questions regarding a post-conflict archive’s ability to facilitate reconciliation if it does not allow space for a more complex accounting of what happened during the genocide. Peace and conflict studies scholar Christopher Davey’s  article discusses research carried out with Banyamulenge soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He explores the challenges researchers face when engaging with complex narratives of atrocity crimes in contexts where participants seek to promote a more simplistic version of events, grounded in what he characterizes as ongoing ‘multidirectional violence’ by combatant groups in the eastern DRC.

Neuroscientist Emilie Caspar’s article brings qualitative interviews into conversation with psychology and neuroscience techniques that can be useful for revealing people’s motivations to participate in genocidal atrocities in Cambodia and Rwanda, as well as their reasons for desistance. The final article by criminologist Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, peace and conflict studies scholar Eric Ndushabandi, and sociologists Mariah Warner and Wes Wislar calls for researchers to consider shifting away from normative labels such as ‘perpetrator’ in favour of person-first language, such as ‘person who committed genocide.’ Their argument builds on growing research in criminology that shows lower rates of recidivism and enhanced reintegration into communities where person-first language is used, and it also corresponds with a recent shift in perpetrator studies from a focus on ‘perpetrators’ to ‘perpetration’. The issue concludes with an afterword by Scott Straus, in which he draws out three key themes discussed in the articles: the value of an approach of what he calls ‘attuned empathy’; the politicized nature of research on perpetrators; and the importance of innovating concepts for research in this field of inquiry.