JPR Issue 7.1 is out!

We are delighted to present you with our latest issue of JPR!

The issue features a timely exchange, hosted and introduced by Uğur Ümit Üngör, on the concept of genocide between two prominent scholars in the field: Martin Shaw, who defends genocide as a legal and sociological concept, and Dirk Moses, who points out the concept’s instability and concomitant limitations.

The issue then continues with a special section, edited by Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt, Mario Panico, and Anneleen Spiessens, on perpetrator sites. The four contributions explore curatorial, educational, and artistic practices at former concentration and torture camps, camp commandant’s houses, and camp guards’ or officers’ homes, focusing specifically on the question of materiality and embodied visitor experience. Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt opens the section with a discussion of the temporary art exhibition ‘Perpetrator Perspectives’ (2022–2023) at the camp commandant’s house at the Falstad Nazi camp memorial in Norway. Mario Panico draws on Georges Perec’s notion of the ‘infra-ordinary’ in order to analyze artistic interventions that revolve around material objects connected to the private lives of perpetrators. He focuses on two former perpetrator homes: an SS-Auxiliary’s house at the Mahn‑ und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück in Germany, and the apartment of Rubén Chamorro, the director of the former detention and torture centre ESMA in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his think-piece, Michael Šafarić Branthwaite reflects on his own artistic practice he developed in relation to sites and archives of perpetration. Anneleen Spiessens closes the special section with her in-depth analysis of the visitor tour and visitor responses at Fort Breendonk memorial museum, a former Nazi Auffanglager in Belgium.

The issue concludes with a report of the 2024 Perpetrator Studies Network Annual Conference in Brussels, Belgium, written by Dušan Janković and Mohana Zwaga, and five book reviews: Jan Burzlaff’s review of Mary Fulbrook’s monograph Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023); Guido Bartolini’s Review of Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond: Compromised Identities? (Bloomsbury, 2023), edited by Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems; Helenie Demir’s review of Hülya Adak, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Ronald Grigor Suny’s edited volume Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (Routledge, 2023); Joanne Pettitt’s review of Ned Curthoys’s monograph The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age (Bloomsbury, 2024); and Sarah Snyder’s review of Alette Smeulers’s monograph Perpetrators of Mass Atrocities: Terribly and Terrifyingly Normal? (Routledge, 2023).

Thanks to our authors, guest editors, and book reviewers for publishing their fantastic work with us. We are also grateful to our peer reviewers, copyeditors, and typesetters for their hard work in bringing this issue together.

A special thank you goes to Uğur Ümit Üngör, our co-founder and co-editor-in-chief, who is leaving JPR after nearly a decade. Uğur, it is hard to imagine JPR without you and you will be greatly missed!

I am pleased to say, however, that we have found a wonderful replacement in the form of Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız, a lecturer in sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London, who will be joining us in the new year. I am also delighted to announce two new section editors, Clare Bielby, senior lecturer in women’s studies at the University of York, and Vanessa Voisin, associate professor of political and social history at the University of Bologna. We look forward to working with them in the new year!