We are delighted to present you with our 2025 special issue of JPR, entitled Complicit Testimonies and guest edited by Ivan Stacy! This rich collection examines testimony through the lens of complicity in a wide range of contexts. It consists of an introduction by Ivan Stacy and eight research articles that utilise various disciplinary approaches…

Dehumanization as a social, cultural, and political practice, as well as a mode of cognition and perception, is often theorized to inform and be transformed by violence. Accordingly, references to dehumanization abound in literatures concerned with harm and violence, including in sociology, political science, history, psychology, philosophy, and across the humanities. To date, however, this…

Utrecht University, 30-31 October, 2025. Conflict Rivers is a workshop hosted by the Ecologies of Violence: Crimes Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination Research Project and the Water Cultures Community of the Network for Environmental Humanities at Utrecht University and convened by Ifor Duncan. Rivers are constitutive features of the cultural imagination, the focus…

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…

Terribly and Terrifyingly normal? A podcast series on the perpetrators of mass atrocities by Nicola Quaedvlieg and Alette Smeulers. The attacks on 9/11, the invasion in Ukraine, the rise of the Islamic State, the genocides in Srebrenica, Rwanda, Cambodia and Nazi Germany are all incredible acts of human cruelty. They make us wonder: who are…

On March 23, 2023, we discussed Hikmet Karčić’s monograph Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide. The discussants were Jessie Barton Hronešová (University of North Carolina, Chapel…

On 9 February we launched The Oxford Handbook on Atrocity Crimes (Oxford UP, 2022), edited by Barbora Holá, Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, and Maartje Weerdesteijn. The handbook brings together research from across the social sciences and humanities to chart and further develop the evolving field of atrocity crimes studies. The launch included presentations by the editors…

Watch the illuminating discussion of Iva Vukušić’s Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia! On 15 December 2022 we launched Iva Vukušić’s Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence (Routledge, 2022). The book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the nature and functions of the Serbian paramilitary units during…

We are delighted to announce the continuation of the New Books in Perpetrator Studies Series also in 2022/23! All events will take place online, on Zoom. The series will kick off on 15 November 2022 at 14.00 CET with the launch Jonathan Leader Maynard’s Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and…

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