Perpetrator Studies Network

Books

Genocide in the Modern Age: State-Society Relations in the Making of Mass Political Violence

By Zachary A. Karazsia. This book explores why some episodes of mass political violence and genocide are so much deadlier than others and under what conditions perpetrators in government and society opt for brutality as a means of accomplishing their goals. Introducing the new concept of “mass political violence” to explain genocide and other mass killings…

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Genocide Culture: Cultural Habitus, Ethnic Engineering and Religious Doxa

By Kaziwa Salih. This book considers different stages of Kurdish history, oppression, and genocide through a critical lens, offering an historiography of Iraq and colonialism. Divided into two parts, the first part conceptualizes the coined term “genocide culture” and examines dominant Iraqi cultural practices that fostered genocide. The second part contextualizes the experiences of the Kurdish…

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Narratives Without Guilt: Japanese Perpetrators and the Question of Responsibility

By Frank Jacob. During the Second World War Japanese soldiers committed several different war crimes, including the kidnapping and raping of women or the mistreatment of POWs. In relation to the war crime trials after 1945 these perpetrators were interviewed by the Allied powers and could reflect on their acts during the war. How they…

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The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Victims, Perpetrators, Justice, and the Question of Genocide

Edited By Diana Dumitru and A. Dirk Moses. This book examines crucial facets of the Russian invasion: among them, the Russian sexual violence against occupied Ukrainians, their “collaboration” and “filtration,” legal prosecutions especially relating to kidnapped Ukrainian children, the portrayal of events in Bucha on Russian social media, and the lessons learned from the Ukrainian refugee…

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Responses to Nazi Perpetration in Fiction: Complicity and Continuities

By Stephanie Bird. Looking at novels by authors from countries directly involved in and affected by genocidal violence and its legacies, this book analyses representations of Nazi perpetration and complicity. It considers how these novels challenge our understanding of perpetration and complicity, how they point to different types of complicit involvement that continue into the present,…

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Violence Elsewhere 2: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany since 2001

Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult – even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions…

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The Death in their Eyes: What Perpetrator Images Perpetrate

By Vicente Sánchez-Biosca. Translated by Martin Boyd. Images that embody the point of view of the perpetrators of violent crimes, or their accomplices, force us to look at the pain of victims through the eyes of those who caused it. Accompanied by over sixty visuals of historically infamous violence, The Death in their Eyes goes beyond the…

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The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century

By Dagmar Herzog. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The…

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Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany 1945-2001

Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. This book explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times. Germany’s twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for…

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Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: A Multifaceted History of Khmer Rouge Crimes

Edited by  Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Anne-Laure Porée.  Established in 1979 in the premises of the Khmer Rouge prison S-21 in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM) has had a turbulent history, mirroring Cambodia’s social and political transformations. The book brings together academics and practitioners from multiple fields who offer novel perspectives and sources on the…

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