Perpetrator Studies Network

Books

Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia: Atrocity Images and the Contested Memory of the Second World War in the Balkans

By Jovan Byford. Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia examines the role which atrocity photographs played, and continue to play, in shaping the public memory of the Second World War in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Focusing on visual representations of one of the most controversial and politically divisive episodes of the war…

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The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe

Edited by Ljiljana Radonić. The book focuses specifically on how “mnemonic warriors” employ the “Holocaust template” and the concept of genocide in tendentious ways to justify radical policies and externalize the culpability for their international isolation and worsening social and economic circumstances domestically. The chapters analyze three dimensions: 1) the competing narratives of the “universalization…

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America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo

By Justin Podur. This book examines US interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda – two countries whose post-independence histories are inseparable. It analyzes the US campaigns to prevent Patrice Lumumba from turning the DR Congo into a sovereign, democratic, prosperous republic on a continent where America’s ally apartheid South Africa was…

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Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World

Edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster. This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national…

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Political Violence and Oil in Africa: The Case of Nigeria

By Zainab Ladan Mai-Bornu. The book argues that in order to better understand the undercurrents of the Niger Delta conflict, it is imperative to analyse the dynamics of choice in terms of the distinct courses of action taken by the Ogoni and Ijaw. Given the similar structural constraints, the author considers why the Ogoni adopted…

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The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians

By Sa′ed Atshan and Katharina Galor. In The Moral Triangle Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility,…

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On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

By David Livingstone Smith. The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again—that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche—deeper…

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Brain Science under the Swastika: Ethical Violations, Resistance, and Victimization of Neuroscientists in Nazi Europe

By Lawrence A. Zeidman. Brain Science under the Swastika draws connections between neuroscience, patient sterilization and murder, the Holocaust, and neurological experiments and research, so that readers will be able to see the central role of neuroscience under the Nazis in a never-before presented fashion; connections and networks between killers and scientists will be illustrated….

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Agency and the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Debórah Dwork

Edited by Thomas Kühne and Mary Janes Rein. The book assembles case studies on the human dimension of the Holocaust as illuminated in the academic work of preeminent Holocaust scholar Deborah Dwork, the founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, home of the first doctoral program focusing solely on the Holocaust…

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Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization

By Kurt Braddock. Weaponized Words applies existing theories of persuasion to domains unique to this digital era, such as social media, YouTube, websites, and message boards to name but a few. Terrorists deploy a range of communication methods and harness reliable communication theories to create strategic messages that persuade peaceful individuals to join their groups…

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