Books

Victims, Perpetrators and the Practice of Law in Maoist China: A Case-Study Approach
Edited by Daniel Leese and Puck Engman. The relationship between politics and law in the early People’s Republic of China was highly contentious. Periods of intentionally excessive campaign justice intersected with attempts to carve out professional standards of adjudication and to offer retroactive justice for those deemed to have been unjustly persecuted. How were victims…
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The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies
Edited by Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman. This collection of essays by Indonesian and foreign contributors offers new and highly original analyses of the mass violence in Indonesia which began in 1965 and its aftermath. Fifty years on from one the largest genocides of the twentieth century, they probe the causes, dynamics and…
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Guatemala, the Question of Genocide
Edited by Elizabeth A. Oglesby and Diane M. Nelson. In Guatemala, it was called the “trial of the century”: the 2013 prosecution of former de facto head of state (1982-1983) General José Efraín Ríos Montt and his intelligence chief, General José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya-Ixil people. Ríos…
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Interrogating the Perpetrator: Violation, Culpability, and Human Rights
Edited by Cathy J Schlund-Vials and Samuel Martínez. Set adjacent to “victims” and “bystanders,” “perpetrators” are by no means marginalized figures in human rights scholarship. Nevertheless, the extent to which the perpetrator is not only socially imagined but also sociologically constructed remains a central concern in studies of state-authorized mass violence. This interdisciplinary collection of essays builds…
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Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine
By Lynne Viola. Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for “counterrevolutionary” and “anti-Soviet” activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about…
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Women as Wartime Rapists: Beyond Sensation and Stereotyping
By Laura Sjoberg. Very few women are wartime rapists. Very few women issue commands to commit sexual violence. Very few women play a role in making war plans that feature the intentional sexual violation of other women. This book is about those very few women. Women as Wartime Rapists reveals the stories of female perpetrators of sexual…
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Ratko Mladic. From Battlefield to Courtroom
Ahead of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic’s war crimes verdict next week, BIRN has compiled all its reports on the landmark case into an open access e-book. The e-book contains all BIRN’s reports on the case from the point when Mladic was transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in…
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Victims and Perpetrators of Terrorism: Exploring Identities, Roles and Narratives
Edited by Orla Lynch and Javier Argomaniz. While the perpetrators of political violence have been the subject of significant academic research, victims of terrorism and political violence have rarely featured in this landscape. In an effort to capture the vast complexity of terrorism, and to widen the scope of the agenda that informs terrorism research, this…
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Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Rescuers and Perpetrators
By Sara E. Brown. This book examines the mobilization, role, and trajectory of women rescuers and perpetrators during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While much has been written about the victimization of women during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, very little has been said about women who rescued targeted victims or perpetrated crimes against humanity….
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Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account
By network member Kjell Anderson. Focusing on the relationship between the micro level of perpetrator motivation and the macro level normative discourse, this book offers an in-depth explanation for the perpetration of genocide. It is the first comparative criminological treatment of genocide drawn from original field research, based substantially on the author’s interviews with perpetrators…
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