Perpetrator Studies Network

Books

A Troubled Sleep: Risk and Resilience in Contemporary Northern Ireland

By James Waller. In contemporary Northern Ireland, more than two decades after the peace agreement that ended the thirty-year sectarian violence known as “the Troubles” the risk of a return to violent conflict is not only present but growing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, comparative research, and over 110 hours of face-to-face interviews with a diverse…

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A Transnational History of Right-Wing Terrorism: Political Violence and the Far Right in Eastern and Western Europe since 1900

Edited by Johannes Dafinger and Moritz Florin.  A Transnational History of Right-Wing Terrorism offers new insights into the history of right-wing extremism and violence in Europe, East and West, from 1900 until the present day. It is the first book to take such a broad historical approach to the topic. The book explores the transnational dimension of…

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On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg

By Anne Berg. On Screen and Off shows that the making of Nazism was a local affair and the Nazi city a product of more than models and plans emanating from Berlin. In Hamburg, film was key in turning this self-styled “Gateway to the World” into a “Nazi city.” The Nazi regime imagined film as a powerful…

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Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus

By Franziska Exeler. How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people’s wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War….

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Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions

Edited by Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński. Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the…

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Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance

By Mihaela Mihai. With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories’ cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and…

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Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature

By Joshua Pederson. In Sin Sick, Joshua Pederson draws on the latest research about identifying and treating the pain of perpetration to advance and deploy a literary theory of moral injury that addresses fictional representations of the mental anguish of those who have injured or killed others. Pederson’s work foregrounds moral injury, a recent psychological concept distinct from…

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

Jovan Byford. Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia examines the role 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 — genocidal…

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Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities

By Jonathan Leader Maynard. In research on ‘mass killings’ such as genocides and campaigns of state terror, the role of ideology is hotly debated. For some scholars, ideologies are crucial in providing the extremist goals and hatreds that motivate ideologically committed people to kill. But many other scholars are sceptical: contending that perpetrators of mass…

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The Oxford Handbook on Atrocity Crimes

Edited by Barbora Holá, Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, and Maartje Weerdesteijn. Social scientific research focusing on mass atrocities, which include widespread or systematic crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, expanded after the end of the Cold War. Mass violence in the former Yugoslavia, as well as the genocide in Rwanda, sparked new research initiatives in…

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