Perpetrator Studies Network

Books

Evil Matters: A Philosophical Inquiry

By Zachary J. Goldberg. This book is an inquiry into particular matters concerning the nature, normativity, and aftermath of evil action. It combines philosophical conceptual analysis with empirical studies in psychology and discussions of historical events to provide an innovative analysis of evil action. The book considers unresolved questions belonging to metaethical, normative, and practical…

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La muerte en los ojos:  Qué perpetran las imágenes de perpetrador

By Vicente Sánchez-Biosca. ¿Qué tienen en común las fotografías de vejaciones humanas de Abu Ghraib, el álbum de Auschwitz y las fotos de prisioneros arrancadas por los torturadores de las más feroces dictaduras de Chile, Argentina, Brasil o Camboya? Más allá de su contenido, todas ellas son “imágenes de perpetrador”: encarnan el punto de vista de…

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Collective Trauma and the Armenian Genocide: Armenian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani Relations since 1839

By Pamela Steiner. In this pathbreaking study, Pamela Steiner deconstructs the psychological obstacles that have prevented peaceful settlements to longstanding issues. The book re-examines more than 100 years of destructive ethno-religious relations among Armenians, Turks, and Azerbaijanis through the novel lens of collective trauma. The author argues that a focus on embedded, transgenerational collective trauma…

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The Path to Genocide in Rwanda: Security, Opportunity, and Authority in an Ethnocratic State

By Omar McDoom. The shocking characteristics of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 have etched themselves indelibly on the global conscience. The Path to Genocide in Rwanda combines extensive, original field data with some of the best existing evidence to evaluate the myriad theories behind the genocide and to offer a rigorous and comprehensive explanation of how…

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Drunk on Genocide; Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

By Edward B. Westermann. In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range…

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Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India

By Deana Heath. Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely…

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Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media

Edited by Peter Leese, Julia Barbara Köhne, and Jason Crouthamel. This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are frequently beyond the sphere…

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Repression, Resistance and Collaboration in Stalinist Romania 1944-1964: Post-Communist Remembering

By Monica Ciobanu. This book examines how the process of remembering Stalinist repression in Romania has shifted from individual, family, and group representations of lived and witnessed experiences characteristic of the 1990s to more recent and state-sponsored expressions of historical remembrance through their incorporation in official commemorations, propaganda sites, and restorative and compensatory measures. Based…

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The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men

Edited by Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă. In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation that most perpetrators of murder were male, men were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they negotiated…

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It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US

By Alexander Laban Hinton. If many people were shocked by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations—crazed extremists who did not represent the…

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