The Perpetrator Studies Network organizes conferences with varying themes relating to perpetrators and perpetration.

Encountering Perpetrators of Mass Killings, Political Violence, and Genocide took place in September 2015 at Winchester University, UK, and it explored a wide variety of issues, such as typologies, motivations, agency, gender, testimony, memory and representation, and legal responsibility, among others.

Representing Perpetrators of Mass Violence took place in September 2016 at Utrecht University, NL, and focused more specifically on the issue of representation, including self-representation, representation in the media, fictional representation, legal representation, representation in the accounts and testimonies of victims and survivors, and representation in academic scholarship of various disciplines.

Double Exposures: Perpetrators and the Uses of Photography took place in January 2018 at Kazerne Dossin Memorial, Mechelen, Belgium, and revolved around the past, present, and future uses of photography of and by perpetrators of mass violence, genocide, and other forms of political violence.

Reflections on the Boundaries of Perpetrator Studies took place in June 2024 at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium, and revolved around theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges regarding the analysis of “perpetrators” and “perpetration”, especially in an interdisciplinary setting, and reflected on new directions for the field.

See also the associated conferences, organised by PSN partners REPERCRI (Contemporary Representations of Perpetrators of Mass Crimes, València, Spain) and Compromised Identities (UCL, London).

For further information on these conferences please click on the links in the side menu.