The chapter provides testimonies of individuals who took part in a genocidal process in order to understand how mass atrocities can take shape across different human societies. Through the analyses of interviews conducted with former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda and in Cambodia, it appears that many of them reported that they participated because they simply followed orders. It thus suggests that obedience to orders strongly influences individual actions during a war or a genocide. The chapter also highlights the key role of other forms of social influence, such as conformity to a group and compliance. However, the interviews reveal that complex additional factors have influenced former perpetrators in their actions, such as elements of coercion, the fear for one’s own life, and hateful propaganda. This chapter illuminatesthe many reasons that can lead a human to perpetrate evil acts.

This chapter introduces the first framing contest under examination in the book: victims versus perpetrators. The chapter starts with the story of Diana, who joined the FARC to escape abusive stepbrothers, only to fall into an abusive relationship with a commander, whom she later fled. Diana never enrolled in a government reintegration program, and after the peace process, she was welcomed back into the FARC reintegration in order to receive benefits. However, she did not stay long, soon leaving to take her chances in Bogotá, where she could be anonymous and not expose her children to what she saw as toxic rhetoric in the FARC camp. This chapter examines three key components that build resonance in the guerrillas’ victimhood frame: the campesino identity, gendered victimhood, and the concept of self-defense. Using supporting quotes and stories from the other 112 interviews, this chapter examines in detail the guerrilla frame of victimhood in Colombia, illustrating how collective victimhood works as a cohesive force to keep members inside the group and is especially effective at convincing women that they have nowhere else to go.

This chapter examines the second fundamental category of international criminal law, the international legal subject. This legal category constructs individuals as legal subjects who possess rights and duties at the international level. Taking gender as a relevant category of victimisation and perpetration, the chapter examines how sexual violence jurisprudence reveals the construction of the legal subject and relations in international criminal law. Reinscribing sexual violence as a gender-based crime makes visible how international criminal law constructs persons as legal subjects and attributes to them specific legal relationships of rights and duties to other persons. The chapter analyses how international criminal law attributes actions, rights, and responsibilities to individuals and collectives as victims and perpetrators of international crimes of sexual violence and constructs the person and society in the international legal order. It shows how these models of legal subjects continually oscillate between person and group, and individual and collective legal subjects, and reveals the problematic conceptualisation of the subject itself.

The Introduction will explore discourses surrounding violence, especially the articulation of perpetrators, victims, heroes, and bystanders (whether they be individuals, groups, or institutions). In the aftermath of mass atrocity, identities shift. Many jockey for the victim position. So-called perpetrators during the conflict may find themselves pronounced heroes, or erstwhile heroes may find themselves storied as villains. The newly assigned roles become truth as quickly as the old roles are discarded. These shifting descriptions of characters, events, and roles reveal sentiment on the ground, telling us a great deal about which regime is truly in power and whether groups in conflict may soon retaliate. We will make the argument that discourses are reflective as well as predictive of violence and that peacebuilding requires inquiring even into our own participation in these stereotypes, regardless of the ends we think they will achieve. The argument that exclusion through language is violence will be incorporated into the anthology’s larger framework. We will then situate each essay’s contribution in the larger themes of the book.

The challenges of post-atrocity recovery are massive and manifold, but perhaps the most fundamental is the capacity for previously divided groups to return to an emotional place of sustainable, harmonious coexistence. This requires efforts to break down the stereotypes and barriers of “tribalism,” including conflicting characterizations of victims and perpetrators. Yet even the best intentioned of such efforts often prove inadequate in the face of three common obstacles: (1) lack of clarity about the objectives of reconciliation, (2) application of a cookie-cutter reconciliation plan, and (3) an ineffective process used to design the plan. Thus, in this chapter we introduce four crucial objectives for promoting integrative dynamics, describe a system for operationalizing those objectives to fit the particular post-atrocity context, and illuminate key negotiation principles to ensure that the reconciliation design process itself moves toward a productive outcome.

Chapter 4 presents the first of the three case studies. Entitled ‘Guilty and Innocent: The Individual Human Being in International Criminal Law’, it analyses the discourse on prosecution with a focus on the ICC. This case study illustrates the applicability and value added of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Furthermore, I draw heuristics from this first case study to guide my analysis of the two other case studies, which I embed in a larger analytical framework developed in Chapter 5. Apart from these theoretical and methodological purposes, the chapter has a substantial purpose, demonstrating how the individual human being appears in the discourse on prosecution and how this appearance matters for global politics. The case study shows how the individual human being appears as a perpetrator or victim. This appearance is based on assertions of innocence and guilt, which makes prosecution and the deliverance of justice to individual human beings possible in the first place.

In the aftermath of collective violence, reconciliation is supposed to ensure that violent conflict does not re-erupt after official treaties have brought it to a halt. This requires attention to the psychological processes that were shaped by the group’s role as victims or perpetrators of violence, as well as to the sociopolitical context in the aftermath of violence. Based on central conceptualisations of reconciliation in political and social psychology, we review five broad categories of psychological processes that obstruct or facilitate reconciliation in the aftermath of collective violence: Identity and identity threats, collective memories of collective victimhood, acknowledgement versus denial of collective victimisation, emotions, and justice. We discuss these processes from the perspective of victim and perpetrator groups, and review examples of interventions that utilise these processes with the aim of increasing willingness for reconciliation and positive outcomes of reconciliation in the aftermath of collective violence in different contexts.

This chapter seeks to review the current definitions, laws, thinking and theorising around intimate partner violence, from a UK perspective. The breadth of the behaviours included within this type of offending and the importance and centrality of control within many definitions is highlighted. Differences between 2 key approaches to intimate partner violence or domestic abuse are explored an and the tension between traditional psychological/individually focused approaches and feminist/explanation at a societal/structural level are identified. Heterogeneity across perpetrators and the range of typologies that have been developed to address these differences are described and critiques and issues linked to male victims and female perpetrators and IPV within same sex couples if briefly reviewed.Links between substance use and IPV are considered and a range of models, including the multiple thresholds model, are reviewed. The need for integrated theories is considered. General risk factors for IPV are described and individual risk markers for some perpetrators of IPV are identified.Current commonly used risk assessment tools are described and targets for intervention are briefly explored.

This chapter focuses on the archive’s concepts and objects. This first examines how the tribunal’s legal rules shaped the archive, setting out how the court’s statute and ever-evolving jurisprudence created the framework through which the archive’s records were produced. Beginning to get to the political nature of this imagining, the chapter also demonstrates how certain interpretations of the law ended up preventing records from being produced – such as about the international nature of the genocide from entering the archive – and cemented the use of trials as a key governance tool within the international community. The second part zeros in on arguably the two most important objects for the archive: victims and perpetrators. Exploring how these were constituted in particular ways points to how this produced distinctive visions of community and also how this resulted in a number of conflicts between the archives strategies.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore how various subject positions (or what Foucault describes as enunciative modalities) influenced how knowledge was produced within the archive, from which perspective records were constructed and, ultimately, what was to be archived. In Chapter 4, ‘Contesting the Archive’, I focus on the witnesses, who played a far more significant role in constructing the archive than scholars normally credit. Whilst this shows how legal actors constrained what witnesses could record within the archive, it also demonstrates how witnesses were able to contest these parameters both in terms of which crimes would be recorded, but also how the law was to account for violence. This contestation also destabilised many of the objects and subjects that the legal discourse tried to produce, such as what constituted a victim or perpetrator.

This chapter will further explore the consequences of the German troops’ contact with their compatriots. The failure to evacuate the local population from East Prussia meant that they found themselves in Königsberg, an area of operations under martial law where a military mindset prevailed. Soldiers perceived their environment completely differently than civilians and yet the set of military laws to which these men had long adhered became the standard of reference for what passed as ‘normality’. In this major shift in what was considered normal, almost from the very commencement of the siege of Königsberg civilians were ordered to contribute to its defence, thus having to ‘earn’ the right to be protected. In line with military custom, failure to comply was considered desertion and was punishable by death, even though commanders were fully aware that civilians could not accustom themselves to military standards overnight. Since these coercive measures ensured a compliant population, Party functionaries expressed the desire to implement similar legislation on a national level, which took place throughout February and March 1945. This led to a diverse set of perpetrators, which in turn resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of victims among the general population.

This chapter explains who is most likely to become victims of violence. It starts by explaining how social proximity to perpetrators or victims of violence could increase the likelihood of being targeted with violence. Then, it discusses how dangerous locations can reinforce the danger of dangerous connections. Finally, it uses interview data to examine its argument. It finds that social proximity to perpetrators in particular increases the likelihood of having violent experiences. Social networks that provide access to information about security conditions and ties to members of the Nusra Front combine to increase the likelihood of witnessing violence.