A hybrid legal discipline dealing with the relationships between the right to punish and state sovereignty, international criminal law (ICL) overturns classical conceptions of the state, law and justice. Its existence, foundations, scope and effectiveness are determined by the outcome of an attempt – which has proved more or less successful throughout the different phases of its evolution – to reconcile it with the founding principles of the modern state, sovereignty and legality, inherited from the Enlightenment. Adopting a historical perspective helps us its development, on either side of the pivotal moment represented by the creation of the League of Nations: the starting point marked by the 1919 Paris Conference and the immediate aftermath of the First World War; and the turning point marked by the work of the League and international legal doctrine in the interwar era. These two crucial phases saw a string of initiatives which, rather than failures, can be interpreted as a series of necessary transformations for the emergence of a new discipline and, more generally, a profound change in the global legal and judicial order.

Torture committed in the context of and in direct connection with any armed conflict is beyond doubt a war crime under customary international law. Torture that is committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population within or outside armed conflict, with knowledge of the attack, is a crime against humanity. Torture is not explicitly an act of genocide when committed with the specific intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Nevertheless, in a landmark judgment, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda held torture formed part of the predicate offence of causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of one of the four protected groups.

Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).

This chapter of the handbook introduces dehumanization as another dark side of humanity. Humanness is a central concept in moral psychology, and whereas people normally treat other humans with moral consideration, they may turn to dehumanize others as a result of moral disengagement and moral exclusion. The author reviews recent psychological accounts of dehumanization that are grounded in empirical research and highlights the diverse forms it takes: dehumanization varies from subtle to blatant, from interpersonal to intergroup, and from simple to complex. In these theoretical accounts, dehumanizing a person or group means ascribing less of certain human attributes to the target – both attributes that distinguish humans from other animals and attributes that distinguish humans from inanimate agents. Within this general framework, the author reviews the empirical literature on how dehumanization may function to prime, facilitate, and justify harm during intergroup conflict. He also considers a number of critiques and debates over these ideas and findings that have recently surfaced.

In Chapter 10, we advance concrete ideas that peace and social activists are invited to adopt when interested in using personal narratives of genocide and/or intractable war in intergroup processes of sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation. Our suggestions draw on conceptualizations discussed in the book, as well as recommendations derived from previous on-the-ground experiences in such contexts. Our proposals focus on the following four arenas: (1) intergroup methods for moving from narratives of distancing to narratives that encourage peacebuilding; (2) ways to deal with social forgetting and “dangerous memories” of genocide and intractable war in peacebuilding efforts; (3) how to deal with fake news, denial of atrocities, and distancing narratives in reconciliation endeavors; and (4) concrete suggestions for pursuing peace with personal narratives of genocide and war when the macro-social level is sabotaging peace efforts.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.

In Chapter 5, we propose our categorization of the four main kinds of personal narratives of genocide and intractable war – Distancing, Victimhood, Ambivalence/Paradoxes, and Embracing the Other while Remaining in One’s Pain – that joins conceptualizations and understandings connected to the development and dynamics of group identity, intergenerational trauma and types of coping, and genuine dialogue between former and present-day “enemies.” We combine these conceptualizations into a theoretical model that proposes the conditions that can either encourage sustainable reconciliation and positive peacebuilding or, unfortunately, obstruct peace endeavors, in contexts of genocide and/or intractable war. The theoretical model focuses on conditions that exist on two main levels: the personal and intergroup level, and the macro-social level.

Chapter 9 proposes topics and issues that connect to further research of personal narratives of genocide and war, and their connections to sustainable peace and reconciliation. This chapter proposes four different areas that have relevance for further exploration of this topic that can be explored qualitatively, quantitatively, or via mixed methods. The four research arenas are: (1) exploration of the categories of personal narratives of genocide and war; (2) personal narratives of genocide and war and their ties to societal transformation; (3) personal narratives and coping with the effects of genocide and war; and (4) further exploration of our conceptual model concerning kinds of personal narratives and the conditions that can either encourage peacebuilding processes or peace obstruction.

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.

Chapter 2 discusses the common belief that people different from us all look alike and act alike. The outgroup homogeneity effect, as it is called, is rooted in normal categorization processes that become oversimplified. Categorization produces a range of tendencies that contribute to prejudice such as stereotyping, inaccurate attributions, ingroup favoritism, outgroup derogation, dehumanization, even scapegoating and genocide. These phenomena are explained and connected to contemporary events such as anti-Asian hate crimes during the Covid 19 pandemic. Chapter 2 ends with strategies for change that include intergroup contact, creating more complex social identities, and cooperative learning.

Starting in 1990, the lethal combination of three factors led to genocide: political transition, civil war and bipolar ethnicity. In the second half of 1990, the start of the democratisation process coincided with an attack by the RPF, the political–military organisation of the Tutsi refugees. Despite the signing of a peace accord in 1993, the civil war resumed in 1994 and led to the RPF's victory. From April to July, the Tutsi were the victims of a genocide orchestrated by Hutu hardliners.

What are the politics of choosing specific frames? This chapter is anchored on this question and finds a marked difference between frames employed at the field level and those by subfields in each country. It finds, for example, that the Kenyan national subfield’s favored frame resembled those selected by fields in the Global North. Concomitantly, it finds an ambivalence in using the genocide frame to talk about the atrocities in Darfur, arguing that this ambivalence is due to perceptions of how the frame would affect peace negotiations and the posture taken by transnational organizations such as the ICC, UN, and AU.