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.

The “just following orders” argument has been used across many documented wars and genocides around the world. It suggests that the justifications given by perpetrators perhaps reflect, at least in part, a reality in their brains that would be shared across all the members of our species. The brain is a complex structure composed of trillions of neurons that controls our thoughts, our feelings, our decisions, our memory, our senses, and that regulates our body. Even though a wide range of environmental and social factors can modulate how our brains process information and computes decisions, the brain is nevertheless the central processing agent. By providing a novel perspective on what is happening in the brains of those obeying orders, I seek to reveal the mechanisms leading to immoral behaviors under obedience at a deep and individual level – that is, at the neural level. This knowledge can be used to develop personalized interventions that take into account unique neurobiological profiles.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

The forced migration of French-speaking Acadians, Wabanaki tribes, and Loyalist refugees have rarely been considered in relationship with one another. Yet their principal movements centered on the Northeastern Borderlands of North America (bounded by Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec), and their interconnected movements spiked from the 1750s to the 1830s. This comparative assessment shows that while each of these coerced mobilities had distinctive qualities, large-scale population movement was the most basic foundation of colonialismss. Acadian, Loyalist, and Wabanaki movements shaped one another and were often associated with violence and trauma. At the same time, mobility offered opportunities and could nurture resilience. The legacies of forced migration in the Northeastern Borderlands during an early period of sustained warfare persist today, especially in the legal cases, artwork, and collective memory of Wabanaki people, who still live in their traditional homeland.

Chapter 8 analyzes the marketing of inkiko gacaca; that is, the RPF’s effort to create demand for its invented tradition. By revealing a series of tactics related to this marketing strategy, the book here sheds light on the manufacturing of consent about the meaning of transitional justice in post-genocide Rwanda. The focus is on the presentation of law in everyday life, with particular reference to select localities.

Chapter 9 is an investigation of mythico-history, with a particular focus on the narrative construction of dictatorship. It tells a disturbing story of how and why, in post-genocide Rwanda, law became “a dramatically enacted thing.” To this end, the chapter analyzes the RPFs media campaign in support of the gacaca courts alongside its assault on international law.

The chapter begins by explaining the complementary role of criminal law in the application of international human rights. It then goes on to analyse the function of the concept of individual criminal responsibility under international law and its relationship to human rights violations. Subsequently, we examine the processes and mechanisms for enforcement of criminal rules under international law with an emphasis on policy rather than the procedural rules underpinning jurisdiction. The ‘peace versus justice’ debate, namely whether international prosecution should sometimes be side-lined in favour of negotiated solutions to ongoing conflicts, is an integral part of this discussion. Finally, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the two core mass international crimes, namely genocide and crimes against humanity with a view to demonstrating that their formulation is largely based on human rights (i.e. rights of victims), rather than criminal law, considerations.

This chapter discusses international criminal law (fighting political crimes) and transboundary police cooperation (fighting common crimes), though mechanisms such as the ICC, but also extradition and abduction

In the last century, the treatment of victims of involuntary sterilisation and castration in Nordic countries has varied drastically from state to state, across time and victim groups. Considering why this is the case, Daniela Alaattinoğlu investigates how laws and practices of involuntary, surgical sterilisation and castration have been established, abolished and remedied in three Nordic states: Sweden, Norway and Finland. Employing a vast range of primary and secondary sources, Alaattinoğlu traces the national and international developments of the last 100 years. Developing the concept of grievance formation, the book explores why some states have claimed public responsibility while others have not, and why some victim groups have mobilised while others have remained silent. Through this pioneering analysis, Alaattinoğlu illuminates issues of human and constitutional rights, the evolution of the welfare state and state responsibility in both national and global contexts.

Platform governance matters. The failure of platform companies to govern their users has led to disasters ranging from the unwitting culpability of Facebook in the 2017 genocide of the Rohingya people, to the spread of fraud and disinformation exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis, and to the subversion of free and fair elections across the world. The Introduction to The Networked Leviathan frames the problem of platform governance and its similarity to some of the problems confronted for centuries by political states and recommends that policymakers and scholars of the internet turn to older forms of political organization for inspiration.

Returning to the Myanmar government's ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people, this chapter argues: how could Facebook not have known that its platform was being abused to promote genocide? The answer draws on longstanding scholarship across political science, urban studies, economics, and other fields relating to the problems that centralized governors have in drawing together knowledge from the peripheries of their territories. It is argued that the appropriate solution to problems of knowledge in the platform context is to design democratic and polycentric governance institutions permitting ordinary people to have influence over company decisions.

During the 1600s, the southwards and westwards expansion of Germanic, which had begun 2,000 years earlier in northern Europe, regained a new impetus. There was an explosive expansion of the English language into and across the Atlantic Ocean, which was to lead to the eventual death of a very large number of the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere. During the 1600s, 350,000 people left the British Isles for the Americas. Some of this expansion of English was the outcome of large-scale, planned, quasi-official attempts at colonisation. Others were haphazard settlements by refugees, pirates, runaway slaves, sailors, shipwrecked mariners and passengers and military deserters such those from the English army of Oliver Cromwell which had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1650s.