Researching Perpetrators of Genocide 2020010781, 9780299329709

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R e s e a r c h i n g P e r p etr ator s of Genocide

Critical Human Rights S co t t S t ra us & Ty rell Habe rkorn , S e rie s Edito rs S t eve J. Stern, Editor Em e ritu s Books in the series Critical Human Rights emphasize research that opens new ways to think about and understand human rights. The series values in particular empirically grounded and intellectually open research that eschews simplified accounts of human rights events and processes.

Researching  

Perpetrators of Genocide Edited by Kjell Anderson and Erin Jessee

The University of W isco n s in Pre s s

The University of Wisconsin Press 728 State Street, Suite 443 Madison, Wisconsin 53706 uwpress.wisc.edu Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road London EC1R 5DB, United Kingdom eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2020 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Printed in the United States of America This book may be available in a digital edition. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Kjell Follingstad, 1977- editor. | Jessee, Erin, 1979- editor. Title: Researching perpetrators of genocide / edited by Kjell Anderson and Erin Jessee. Other titles: Critical human rights. Description: Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2020] | Series: Critical human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010781 | ISBN 9780299329709 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Genocide—Research. | Criminals—Research. Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .R465 2020 | DDC 304.6/630721—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010781

In memory of L ee Ann F uj ii

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

3

Kjell Anderson and Erin Jessee

The Perpetrator Imaginary: Representing Perpetrators of Genocide

23

Kjell Anderson

Victims Everywhere, Perpetrators Nowhere: Locating and Talking to Perpetrators in Cambodia

49

Timothy Williams

Seeing Monsters, Hearing Victims: The Politics of Perpetration in Postgenocide Rwanda

67

Erin Jessee

Perpetrators among Ourselves

91

Ivana Maček

Getting Close with Perpetrators in Argentina

115

Eva van Roekel

Assad’s Paramilitaries: Shabbiha Perpetrators in the Syrian Civil War

137

Uğur Ümit Üngör

From Murders to Victims: Dilemmas of Doing Perpetrator Research in an Illiberal State

157

Andrea Pető

vii

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From a Perpetrators to a Respondents Approach: A New Way to Consider the Words of the Accused before International Criminal Courts

173

Marie-Sophie Devresse and Damien Scalia

Conclusion: Toward a Code of Practice for Qualitative Research among Perpetrators

199

Erin Jessee and Kjell Anderson

viii

Contributors

221

Index

225

Contents

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A c kn o wle d g m e nt s

We are extremely grateful to the many institutions and individuals who have made this book possible. First and foremost, thank you to the contributors for their hard work and to everyone who participated in and assisted the research in which this book is grounded. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their time and thoughtful suggestions as well as to the University of Wisconsin Press’s editorial team for their support for this project. The genesis of this book was the 2013 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting, for which Erin Jessee and Tal Nitsán organized a double panel on “Approaching Perpetrators.” This was followed by a workshop organized by Erin Jessee and Tal Nitsán at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia in 2014. This workshop was made possible through the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and its outcomes were published in the anthropology journal Conflict and Society. A special thankyou goes out to the AAA panel and workshop contributors who helped initiate and guide this important conversation: Erin Baines, Kathleen Blee, Yolande Bouka, Marc Ellison, Patricia Foxen, Patty Gallivan, Anna Hedlund, Alexander Hinton, Beatrice Jauregui, Tal Nitsán, Juliane Okot Bitek, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Antonius Robben, Amy Rothschild, Victoria Sanford, Jeffrey Sluka, Ronald Stade, Beth Stewart, and Julie Wagemakers. Kjell Anderson and Erin Jessee subsequently tailored this theme to focus on genocide through our “New Horizons in Perpetrator Research” panels at the International Association of Genocide Scholars meeting in Yerevan in 2015 and our “Margins of Perpetration” panels at the International Network of Genocide Scholars meeting in Jerusalem in 2016, which we co-organized with Timothy Williams. Thank you to all participants in the workshop and

ix

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the panels for helping to further shape this important conversation: Willa Culpepper, Antonio Ferrara, Hasmik Grigoryan, Christian Gudehus, Jonathan Leader Maynard, Kaziwa Salih, Damien Scalia, and Timothy Williams. We are also grateful to Susanne Knittel for creating the Perpetrator Studies Network and facilitating collaboration in this emergent field. Kjell Anderson would also like the thank the “Compromised Identities? Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism” project team at University College London, particularly Mary Fullbrook, Stephanie Bird, and Stephanie Rauch. Thank you as well to the colleagues at our respective faculties: the History Program at the University of Glasgow, the Scottish Oral History Center at the University of Strathclyde, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba. Finally, we are grateful to Alan Anderson for his assistance with the index. We have dedicated this volume to Lee Ann Fujii. Lee Ann was a pathbreaking researcher on genocide, political violence, and perpetrators. She was also a cherished colleague and mentor to many, whose brilliant research was matched by her accessibility and generosity to junior scholars. Lee Ann undertook her research with a critical and thoughtful approach to methodology that encouraged constant reflection, transparency, and discovery. We hope that our book captures a small bit of Lee Ann’s legacy in embracing methodology as going beyond mere sets of tools to consider how our relationships with our research participants and other interlocutors inform our scholarship.

x

Acknowledgments

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A b b r e vi a t i o n s

CDF

Civil Defense Forces (Sierra Leone)

CEU

Central European University

CONADEP

Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) (Argentina)

DC-Cam

Documentation Center of Cambodia

DRC

Democratic Republic of Congo

ECCC

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

FSA

Free Syrian Army

HVO

Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane (Bosnian Croat Army)

ICC

International Criminal Court

ICT

International Criminal Tribunal

ICTR

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

ICTY

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

IIIM

International Impartial and Independent Mechanism

LRA

Lord’s Resistance Army (Uganda)

MININTER

Ministry of Internal Security (Rwanda)

xi

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xii

NDF

National Defense Forces (Syria)

NGO

nongovernmental organization

PTSD

post-traumatic stress disorder

RDS

respondent-driven sampling

RPA

Rwandan Patriotic Army

RPF

Rwandan Patriotic Front

UN

United Nations

VRS

Vojska Republike Srpske (Bosnian Serb Army)

Abbreviations

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 R e s e a r c h i n g P e r p etr ator s of Genocide

Copyright © 2020. University of Wisconsin Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

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In t r o d u ct io n K j E L L A N D E R S o N A ND E R IN jE S S E E

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cholars who conduct close-contact qualitative research among those identified as “perpetrators” of genocide must negotiate a range of theoretical, ethical, and methodological challenges. From making sense of how a seemingly ordinary person could encourage others to commit extraordinary acts of violence to the researcher’s need to be emotionally and psychologically prepared to listen deeply to and critically assess perpetrators’ narratives of their involvement in violence, close-contact qualitative research among perpetrators can pose a range of challenges that potentially undermines the reliability of the data being collected or the analysis being undertaken. This is arguably why close-contact qualitative fieldwork among perpetrators has remained comparatively rare within genocide scholarship, while similar studies among survivors, rescuers, and bystanders in various postgenocide settings have proliferated. Qualitative fieldwork among perpetrators is, by its very nature, a fraught academic endeavor in which scholars and practitioners must find ways to successfully engage with the difficult experiences and recollections of “unloved” participants to better understand their decisions— whether coerced or not—to commit what are often regarded by the public as unspeakable atrocities.1 Yet qualitative studies of perpetrators can add much to our understanding of how genocides and related mass atrocities take shape within societies. While the narratives of survivors, rescuers, and bystanders can illuminate the definition, dehumanization, isolation, and targeting of victim groups by the perpetrators, they rarely speak to perpetrators’ particular motivations and experiences with any degree of accuracy. Too often, the specter of the perpetrator looms too large in popular culture as monster, sociopath, or criminal, whose assumed

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primary motives include the pleasure of inciting violence and inflicting undue suffering on their victims. Few insights can be gleaned from such overly simplistic portrayals of perpetrators, particularly in terms of genocide prevention and intervention: they tend to obscure the intensely personal and varied processes through which ordinary, otherwise law-abiding civilians can become active participants in genocidal violence. Moreover, practitioners who build transitional justice mechanisms on such a shaky foundation do postconflict societies a grave disservice. Complex questions require complex answers, and yet many transitional justice mechanisms seem to reproduce oversimplified narratives of criminal culpability that fail to account for the complexity of perpetration. If such mechanisms fail to adequately identify and address the factors that prompted individuals to commit genocide in a particular setting, little can be done toward addressing the structural and institutional causes of genocide, meaning the potential for further bloodshed can be heightened for future generations. But what are the “best practices” for conducting qualitative research among perpetrators of genocide? How might these best practices need to be adapted in different settings and in response to different kinds of perpetrators? What are some of the common pitfalls that qualitative researchers encounter during and after their fieldwork? What kinds of insights might be gained from incorporating qualitative research among perpetrators into genocide studies? What can we learn from perpetrators? This volume takes a unique angle within the currently burgeoning field of perpetrator studies by bringing the ethical and methodological challenges that are inherent in close-contact qualitative perpetrator research into conversation with the field of genocide studies. Perpetrator Studies and Genocide Studies The field of genocide studies is rooted in the work of the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” at the height of an impressive career aimed at effectively prohibiting the atrocities that state institutions inflicted on unwanted minority groups. In his original definition, Lemkin combined the ancient Greek term genos (race or tribe) with the Latin verb cidere (to kill) to encapsulate “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”2 Lemkin included murder, torture, and other direct physical violence among the acts that constituted genocide. However, he also highlighted the importance of any actions intended to bring about the “disintegration of the political and social institutions, of

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culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, [and] dignity” of individuals, precisely because of their membership in an unwanted national group.3 This framing was informed by Lemkin’s comparative historical analysis of mass atrocities as well as his firsthand experiences of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe.4 Having defined genocide, Lemkin pursued the creation of a new legal prohibition aimed at preventing and punishing genocide. In 1946, his efforts prompted the newly established United Nations (UN) to adopt a resolution that recognized genocide as a crime under international law and invited member states to begin drawing up the necessary legislation to ensure its prevention and punishment.5 The resulting UN “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (hereafter referred to as the UN Genocide Convention) was adopted on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951. Following several rounds of debate and revision, Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.6

The creation of an international legal prohibition against genocide spurred subsequent academic debates over its strengths and weaknesses and led to the formulation of several alternative definitions of genocide.7 Unlike the remarkable evolution of the complementary preexisting prohibitions against war crimes and crimes against humanity through jurisprudence and the statutes of other international tribunals, the definition of genocide in international law remained the same.8 In the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was drafted in 1998 and entered into force in 2002, the Article 2 definition has been reproduced exactly.9 To this end, the legal recognition of genocide through international tribunals and courts has been a long process with successful international prosecutions only occurring to date in the cases of the Holocaust of Jewish civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, the Hutu Power extremist-perpetrated massacre of Tutsi civilians in Rwanda in 1994, the Bosnian Serb militia-perpetrated massacre of Bosnian Muslim men at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, and the Khmer Rouge–perpetrated

Introduction

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Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979.10 Genocide has been more frequently prosecuted in domestic courts in Canada, Norway, Poland, Israel, Ethiopia, and Argentina, for example, though in such instances the courts have often used modified definitions of genocide. However, beyond international law, academic debates were successful at prompting genocide scholars across the humanities and social sciences to take a broader approach to genocide. Most significantly, scholars have questioned the relevance of only recognizing genocide when the victims are members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. For example, sociologist Helen Fein advocated for a definition of genocide as “the calculated murder of a segment or all of a group defined outside of the universe of obligation of the perpetrator in response to a crisis or opportunity perceived to be caused by or impeded by the victim.”11 In refusing to limit the kinds of social groups that could be targeted, Fein created space for recognition of atrocities aimed at eliminating political opposition, among other potential communities, as genocide. This was based on the understanding that, while in some contexts an individual’s political membership and beliefs might change over time, allowing them to potentially alter any stigmatized behaviors or associations, there were conflicts in which an individual’s perceived affiliation with members of an undesirable political movement meant that they were regarded by state officials as permanently and immutably contaminated and were persecuted accordingly. In her associated typology, Fein then highlighted despotic genocides as intended to eliminate a real or perceived political opposition. This in turn established a foundation for recognizing mass killings aimed at eliminating perceived political subversives—such as Communists during the 1965 political killings in Indonesia—as genocide.12 It similarly influenced genocide scholars to consider the potential for other kinds of social groups to become vulnerable to genocide.13 To this end, this volume takes a similarly broad, sociohistorical approach to its discussion of genocide. We have included chapters on genocides that have been recognized in international law—most notably, the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, the 1975 to 1979 “auto-genocide” in Cambodia, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1992 to 1995 war in BosniaHerzegovina (during which only the massacre at Srebrenica was recognized by the ICTY as genocide). However, we have also included chapters that discuss less commonly recognized but nonetheless case studies of potential genocides, such as the 1976 to 1983 Junta (Dirty War) in Argentina and the current civil war in Syria. This decision emerges from the realization that within each of these less commonly discussed case studies, there are episodes of genocidal violence in which state agents and their proxies have attempted to annihilate

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unwanted civilian populations on the basis of their perceived national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, gender, or class identities, among other potential facets of people’s identities. Within the field of genocide studies, most scholars—and particularly those who engage in qualitative research—have focused on understanding genocide by analyzing the experiences of victims, survivors, and bystanders who can provide firsthand accounts of the violence. As a result, there is a substantial body of literature that is based on qualitative research among these potentially vulnerable cohorts and that clearly demonstrates the insights that can be gleaned from studying testimonies.14 However, perpetrators have long been relegated to the shadows of academic study surrounding genocide and mass atrocities. The figure of the perpetrator is often spectral—manifested only through their criminal actions’ negative impacts on other actors. This trend is partially informed by the tendency for people—some researchers included—to operate according to what international relations scholar Kelly-Jo Bluen has termed “good and bad binaries.” In her commentary on alleged sexual abuse committed by UN peacekeepers against civilians, she notes that “the system is not able to accommodate acts of violence when it doesn’t fit our moral universe. Our fixation with the perfect victim and the perfect perpetrator. What this means is that if a perpetrator does not fit the idea of an ‘evil warlord,’ it simply doesn’t suit the narrative.”15 In the few studies that have focused on analyzing perpetrators, social scientists have struggled with separating the person from the crimes they have committed, as evidenced by their tendency to describe them as “repellent” and/or “unloved” participants—what constitutes a highly judgmental framing.16 The extreme moral transgression represented by genocide is definitional: evil people perform evil acts. And yet among those who have spent significant amounts of time studying perpetrators of genocide, a common theme that emerges is the complexity of not only the crimes perpetrators have committed but also the way that they make sense of these crimes in recounting their experiences. To this end, they rarely present themselves as archetypes of “pure evil.” In her formative study, Eichmann in Jerusalem, political theorist Hannah Arendt struggled to make sense of Adolf Eichmann’s testimony during his trial in Israel for crimes—most of which were bureaucratic and related to his organizing the mass deportation of Jewish, Polish, Slovenian, Roma, and Sinti civilians in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe to death camps during the latter years of World War II.17 While observing his trial, Arendt found that Eichmann was not the overt monster or caricature of pure evil that the Israeli state desired to expose to the world, alongside the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, he was a banal bureaucrat who followed orders as they were issued to him, acting in

Introduction

7

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accordance with his understanding of contemporary German law. She notes, “We are forced to conclude that Eichmann acted fully within the framework of the kind of judgment that was required of him: he acted in accordance with the rule, examined the order issued to him for its ‘manifest’ legality, namely, regularity; he did not have to fall back on his ‘conscience,’ since he was not one of those who were unfamiliar with the laws of his country. The exact opposite was the case.”18 Further complicating popular understandings of the evil perpetrator, writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi put forward the concept of the “gray zone,” which he used to explore the phenomenon of Jewish civilians who collaborated with Nazi policies that were intended to bring about the annihilation of Jewish communities across Nazi-occupied Europe.19 He highlighted the “moral collapse” that new arrivals in the concentration camps experienced, through which the Nazis not only degraded their victims but also made them act against their interests to become like the Nazis, “lacking a political or moral armature.”20 Using the example of the Sonderkommandos—Jewish civilians who attempted to negotiate their survival by facilitating the gas chamber executions, removal of valuables from the bodies, and cremation of Jewish and other so-called undesirables—and other low-level collaborators who were an integral part of the daily maintenance of the camps, Levi argued that “if I were forced to judge, I would lightheartedly absolve all those whose concurrence in the guilt was minimal and for whom coercion was of the highest degree.”21 In doing so, Levi begins to establish a spectrum of collaboration, perpetration, and related actions, with civilians who commit atrocities under duress situated at the lowest level of criminal responsibility and those who occupy command positions potentially at the highest, though even in these most privileged cases, he notes judgment should be “tentative and varied” according to the personal circumstances of the accused.22 Shortly after, Christopher Browning published his foundational text, Ordinary Men, which focused on the personal circumstances that determined the actions of members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 who served on the front lines of efforts to locate and exterminate Jewish civilians across Poland.23 Browning estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the relatively inexperienced, middle-aged family men from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds who served in this unit ultimately chose to participate in the executions, despite what appeared to be fairly minimal negative consequences for refusing.24 Yet he noticed that not all of those individuals who opted to participate did so for the kinds of reasons that one might expect, such as antisemitism or personal support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Rather, the stated range of motives included “war-time brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task,

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special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity.”25 Moreover, even among those who agreed to participate, many individuals sought to avoid full participation by shooting past victims, taking long bathroom breaks, and wandering off. As a result, Browning concluded that while members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were—like the rest of contemporary German society— “immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda,” and subject to training intended to harden them “for the personal task of killing,” they were rarely acting as senseless monsters.26 Conversely, they were for the most part “ordinary men” who were caught up in political processes far greater than themselves, placing them within the lower range of the spectrum of perpetration hinted at in Levi’s work on the “gray zone.” However, in recognizing the complexity of their positioning relative to the crimes that they committed or in which they were complicit, unlike with Levi’s example of the Sonderkommandos, Browning is not advocating that members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could simultaneously be regarded as victims. Despite the value of these early insights into perpetrators of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe, the study of perpetrators within the social sciences and humanities has failed to attract the same attention paid to survivors and other mass-atrocity-affected cohorts. In 2000 sociologist George Aditjondro attributed this trend among anthropologists specializing in political violence to “earnest attempts to defend the victims of blatant as well as structural oppression,” while leaving the perpetrators of human rights violations for political scientists and human rights lawyers to analyze.27 A handful of ethnographers have addressed Aditjondro’s criticism in their studies of the drug trade in East Harlem in the United States, military dictatorships in Argentina in the 1970s, the 1975 to 1979 Cambodian genocide, and the 1992 to 1995 siege of Sarajevo, to cite but a few examples.28 Beyond anthropology, political scientists, historians, and related scholars have conducted case studies that focus on perpetrators of genocide. Most notably, political scientists Scott Straus and Lee Ann Fujii have published valuable monographs based on interviews with civilians who were responsible for perpetrating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.29 Similarly, literary scholar James Dawes has written an interview-based book about convicted war criminals who committed atrocities during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945.30 Such ground-breaking studies have clearly demonstrated the value of using qualitative methods to better explore individual perpetrators’ actions and perspectives while also illuminating the processes through which genocide took shape in their communities. Their contributions have resulted in more comprehensive understandings of how ordinary people were motivated to commit

Introduction

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atrocities in these contexts, and the—at times—“choiceless decisions” they were forced to navigate, in addition to any personal interests they may have had in seeing their victims exterminated.31 Yet despite these advances, perpetrators remain a comparatively underresearched cohort across the humanities and social sciences, particularly as they relate to the field of genocide studies. While there has been a small wave of recent general volumes on perpetrators, such as the Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, Perpetrators of International Crimes, and monographs by Kjell Anderson and Timothy Williams, these books pay relatively little attention to methodological quandaries in perpetrator research.32 There are even fewer volumes that bring into conversation different case studies based on the work of scholars who have engaged in qualitative fieldwork with or among perpetrators of genocide. One notable exception is Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann’s edited volume Ordinary People as Mass Murderers, though the authors focus on their findings rather than the study’s underlying methodology.33 Indeed, across the literature on perpetrators emerging from the field of genocide studies, scholars have rarely included focused discussions of the ethical frameworks and methodological negotiations that underpin the insights that they have gleaned from the perpetrators with whom they have worked. Approaching Perpetrators of Genocide: Identifying the “Perpetrator” This absence of transparent discussion of perpetrator researchers’ underlying ethical and methodological negotiations is a striking gap in the sparse literature emerging at the interfaces of perpetrator studies and genocide studies—particularly given the often-daunting and complex nature of fieldwork in these contexts. This book is designed to address this gap by highlighting the diverse ethical and methodological frameworks that researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have developed in their work in genocide-affected settings around the world. Several of the authors are interdisciplinary or trained in mixed methods, with particular expertise in using qualitative methods to elicit perpetrators’ narratives of genocide and related mass atrocities, among other themes of interest. The resulting contributions reveal several interesting points of consensus of relevance for qualitative research among perpetrators, but they also differ in significant ways. A key theme that runs throughout this book is the challenge of identifying perpetrators in different contexts. To a large extent this is because of the

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“perpetrator imaginary” that criminologist and jurist Kjell Anderson outlines in his chapter, whereby the researcher, the perpetrators with whom they work, and the surrounding society more generally are all affected by the shadow cast by popular perceptions of the perpetrator. It seems to be a near-universal phenomenon that the perpetrator is perceived primarily as a producer of harm, engendering a social response that renders perpetrators as hazardous exiles from society and politics. In approaching perpetrators, researchers are not only approaching “evil” but often face resistance as well from the conflict-affected states whose gatekeepers and citizens they must work with—or at the very least seek approval from—in order to study perpetrators. They may also face backlash from members of the public and colleagues alike, who interpret their efforts to humanize perpetrators and explore the complexity of people’s decisions to engage in genocidal violence as intended to minimize perpetrators’ criminal actions, even though this is rarely the case. This creates myriad analytical, ethical, and personal challenges for researchers, which each of the contributors to this volume grapples with in different ways. Indeed, the challenge of labeling perpetrators is a key theme that runs throughout this book, as different contributors have consistently found that not all people who commit crimes will come to be identified as perpetrators, while those who are clearly categorized as perpetrators often neither neatly fit the preconceived notions of “evil” that researchers and the public may maintain nor accept their status as “perpetrators.” Several chapters touch on contexts in which only a few high-level officials are held legally and socially accountable for atrocities. Anthropologist Eva van Roekel’s chapter explores the narratives of a select group of military officers who were indicted for crimes against humanity they allegedly committed during the 1976 to 1983 Junta in Argentina. As suspected perpetrators, a key point of tension in her work is the lack of remorse that they demonstrate when reflecting on their alleged crimes. Van Roekel’s long-term analysis of their narratives and the broader circumstances of their lives as soldiers reveals that this lack of remorse is grounded in their training as soldiers and their indoctrination as to the necessity of protecting the nation from “permanent chaos and disorder,” even when faced with overt evidence of power abuses and “institutional moral collapse” within the military. In their narratives, their professional training repeatedly seemed to take precedence over their personal feelings, resulting in critical silences in their narratives that allowed them to distance themselves from the crimes against humanity of which they were accused and to reject legal efforts to hold them criminally accountable for their role in these atrocities. Oral historian Erin Jessee’s chapter on Rwanda reveals a very different social and legal context. In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the government

Introduction

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pursued a form of “universal accountability” that held all alleged perpetrators of what is referred to in official parlance in Rwanda as the “1994 genocide of the Tutsi” legally accountable through national and community-based trials, regardless of whether they had committed Category One crimes, such as mass murder or sexual violence, or Category Three crimes, such as looting and other comparatively minor offenses.34 As a result, she uncovered complex and highly personal motives for people’s participation in the genocide: most notably, previous experiences of violence perpetrated by the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) that had invaded Rwanda in 1990, triggering a four-year civil war; situational peer pressure that made it difficult for them to resist contributing to specific acts of violence; and inherited memories of abuse at the hands of Tutsi elites affiliated with Rwanda’s monarchy prior to the nation’s independence in 1962. However, her research also reveals that the pursuit of universal accountability is still, nonetheless, highly selective: in the aftermath of the genocide, wherein the RPA’s political party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), has taken power, many génocidaires perceive themselves as victims of political injustices, voicing allegations of illegal imprisonment, torture, forced confessions, and unfair trials. This complaint is exacerbated by the realization that RPA soldiers and RPF officials have rarely been held legally accountable for the war crimes and crimes against humanity that they committed against Hutu and Twa civilians during the genocide, despite substantive evidence that such atrocities occurred across the country as they wrested control of the nation. In other settings, the people responsible for committing genocide and related mass atrocities have enjoyed a high degree of impunity, despite widespread evidence that their conduct has violated international law. Historian Uğur Ümit Üngör explores this phenomenon in his research among the Syrian paramilitary soldiers who fight for President Bashar al-Assad in the ongoing (since 2011) civil war in Syria. Üngör notes that these paramilitary units are a primary means through which the Assad regime ensures widespread complicity in these atrocities among the general population, while offering its politicians a degree of plausible deniability in orchestrating and inciting the violence. This pattern remains prevalent even in instances where state-level actors facilitate violence as a means of protecting their private interests rather than achieving a broader political or military objective. This outsourcing of violence will undoubtedly complicate the investigations being conducted by the UN’s International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) charged with investigating mass atrocities in Syria and any subsequent national or international prosecutions. In other contexts, researchers may identify perpetrators among cohorts that society has deemed innocent, or even victims, to varying degrees, as in political

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scientist Timothy Williams’s chapter on Cambodia. In present-day Cambodia, all but the most senior former Khmer Rouge are accepted as victims of the genocidal regime that was in power from 1975 to 1979, alongside those who were wrongfully imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Williams’s efforts to recruit perpetrators—as he had framed all cadres who had served in the Khmer Rouge—met with substantial difficulties and forced him to question his preconceived notions of what perpetration looked like in the context of postgenocide Cambodia’s political climate. And when he did manage to recruit former Khmer Rouge cadres, he found that they struggled to speak openly about the crimes that they had committed against civilians, preferring instead to speak abstractly about what they had observed or to shift the topic of conversation to the ways in which they too had been victims of the Khmer Rouge. In the Cambodian genocide context, many Khmer Rouge cadres were themselves subject to coercion, intimidation, and abuse, even as they committed atrocities against their compatriots. Anthropologist Ivana Maček touches on a similar theme in her chapter, “Perpetrators among Ourselves,” which explores the criminal actions ordinary civilians often engaged in to negotiate survival during periods of political violence. Reflecting on her research among civilians who had lived through the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, she notes that several participants likely committed acts that, during the wars, became permissible and even desirable as a valuable survival strategy but that in times of peace clearly violated both their personal sense of what was right as well as national and international laws. As a result, she observed a tendency among these civilians to resort to “righteous selfdefense” of their actions in the wars’ aftermaths. Maček makes sense of such acts by considering participants’ actions as part of a continuum of perpetration that includes “not only spectacular perpetration and perpetration by soldiers, but also perpetration by supporters of any ideology that morally defends or encourages destruction and killing.” It is equally important to recognize how perpetrators’ ascribed status can shift over time in dramatic ways. Gender historian Andrea Pető explores this phenomenon in her analysis of how perpetrators of a massacre of Jewish civilians in Budapest during World War II were gradually reinterpreted by the state and by subsequent generations of one alleged perpetrator’s grandson as Hungarian victims of Stalinist injustice. She finds that Hungary’s postsocialist political climate enabled the perpetrators’ descendants to gloss over their family’s crimes, which were well documented at the time by a Soviet investigation and trial that was, following the 1989 collapse of Communism in the country, dismissed as fabricated to uphold a Communist-led political trial. This, in turn, has permitted the family to adopt and reinforce a revisionist history,

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allowing the person Pető interviewed to shift focus away from his ancestor’s alleged crimes and his Jewish victims and to reframe his ancestor as a victim of Soviet persecution and oppression, first and foremost. Given the challenges that surround labeling perpetrators in the contexts explored in this edited volume, it is no surprise that a key point of consensus among the authors is the need for a shift from the field’s current focus on perpetrators to a more nuanced focus on perpetration. This shift enables an enhanced understanding of the criminal actions and complicity of people who are immediately visible as perpetrators in postgenocide contexts and those whose status is less clearly defined or whose crimes have been obscured or overlooked. Of similar importance, a focus on perpetration may allow us to better balance the crimes in which people engage during genocides and related mass atrocities against their broader lived experiences during and surrounding these periods of upheaval. This allows for a more holistic understanding of who they are as people and how they came to be labeled perpetrators. To do so in no way advocates for minimizing their criminal actions but could facilitate an improved understanding of how people are drawn into genocidal violence and how they are affected by their experiences of postgenocide justice. The chapter by Marie-Sophie Devresse and Damien Scalia advocates for approaching perpetrators as “respondents” and recognizing that their perspectives regarding the impact and effectiveness of transitional justice initiatives are extremely valuable. From their research on people who have been tried for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, it is clear that much can be learned from approaching indicted perpetrators as key players in transitional justice processes, whose reflections as respondents offer valuable insights, rather than what Anderson argues is more common: as “depersonalized object[s] of the judicial process.” Toward a Critical Approach to Perpetrator Research Although it is in its relative infancy, it is clear that perpetrator research needs to take a critical approach—to interrogate assumptions about perpetrators and perpetration, to reflect on our position as researchers. Some core questions for researchers to ask themselves include: What preconceptions do we, as researchers, have about our research subjects? How do these preconceptions challenge our research? How are we perceived and how do we perceive the societies in which we do research when they are not our own? Anderson’s chapter demonstrates that these are not questions with straightforward responses,

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thus rendering reflexivity crucial at all points in research. The need for such reflexivity is well established in anthropological research but is arguably rather less entrenched in other disciplines, particularly within the fields of genocide studies and perpetrator studies, in which detailed reflections on ethics and methodology are comparatively rare. There are both advantages and disadvantages to being an “insider” and “outsider” relative to the communities and people with whom the researcher is working. However, research on genocide and mass violence, like most other academic “fields,” retains a colonial quality, insofar as it is largely dominated by researchers based in Europe and North America, who are not necessarily from the genocide-affected contexts that they study. Thus, there is a responsibility for “northern” scholars to consciously seek out partnerships with researchers in and from these genocide-affected settings as well as to recognize the privilege and biases inherent in the literature at present. Moreover, wherever possible, the research being done by scholars and practitioners who come from genocide-affected settings must be brought into conversation with international scholarship. This book includes insights from researchers who are from the genocide-affected communities they are writing about or—as an alternative— who have spent significant periods of time immersed in the communities that they are studying. Jessee and Anderson hope that in this regard the book can serve as a model for enhanced engagement among researchers working “at home” and “abroad” in future, though more needs to be done to incorporate research by scholars in the Global South. Additionally, researchers need to be aware that to facilitate a sense of what Graham Dawson terms “composure,” perpetrators—among other types of interviewees—often narrate their experiences in a manner that aligns with the norms of the society in which they are speaking and that gives them the greatest sense of psychic comfort and control over their narrative.35 This is demonstrated by the chapters by Williams and Jessee, wherein people who had clearly committed genocidal crimes frequently constructed their narratives in a manner that made them seem like victims of these same genocide processes, among other mass atrocities. The chapters by Pető and van Roekel reveal this same tendency among the families of people identified as perpetrators, who often vehemently resisted the idea that their loved ones could have been mass murderers. But beyond these overt examples of composure in the interview is the more subtle and unnerving possibility that persists throughout all of the chapters: that participants may have constructed their narratives with an eye toward pleasing the researcher and their imagined audience, telling them what they think they want to hear, in addition to seeking to convince the researcher of their essential goodness and humanity.36 Of similar importance

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for researchers to consider is the common phenomenon whereby participants seek to convince the researcher of the validity of their particular interpretation of events—a phenomenon anthropologist Antonius Robben has termed “ethnographic seduction.”37 Moreover, research participants may distort facts and omit details due to lapses in memory, attempts to diminish perceptions of their criminal responsibility, or a desire to avoid voicing those experiences that they find difficult to put into words, as explored by Maček.38 All these possible factors can shape researchers’ findings in ways that they might not anticipate unless they remain aware of their influence through the research process. To this end, much of the qualitative data we produce is ultimately a coproduction of the researcher and individual participants. In an interview context, for example, the interviewee provides information, but this narrative is shaped by the relationship between the interviewee and interviewer (and research assistants, where relevant) as well as the researcher’s underlying research interests and design. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues that the analysis of such narratives may serve several purposes.39 The first is objective, aimed at the establishment of objective (positivist) facts. The second is subjective and relates to the establishment of a particular perspective or interpretation. The third purpose is constitutive and involves examining the ways that narrative relates to personal identity making. In this book, readers will find scholars’ analyses that incorporate all three of these perspectives. In postgenocide contexts where genocide-related crimes have been condemned, perpetrators may emphasize the wrongfulness of the genocide and seek to minimize their own role within the genocidal enterprise. These narratives are also subject to temporality, prompting a necessary question: how do perpetrator accounts change over time? This is a key theoretical and methodological question for researchers to consider, given that fieldwork during genocide is typically impossible owing to the elevated risks associated with overt conflict and warfare. Thus, by the time it is possible to conduct interviews, the resulting narratives will be shaped by their particular postgenocide contexts in addition to perpetrators’ recollections of their criminal actions.40 Their selfrepresentation and memories will have evolved since their crimes occurred. To this end, memory is a complex nonlinear phenomenon, with memory and narrative vacillating not only over long timescales but even within a single interview. Given the various factors that might shape people’s narratives of perpetration across time and in different contexts, we cannot ignore the potentially contradictory and contingent nature of the narratives that contributors analyze in this book. Moreover, making sense of such inconsistent narratives, in which perpetrators contradict themselves, misremember, and obfuscate, is

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itself a hegemonic exercise in creating meaning.41 None of these points necessarily undermine the usefulness of engaging with the narratives of people who come to be identified as perpetrators, however. As Fujii notes, stories may be “emotionally true” even if they are “factually false,” and this emotional accuracy can be a valuable tool for assessing subjectivities, such as perpetrator motivation and rationalization, as demonstrated by van Roekel and Jessee, among other scholars.42 Every process of analysis constitutes a process of “translation” and—in many instances—a reduction of complexity. In integrating perpetrators’ narratives into academic publications, researchers also make editorial decisions that risk the loss of the respondents’ voices and perspectives. For example, should interviews be edited for grammar and clarity? How do we indicate the abridgment of lengthy narratives, and how are the words of respondents distorted by piecing together elements from different parts of an interview or even different interviews with the same respondent? Beyond the day-to-day practicalities of undertaking qualitative fieldwork and analyzing the subsequent data that is produced, where perpetrators’ crimes are recognized and condemned, perpetrators typically become vessels that represent the evils of the past as well as powerful warnings for a reactionary future, against which postconflict nations must be seen to fortify themselves if they are to be regarded as “successful.” As noted by Devresse and Scalia, the prosecution of perpetrators is an integral part of most transitional justice programs in post-atrocity settings, informed by a transition narrative—moving from the dark past toward a luminous future—that perpetrator researchers are required to navigate. Research may even be perceived as an impediment to transition, particularly where the research produces nuanced and contextual narratives that emphasize the transitory nature of perpetration or that identify categories of perpetrators beyond those targeted for prosecutions and other forms of reparations. As Jessee and Pető, among others, find, the production of collective memories of past genocidal atrocities often involves the devaluation or even an active silencing of individual memories that diverge from the preferred official narrative.43 In addition to the various theoretical insights that can emerge from adopting a critical approach in qualitative research among perpetrators, Anderson and Jessee provide in the conclusion to this volume a preliminary code of practice—the first of its kind internationally—for thinking through the various ethical and methodological challenges that can emerge around conducting this kind of fieldwork. In doing so, they highlight the various ethical and methodological challenges that are raised across the chapters in this volume and draw out key questions that scholars and professionals might benefit from asking themselves throughout their research among perpetrators of genocide

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and other mass atrocities. These questions are by no means comprehensive, nor are their answers universal given the variation that exists among researchers, the contexts in which they work, and the outputs they are interested in producing. However, they provide a starting point for anticipating and mitigating the various ethical and methodological challenges that can arise in qualitative research among perpetrators and provide newcomers to perpetrator studies with links to valuable resources that can help them delve deeper into the particular challenges they encounter. Conclusion Taken together, we hope this book facilitates more open conversations regarding the theoretical, ethical, and methodological challenges inherent in conducting qualitative research among perpetrators, allowing for greater diversity in the professional communities that use qualitative methods in their work among perpetrators and perpetration of genocide in different settings around the world. Similarly, we hope this book will prompt scholars who work in the field of perpetrator studies to be more transparent about the methodological and ethical decision making that emerges surrounding their studies in order to make it easier to assess and build on the important research taking shape in the emergent field of perpetrator studies. We must also consider how our methodologies, and preconceptions, shape the ways we frame our research, analyze our data, and ultimately, our theoretical insights on perpetrators and perpetration. While across genocide studies, transitional justice, and related fields primary importance is typically placed on the findings that emerge from qualitative research, the complex ethical and methodological negotiations that underpin these findings have too long been relegated to the “corridor talks” at conferences and related events. This is unfortunate given the importance— demonstrated across the chapters in this book—that these negotiations have for our findings.

Notes 1. The particular challenges of working with “unloved groups” has been addressed by a wide range of scholars in different settings, most notably sociologists Nigel Fielding and Kathleen Blee. Nigel Fielding, “Mediating the Message: Affinity and Hostility in Research on Sensitive Topics,” American Behavioral Scientist 33, no. 5 (1990): 608; Kathleen Blee, “Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists,” Qualitative

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Sociology 21, no. 4 (1998): 387–88; Kathleen Blee, Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 2. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York: Lawbook Exchange, 1944), 79. 3. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. 4. Michael McDonnell and Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 501–29. 5. United Nations, “Resolution 96(I): The Crime of Genocide,” December 11, 1946. 6. UN, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948, Article 2. 7. For concise summaries of the various debates that surrounded early efforts to define genocide in the drafting of the UN Genocide Convention (UNGC), as well as the subsequent debates within the social sciences aimed at resolving any critical weaknesses in the UNGC, see Ann Curthoys and John Docker, “Defining Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 9–41; Nicole Rafter, The Crime of All Crimes: Toward a Criminology of Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 25–30; and Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 23–27. 8. There was essentially no discussion of modifying the existing legal definition of genocide (found in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention) during the drafting of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. William Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107–8. 9. International Criminal Court, “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” July 17, 1998, Article 6. 10. In the case of the Holocaust, genocide was prosecuted by the Nuremburg Tribunal as one of several crimes listed under the legal prohibition for crimes against humanity as the UNGC did not yet exist in 1945. In Rwanda, the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) successfully prosecuted several high-level officials for their role in inciting and committing genocide, the most notable being the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, which recognized for the first time in international law that rape could constitute an act of genocide. ICTR, Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu (Case No. ICTR-964-T): Judgement,” September 2, 1998. In Bosnia, the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) successfully prosecuted several perpetrators for genocide, most notably Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, who were deemed to have command responsibility associated with the genocide that occurred at Srebrenica in 1995 toward the end of the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War. ICTY, “Rule 98 bis Judgement Summary in the Case of Ratko Mladić,” April 15, 2014; ICTY, “Trial Judgement Summary for Radovan Karadžić,” March 24, 2016. 11. Helen Fein, “Scenarios of Genocide: Models of Genocide and Critical Responses,” in Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide, ed. Israel Charny (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 4.

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12. Robert Crib, “Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 2 (2001): 219–39; Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman, “A Case for Genocide: Indonesia, 1965–1966,” in The Indonesian Genocide of 1965, ed. Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 27–47. 13. There are many alternative definitions of genocide that incorporate other protected groups such as political groups and social groups. Adam Jones has a good summary of this in his text, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 23–27. On the other side, some scholars argue that expansive definitions of genocide weaken the concept. Anthropologist Alexander Hinton calls this the “dilution metaphor.” See Alexander Laban Hinton, “Critical Genocide Studies,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, no. 3 (2012): 3–15. 14. See, for example, Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff, Mary Chamberlain, and Leyla Neyzi, eds., Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009); Alexander Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Donald Miller and Lorna Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Kim Lacy Rogers and Selma Leydesdorff, eds., with Graham Dawson, Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009); Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Samuel Totten and William Parsons, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2013). 15. Kelly-Jo Bluen, cited in Assad Essa, “Is the UN Sending the Wrong People to Keep the Peace?,” Al Jazeera, August 4, 2017. 16. Fielding, “Mediating the Message,” 608; and Carolyn Gallaher, “Researching Repellent Groups: Some Methodological Considerations on How to Represent Militants, Radicals, and Other Belligerents,” in Surviving Field Research: Working in Violent and Difficult Situations, ed. Chandra Lekha Sriram, John King, Julie Mertus, Olga Martin-Ortega, and Johanna Herman (New York: Routledge, 2009), 129. 17. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). 18. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 293. Arendt’s image of Eichmann as the embodiment of the “banality of evil” was highly influential, but it was later critiqued by scholars who argued Eichmann was a virulent antisemite and not banal at all. For more information, see Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative (New York: Macmillan, 1965); and David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and the Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Boston: Da Capo, 2007). 19. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). 20. Levi, The Drowned, 29. 21. Levi, The Drowned, 33. 22. Levi, The Drowned.

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23. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998). 24. Browning, Ordinary Men, 159. 25. Browning, Ordinary Men. 26. Browning, Ordinary Men, 184. 27. George Aditjondro, “Ninjas, Nanggalas, Monuments and Mossad Manuals: An Anthropology of Indonesian State Terror in East Timor,” in Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, ed. Jeffrey Sluka (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 159. 28. For East Harlem, see Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For Argentina, see Antonius Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). For Cambodia, see Alexander Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California, 2005). For Sarajevo, see Ivana Maček, Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 29. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 30. James Dawes, Evil Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 31. Erin Baines, “Complex Political Perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic Ongwen,” Journal of Modern African Studies 47, no. 2 (2009): 165. 32. Susanne Knittel and Zachary Goldberg, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (London: Routledge, 2019); Alette Smeulers, Maartje Weerdesteijn, and Barbora Holá, eds., Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theory, Method, Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Kjell Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (London: Routledge, 2018); Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2020). 33. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann, Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 34. Since 2007, the Rwandan government has engaged in a campaign to promote international recognition of the “1994 genocide against the Tutsi.” This campaign has met with significant success: most notably, the Canadian and Belgian governments have criminalized denial of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi as a form of genocide denial. It has also raised significant criticisms, however: most notably, for silencing people’s experiences of the broader human rights violations that surrounded the genocide in the 1990s, including those that were perpetrated by the current government against Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa civilians, and spread into the surrounding Great Lakes region of Africa. For more information, see Scott Straus, “The Limits of a Genocide Lens: Violence against Rwandans in the 1990s,” Journal of Genocide Research 21, no. 4 (2019): 1–22. 35. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 2013), 23. See also Erin Jessee, “The Limits of

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Oral History,” Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 287–307; and Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews,” Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): 65–93. 36. Henry Greenspan, “The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 229–43. 37. Antonius Robben, “Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina,” Ethos 24, no. 1 (1996): 71. 38. Kristen Munroe, The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 283. 39. Ricoeur, cited in Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg, “Introduction: What Is the Story?,” in Narrrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime, ed. Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 4. 40. Elizabeth Wood, “The Ethical Challenge of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” Qualitative Sociology 29, no. 3 (2006): 373–86. 41. Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide. 42. Lee Ann Fujii, “Shades of Truth and Lies: Interpreting Testimonies of War and Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 2 (2010): 231–41. 43. Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide; Erin Jessee, Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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

T h e P e r p e tr a to r Im a g in a r y R e p r e s e n t i n g P e r p etr ator s of Genocide KjELL ANDERSoN

W

ho is the perpetrator? The better question might be who is the perpetrator to me? The answer is based on positionality. If the perpetrator were to answer, they might say, “Not I.” Genocide to perpetrators is an uncharacteristic act, and yet it becomes the defining moment of their lives. Even for perpetrators who deny genocide, there is often an undercurrent of repudiation—how could someone like me do something like that? On a collective level, genocidal denial also seems to be rooted in the sense of self. To associate oneself with great evil, even indirectly, is to question one’s identity. Through nationalism, the past achievements of group members accrue to all members of the group, past and present. Equally, the evils of forebearers are ancestral pollution, sullying collective and individual identity in the present. The disassociation of self from act is also a moment of purification, a preservation of the “true self.” In this chapter, I explore the perpetrator imaginary—the image of the perpetrator—through various archetypical perspectives: the artist, the lawyer, the victim, the perpetrator, and the researcher.1 What do these perspectives tell us about our understanding of perpetrators? I have chosen these archetypes as they are the main perspectives encountered in researching perpetrators. In

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some sense they resemble the fields articulated in French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory: these archetypes are social settings in which agents interact according to their habitus (worldview), the rules of their field, and their capital (whatever is significant to the agents).2 In the context of this chapter, capital varies for each archetype—for example, the artist may seek creative fulfilment or public recognition, the researcher seeks “good” data, the perpetrator seeks respect, and lawyers seek legal victory through the adversarial and formalized rules of the legal habitus and field. In defining the perpetrator imaginary, I am also inspired by the work of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre argued that, when we look at a work of art, we are not perceiving so much as attributing. Our idea of what the subject ought to be informs our attribution. Our image of the perpetrator derives from our own expectations of the perpetrator. The parts of the perpetrator that we do not see, or that we choose not to see, are excluded from our image. Sartre called our perception of objects a “mélange of past impressions and recent knowledge.”3 The whole perpetrator is constructed from a partial image: one side of a cube, to borrow Sartre’s analogy.4 Yet unlike a cube, we do not always seem to realize that there are other dimensions to perpetrators. But the perpetrator always has unseen sides. Perpetration is an act, but “the perpetrator” is an imaginary. Moreover, the witnessed “side” of the perpetrator depends on who holds the cube, when, where, and why. Our identity, and our view of others, is based on our relationships; consequently, our image of the perpetrator, as an extreme other, is also a function of what they mean to us. In this chapter, I draw from secondary sources as well as my interviews with perpetrators and victims of mass atrocities in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Iraq to demonstrate that the perpetrator is an elusive concept.5 In the process, I reimagine perpetrators and perpetration as complex and contextual. The individual cannot exist outside their social environment: accordingly, different facets of the perpetrator are elicited and ascribed by those seeking to understand perpetrators. The Artist’s Perpetrator Artistic and media representations of perpetrators are often the most visible to the public. Rwanda will forever be symbolized by a bloody machete, while we tend to picture both Auschwitz and Bosnia through the image of emaciated concentration camp prisoners peering out from behind barbed wire. In focusing on the suffering of victims, the perpetrator is rendered invisible. This is often the case in memorials and museums dedicated to

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genocide and mass atrocity. The perpetrators are more metaphorical, or even metaphysical, than real. Where they are present, such as in the female guard exhibit at the Ravensbrück memorial site, the voices of victims are emphasized.6 In a sense, there is no need to represent the personhood of perpetrators in these symbolisms—the perpetrator is an instrument of destruction, of evil, of suffering, and of victimization rather than a multifaceted human being. In literature and film, the perpetrator is often present only as a means of furthering the victim’s or survivor’s narrative. Perpetrators often serve as a totem of outrage—an antagonist for the protagonist to struggle against; the struggle itself is the thing—the heroic realization of courage, justice, or survival. Through fighting against the perpetrator, a story is told, while the character of the protagonist is also manifested. When rendered as a symbol, the perpetrator is unidimensional, and without compassion, doubt, or remorse. The perpetrator serves only as an oppositional force. Consequently, artistic and cultural representations of the perpetrator often mystify evil rather than bring us any closer to understanding or empathy, promoting a sense that evil is meant to be feared, not understood. Genocide, in particular, engenders a “rhetoric of awe” and an “unintentional sacralization.”7 The protagonist in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader grapples with this dilemma: “I wanted simultaneously to understand Hannah’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding.”8 Schlink contends here that representing perpetrators is not only difficult but also dangerous. This sense of danger informs many artistic representations of perpetrators. To draw closer to the perpetrators is to question our own essence as moral beings such that understanding becomes a kind of voyeurism: the continuation of the crime by aligning ourselves with the perpetrator’s perspective. Perhaps the rejection of perpetrator understanding reached its apogee with filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s refusal to allow a screening at a conference of a film on Nazi doctor Eduard Wirths because he believed that to humanize Wirths was morally untenable.9 Comparative literature scholar Jeremy Metz sets out his view of appropriate “ethical practice” in the literary representation of perpetrators. I am concerned only with the quality of his [the perpetrator’s] presence in his encounter with the victim. In this sense, I associate myself entirely with those who reject any project that would have as its object an improved “understanding” of the perpetrator for its own sake. But it is nonetheless indispensable that the victimizer be available for unfettered literary

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representation. The object of that representation is to figure fully the victimizer in relation to the victim, so that we may better grasp the nature of the traumatic moment, which may be identified as that moment in which the victimizer encounters the victim, and the individual, as a result of this encounter, apprehends himself as a victim.10

In this passage, we see the fear that seems to underscore many literary approaches to the perpetrator and perpetration.11 The perpetrator is present only in relation to the “traumatic moment,” the act of victimization as experienced by the victim. The fear is once again of exoneration as well as moral proximity to the perpetrator and to perpetration. There is a risk of identifying with an immoral narrator, of what historian Dominic LaCapra calls “empathetic unsettlement.”12 The understandable desire to identify with the victim, rather than the perpetrator, often contributes to the sacralization of the victim and the beastialization of the perpetrator. Such forms of representation paradoxically dehumanize both victim and perpetrator. For example, in David Grossman’s novel, See under Love, the perpetrator is literally and figuratively represented as a beast.13 Perhaps, as Metz writes, the perpetrator’s “malevolent agency is so excessive that he can be represented only as an animal.”14 Yet if the perpetrator is a beast, we might ask whether he is a beast in the shape of a man or a man in the shape of a beast? Is his evil a part of his essential character as The Perpetrator or is it transitory, located in the act of perpetration? This literary anxiety of perpetrator characterization is retrograde when compared with contemporary trends in social scientific research, which seek to understand perpetrators as social, whole persons.15 It also places little faith in the reader. This metaphysical fear makes understanding itself an obscenity. The narrator in Jorge Semprún’s The Long Voyage argues that “there’s no point trying to understand the SS; it suffices to exterminate them,” and “I know that with an SS man, dialogue becomes possible only after he is dead.”16 This dialogue is avoided through eschewing first-person narratives, where the perspective of the perpetrator is adopted, an act that literary scholar Johanne Pettitt calls, at times, “unethical.”17 French writer Michael André Bernstein argues that, although it is acceptable to represent the Warsaw Ghetto, to represent Auschwitz death camp would “place me beside the SS man in charge of looking through the peephole in order to see the condition of those being gassed.”18 Representation of the moment of death, the anus mundi—the environment of evil— then functions as a form of voyeurism. The reader is witness and judge. In his influential book Probing the Limits of Representation, historian Saul Friedländer argues that “the extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible

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to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event. But we are dealing with an . . . event at the limits.”19 If Friedlander is correct, we might ask why genocide is at the limits but other acts of human evil are not? Is it a manner of the scale of the evil, or its quality? Scale must certainly have something to do with the representability of the evil, as acts such as murder, rape, and torture are not unique to genocide. In the Einsatzgruppen trial, the Chamber tried to communicate this scale, writing in the judgment: “[Genocide is a crime of ] such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray. . . . One cannot grasp the full cumulative terror of murder one million times repeated.”20 The unimaginability of evil on such a scale must then function as one of the obstacles to its accurate representation. Philosopher Theodor Adorno agreed that genocide is difficult to represent, famously writing that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”21 The absence of perpetrators, the void, may itself be a form of representation. The void is increasingly present as a form in genocide memorials, where negative space often comes to stand for the absence of the victims or the absence of comprehension. In such memorials, perpetrators are often completely absent, othered, or presented in a very superficial manner.22 In other words, they remain unfamiliar. Thus, artistic representations of perpetrators often seek to distance us, the audience, from the perspective of the perpetrator. This is a repudiation of evil but it may also serve prosaic purposes. It is difficult for readers to enjoy works in which they cannot identify with the protagonist. Moreover, the perpetrator’s perspective may be uncomfortable, prompting either the “empathetic unsettlement” described by LaCapra or visceral moral disgust. The Holocaust is often said to have produced a crisis in representation. According to historian Ruth Leys, “The Holocaust is held to have precipitated, perhaps caused, an epistemological-ontological crisis of witnessing, a crisis manifested at the level of language itself.”23 In other words, language is deemed inadequate to represent the realities of the lived experience of the victims. Nonetheless, there are now many attempts to represent victims’ suffering in genocide. Perpetrator representations and perspectives are far rarer and are often plagued by people’s aversion to drawing near to the imagined perpetrator. Mystical evil is not the only possibility in artistic representations of perpetrators. There also seems to be a dark fascination with perpetrators, with the serial killer, with Adolf Hitler, with Darth Vader. Nazi symbology is a powerful marker of transgression or power, even for those who do not espouse Nazi

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ideologies.24 These representations often have a cartoonish quality and may function as a means to distance ourselves from encounters with the full perpetrator. Perpetrators and perpetration may also be trivialized in other ways, as a setting for social commentary and humor, as in the comic strip “Hipster Hitler,” or through juxtaposition with superficial popular culture in Zbigniew Libera’s Lego: Concentration Camp or Tom Sachs’s Prada Deathcamp.25 The artists may have been making broader commentary on popular culture or consumerism, or they may have been juxtaposing Holocaust imagery with popular culture to provoke. Their message is “purposefully ambiguous.”26 There is an aversion in the visual arts, and perhaps literature as well, to taking aesthetic pleasure from genocide representations. Any pleasure taken must be “illicit” rather than open.27 We also sometimes find that there is a vicarious thrill in rooting for the bad guy, such as in William Shakespeare’s play Richard III.28 However, the more realistic the scenario of perpetration, the more uncomfortable it may be to identify with the perpetrator. Perhaps realistic depictions of perpetration produce realistic victims, and consequently the audience feels empathetic distress at the victims’ suffering. The filtering of the perpetrator perspective through that of another—such as the presentation of the perpetrator, Hannah, in The Reader via the sympathetic protagonist Michael—allows us to approach the perpetrator without ever becoming too close.29 Perpetrator representations are also shaped by other prejudices. Orientalism, for instance, is common in cinematic representations of perpetrators: contrast, for instance, Ralph Fiennes’s cool menace in depicting Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List with the angry, undifferentiated mobs of perpetrators in Hotel Rwanda and other depictions of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.30 Of course, there were differences in the morphology of killing between the two cases, but these still do not account for the wholesale depoliticization of violence in many filmic depictions of non-Western genocides. Depictions of women perpetrators are also shaped by our expectations— they are doubly deviant as people and as women.31 Killing is held to be a masculine act and women who perpetrate are also transgressing gender norms. Perpetration in such cases is especially shocking, and accounts are often salacious, portraying women perpetrators as especially bad—with monikers like the “Bitch of Belsen” or “Hitler’s Furies” being applied to female perpetrators in the Holocaust.32 The term “perpetrate” is itself gendered, derived from the Latin “per” (completely) and “patrare” (to carry out, which is itself derived from “pater,” or father).33 There are, of course, also more complex representations of perpetrators in the arts. For example, Jonathan Littell’s novel, The Kindly Ones, is told from

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the perspective of the perpetrator, Maximilien Aue.34 Yet even though the perpetrator is, in some ways, the protagonist, we are also prevented from drawing too close to him through his apparent deviancy as he commits incest, patricide, and matricide. Although there is an increasing turn toward the perspective of the perpetrator in literary works, perpetrators such as Aue are still often presented as being pathological rather than “ordinary.”35 These novels present what literary scholar Jenni Adams calls an “ethics of encounter,” which forces the reader to approach perpetrators in a manner that provokes introspection about right and wrong, and perhaps even one’s own place in the metaphysical cosmos.36 We must remember, however, that not all artistic representations of genocide are made by outside observers. Victims also produce artistic representations of perpetrators and perpetration. These victims are often drawing from their personal experiences to convey emotions in the viewer or, reflexively, to communicate their own emotional state. In such cases, perpetrators are often presented as “embodiments of evil, death, and destruction.”37 Consider, for example, Vann Nath, a former prisoner of the infamous Khmer Rouge prison, S-21, who survived by painting portraits of Khmer Rouge leaders. When the Cambodian genocide ended, he began depicting the atrocities that he witnessed in prison.38 His paintings evoke experiences of extreme human suffering as well as the cruelty of the perpetrators. Several of his images, for example, show perpetrators tearing infants out of the arms of their mothers at the Killing Fields or in S-21. Thus, most artistic representations of the perpetrator produce distance. In literature, the use of the perpetrator as a mere narrative device is realized through shallow characterization, while in memorials and visual artistic works of genocide the perpetrator is either absent or rendered as symbolic evil. We will now leave the ostensibly emotive realm of the arts for the reason of the law, which often functions as emotional theater. The Lawyer’s Perpetrator Within the field of the law, the perpetrator serves as a symbol, a depersonalized object, of the judicial process. The moment of perpetration is the focus of judicial inquiry, and the raison d’être of the trial. In the trial, the moment of perpetration is the perpetrator, with the perpetrator’s character or expressions of remorse only receiving often quite perfunctory consideration in the sentencing process.39 The defense often seeks to produce a temporally and thematically broader image of the perpetrator as someone

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whose experiences and context have shaped their actions, yet the court, particularly the prosecution, often seeks to retain the proceedings’ focus on the alleged act of perpetration. The law is an epistemological system with its own logic and its own way of processing facts, what we might term “legal ordering.”40 Courts’ normativity may be concealed through the promulgation of a rational and impartial professional culture, yet ultimately the substantive law that courts apply is grounded in normative concepts of natural law and the prevention of harms to the community and its members. As an epistemological field, the law produces results in service of its own internal rationality: legal processes determine the culpability of individuals for specific acts within a given temporal, substantive, and geographical space. The selectivity of courts in trying mass atrocities, especially international courts, means that there is always an element of political instrumentality to the identification of suspects. This leads to an arbitrariness in the law, which may contradict normative assumptions about the harmfulness of perpetration. A few perpetrators are selected to symbolically represent perpetrators from a particular ethnic community, or even all perpetrators within a conflict.41 This symbolic representation of perpetrators has a dual meaning, representing the episode of evil as well as all human or even metaphysical evil: the transgression of morality as represented in divine law. This selectivity is partially grounded in logistical constraints, but it is also a deliberate strategy to try those who are deemed “most responsible.” Thus, the former commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, Dominic Ongwen, as the only Ugandan perpetrator in the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has come to represent all LRA crimes in Uganda.42 Courts strive to bring coherence and clarity. This is particularly difficult in the case of international crimes, which are often shaped by complex, interactive, dynamic, and transnational processes. The search for coherence necessarily produces simplified narratives and understandings of genocide that reduce uncertainty. Genocide, characterized by the breakdown in social relationships and the restructuring of norms, is a moment of ambiguity masquerading as clarity. The victim group is “lawfully” targeted for destruction by the state, but the state’s demand for mass murder may still represent an upending of norms for many individual perpetrators. One Rwandan perpetrator whom I interviewed recalled: “We thought at the time we were doing something wrong, but the authorities were ordering us to do it.”43 Judicial judgments often paradoxically contain both moral certitude and ambiguities—such as acts excluded from the trial due to jurisdiction, dissenting opinions, and inconsistencies in legal reasoning—but this ambiguity is not

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regarded as ideal. Transitional justice processes rarely present complex truths, and this gives perpetrators a space in which to deny their crimes. Perpetrators may think that the version of the perpetrator reproduced in transitional justice and memory processes is not like them at all, and they are correct in a fashion: the one-dimensionality of legal representations of perpetrators often do distort reality. Moreover, individual responsibility for mass atrocities cannot be neatly separated from its collective dimensions.44 Courts individualize responsibility, partially removing perpetration from the collective context. Yet genocide necessarily occurs collectively, facilitated by the social pressures of group dynamics. Nonetheless, criminal courts are not truly designed to assess collective responsibility; rather, they only deal with individuals as discrete entities. The attribution of responsibility to individuals for collective acts is often achieved through modes of criminal liability, which tie individuals to organizations and chains of command, such as joint criminal enterprise, coperpetration, command responsibility, and conspiracy. The attribution of individual criminal responsibility also often means that courts produce binary and mutually exclusive categories: those who are culpable as perpetrators and those who are not. Such binary classifications obscure the complexity and fluidity of individual motivations. Where perpetrators are convicted, they are instantly moved from the category of the innocent to the category of the condemned. There is another assumption at play here as well: of planning and traceable intent and decisions. Every act is connected to a broader plan rather than being isolated or improvised. Historian Taner Akçam writes: “There is also an implicit teleology [in determinations of genocidal intent], . . . which takes the last point of destruction (Auschwitz, Der Zor) as a starting point and looks backward to violent expressions in the perpetrators’ early speeches and writings, treating them as a ‘serious declaration of intent.’”45 Thus, through judicial ordering we are presented with an image of genocide as being centrally planned and implemented by deliberate and determined perpetrators. In reality, as this book demonstrates, many perpetrators operate in a kind of gray zone—drifting between endorsement of perpetration and hesitancy, or even between perpetration and victimization.46 For courts, perpetrators are also symbols. The conviction of perpetrators is the purpose of courts and the fulfilment of justice—the fight against impunity. There is an echo here of artistic representations of trials, of both genocide perpetrators and ordinary perpetrators—the trial produces justice, and those who fight for conviction are themselves producing justice and gilding their character with justice’s luster. The rhetoric of justice is embodied for many international justice actors in the condemnation and stigmatization of the perpetrator.

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Jurist Frédéric Mégret draws from sociologist Émile Durkheim to argue that “stigma is both an expression of the inherent moral blameworthiness assigned to the perpetrators of certain heinous acts and a way of constituting the society that assigns this blameworthiness.”47 Those who violate the moral order are symbols of the worthiness and resilience of the order. The representation of perpetrators begins with the indictment. Mégret notes: “Pronouncing the words ‘genocide,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ or ‘war crimes’ in relation to a person’s name is of course already an exercise in inchoate stigmatization. However, prosecutorial practices typically go beyond bare legal allegations to include language that portrays the acts of the accused as particularly horrendous, and rely on the ability to simultaneously monopolize a high degree of pathos (against the background of impeccable technical reasoning). The prosecutor’s opening and concluding statements are typically an attempt to brand the accused’s crime or crimes as particularly heinous.”48 For example, in the opening of the Special Court for Sierra Leone Civil Defense Forces (CDF) crimes against humanity and war crimes trial, Prosecutor David Crane stated: A people have stood firm, shoulder to shoulder, staring down the beast, the beast of impunity. The jackals of death, destruction, and inhumanity are caged behind bars of hope and reconciliation. The light of this new daytoday-and the many tomorrows ahead are a beginning of the end to the life of that beast of impunity, which howls in frustration and shrinks from the bright and shining spectre of the law. The jackals whimper in their cages certain of their impending demise. The law has returned to Sierra Leone and it stands with all Sierra Leoneans against those who seek their destruction.49

Impunity itself is presented as a beast here, but one may also conclude from this bombastic language that the accused perpetrators are being presented as beasts. Indeed, they are seemingly referred to as “jackals of death” who “whimper in their cages.” This is a prosecutor rather than a court speaking, but the prosecutor’s perspective often shapes how perpetrators are understood by courts and the public. This kind of language may challenge the presumption of innocence. If justice is unachievable without conviction, then acquittals are failures. This is often the way that courts are viewed by donor states—without a high number of convictions, the court is regarded as a failure. This image of the conviction of perpetrators as the fulfilment of justice also poses problems for those perpetrators who are acquitted. They have been exonerated, at least in terms of the scope of the trial, yet they are held to be universally undesirable and unwanted by states. They often live out their lives in a twilight of assumed, but not proven, guilt.

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There is also an element of triumphal entrapment in trials, whereby the perpetrator has been captured and is coercively held to face justice. Perhaps this was most explicit in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, who was abducted from his safe haven in Argentina and brought to Israel for trial. During his trial, Eichmann sat within a glass box— like an artifact—as an untouchable symbol of justice being done, though he occasionally rose in deference to the judges or to show outrage in response to aggressive questions from the prosecutor. The same sense of “entrapment” is also present in other mass atrocities trials—from the United Nations (UN) guards looking over the shoulder of Slobodan Milošević in the courtroom of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to grassroots gacaca trials in Rwanda, where the accused are admonished if they turn away from the courtroom and the judgment of their peers. Justice is rarely so intimate as it was in gacaca, with the accused sometimes standing a meter away from their accuser. The more agency given to the accused, the more this sense of entrapment is broken. For example, self-representations by perpetrators at the ICTY, such as Slobodan Milošević and Ratko Mladić, allowed them to challenge the fundamental assumptions of the justice system while also introducing humor and bravado to otherwise solemn judicial proceedings. I recall, for example, attending a hearing where presiding judge Patrick Robinson admonished Milošević to “stop beating a dead horse” with his line of questioning. Milošević’s smug retort of “I am not beating dead horse” caused the courtroom to erupt in laughter. In this moment, the perpetrator’s perspective unsettled judicial entrapment and the court was rendered an open theatrical space for the contestation of objective truth and symbolic meaning. Even where perpetrators confess, their confessions often reframe violence in ways that “unsettle” official accounts.50 The stories of victims are often denuded of emotion through the process of examination and cross-examination in the courtroom, the function of legal reason. Yet this reason can be shaken by the expression of human suffering, for example, when Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur collapsed on the witness stand during the Eichmann trial.51 Although representations of perpetrators in adversarial judicial processes are positional—Prosecution, Defense, Chamber, and Victims’ civil parties—all “sides” in the courtroom adhere to legal reasoning as a matter of professional habitus and ideal. The lawyer’s perpetrator is grounded in notions of rationality and positivism. Yet even if we accept that perpetrators are rational actors who choose to perpetrate crimes, trials also have the effect of rendering perpetrators as symbolic objects whose stigmatization is required to realize justice, and this creates a distorted and static image of perpetrators and perpetration. Perpetration is

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grounded in contemporaneity, yet the perpetrator, as a person, existed before the moment of perpetration and continues to exist afterward. Where they are found culpable, especially where they are condemned in a judicial process, the perpetrator cannot reclaim an identity separate from the act of perpetration. In other words, perpetration defines perpetrator. The Victim’s Perpetrator Many victims also have a static image of perpetrators as tormentors. During my research in Rwanda, I asked sixty-eight perpetrators and twelve victims, “Why did ordinary people kill?” Victims were more likely to identify “evil” and “bad morals” as being key factors, while perpetrators emphasized complex personal factors such as “poverty,” “revenge,” and “ignorance.” Thus, the victims’ perception of perpetrators tends to echo fundamental attribution error, which stipulates that individuals attribute their own actions to complex situational factors and the actions of others to innate characteristics.52 Perpetrators are, paradoxically, both intimately close—through the violence they inflict upon the bodies of their victims—and unknown. In institutionalized systems of perpetration, like concentration camps and prisons, perpetrators are often only known by victims in the moment and context of perpetration. The perpetrator is thus, once again, not a complete person. Indeed, perhaps they cannot be. Training and procedures within contexts of violence are often depersonalizing and dehumanizing for perpetrators as well. They adapt to a new environment and new norms of behavior that often seem to exist in a space beyond peacetime norms and reality. They are depersonalized—uniformed and constrained by standard procedures and chains of command. Richard Glazar, a survivor of Treblinka concentration camp, writes: “Obviously no ordinary standards of emotion or behavior can apply; because all of existence, for us [the prisoners] especially, and up to a point, at least by reflection, also for them [the guards], was reduced to a primeval level: life and death. . . . One must not forget their incredible power, their autonomy within their narrow, and yet, as far as we were concerned, unlimited field; but also the isolation created by their unique situation by what they—and hardly anyone else even within the German Nazi Community—had in common.”53 The perpetration of genocide manifests the omnipotence of the perpetrator and the weakness of the victim. This contrast is institutionalized in the highly structured environment of concentration camps and detention centers, which are often isolated from wider society and maintain their own strictly regimented order. A former prisoner of S-21 in Cambodia recalled: “The guards beat the prisoners like

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they were not human. . . . If I have to compare between human and animal; we were treated worse than their pets. They could look straight at us; we didn’t dare to look back at them—we couldn’t even look at them! . . . There are no better words to describe the conditions we encountered.”54 In the lead-up to genocide, the victims are rendered as abstract objects of evil, contamination, or filth. They are depersonalized, instead being defined by fundamental inborn characteristics. Their actions are then interpreted through this lens of bad intention, what cognitive psychiatrist Aaron Beck refers to as “hostile framing.”55 Thus, for victims the perpetrator may be a symbol of the utter disorientation that they find themselves in. Their acts are inexplicable. According to one survivor of the Rwandan genocide: “I wonder how people who used to share drinks . . . how could people do something like kill each other? . . . Considering what they did, nothing can be repaired. Because of that there is nothing to do but pardon them. Nothing can replace what we lost.”56 Although perpetrators almost universally deny enjoying violence, victims often believe that perpetrators are essentially evil and sadistic. A Rwandan survivor noted: “They were heartless. They had hatred in their hearts for a long time; it was a normal thing within them.”57 Indeed, forcing victims to consider perpetrators’ humanity may cause victims to experience dissonance. Victimization is already disorienting, upsetting many assumptions about the moral order and faith in the goodness of others. If the victim sees the perpetrator in everyday life, this may escalate this disorientation. In situations where victims know their perpetrator personally, this is likely even more troubling. A victim of the Rwandan genocide recalled: “In 1994, some Hutu friends of mine stole one of my family’s cows. I went to ask them about the cows and they told me I had better not stay or they would have to kill me. I didn’t understand how they became like that.”58 Similarly, in his diary, historian Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of Jewish policemen in the Warsaw Ghetto: “For the most part, the Jewish police showed an incomprehensible brutality. Where did Jews get such murderous violence? When in our history did we ever before raise so many hundreds of killers . . . ?”59 Ringelblum’s puzzlement here may have been as much about Jewish policemen’s betrayal of fellow Jews as human nature, more broadly. The effects of victimization are often far reaching. A victim of sexual violence in the Rwandan genocide who was attacked by her own church congregation explained: “Because of what happened to me, I never feel safe.”60 For victims who know their perpetrators personally, victimization is both a physical atrocity and a betrayal. Perhaps, for those who are victimized by anonymous perpetrators, the othering of perpetrators helps preserve their worldview. It may be unreasonable to ask victims to seek empathy with the perpetrators

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who have harmed them, their families, and their communities. Victims’ representations of perpetrators are true to their experience of suffering, even if this representation only presents a partial image of the perpetrator. The Perpetrator’s Perpetrator In contrast to the other perspectives, which align the perpetrator more closely to the act of perpetration, perpetrator self-representation is often about a disassociation of self from act. Paradoxically, perpetration involves contravening values, which contribute to positive self-image; the view of oneself as a good person seems incompatible with the commission of harms against innocent others. Yet this occurs, in part, to maintain ties to the group, which is another fundamental facet of positive self-image—the “looking glass” self.61 In the case of genocide, however, these conflicting notions may be reconciled through moral neutralization—discourses that stipulate that the victims are not innocent, thus the same moral rules do not apply to them.62 In such contexts, it may ultimately be easier for perpetrators to neutralize previously held moral norms than to isolate themselves from the group. Therefore, pressure to conform is central to the decision to perpetrate for many perpetrators. Perpetrators of genocide must be able to maintain some sense of moral consistency. Like other individuals, they want to avoid cognitive dissonance, the conflict that occurs from an individual internalizing incompatible ideas or actions that do not align with their beliefs.63 Such dissonance produces discomfort. Individuals may try to avoid cognitive dissonance through various means, including the exclusion or reimagining of disconfirming information, changing cognitions so they are more compatible, or creating new cognitions that help bridge the gap between the original cognitions.64 In other words, perpetrators, like other individuals, would rather change their view of the world than their view of themselves. Self-persistency also overrides new and contradictory information. Propaganda and external justifications may also help prevent development of a deviant self-image. This protection of self-image manifests in the interview environment through what historian Graham Dawson calls “composure”—namely the tendency of interview subjects to structure their stories in ways that maintain their self-image and present a positive self-image to their audience.65 Oral historians, in particular, recognize that where personal narratives do not correspond with public narratives, they often become risky and difficult for the narrator.66 Once individuals becomes perpetrators, they are less likely to prioritize moral rules: in effect, they have already transgressed a moral norm and must

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rationalize their transgression to maintain their self-image. During genocide, perpetrators may doubt the rightfulness of their acts, but they will often resist these doubts. Their sense of wrongfulness commonly fluctuates: according to one Rwandan perpetrator, “One day we felt we were doing something wrong and the next day we didn’t.”67 In the post-atrocity period, perpetrator’s narratives evolve in response to the broader social context, including the perpetrator’s self-image, the audience they are addressing, and the purpose of the narrative given their interests. Narratives that emphasize the rightfulness of genocide will become dominant in contexts where genocide is still justified by the state and society. Moreover, perpetrators within subcultures embracing violence, such as paramilitary groups, may continue to endorse violence as a source of pride and belonging. After genocide, many perpetrators create coherent prosocial identities in the form of stories, what criminologist Shadd Maruna calls “redemption scripts.”68 Many genocide perpetrators express a desire to contribute to society and emphasize that perpetration does not align with their beliefs.69 However, the sense of free will is still frequently lacking: they feel they had no choice but to perpetrate.70 This fatalistic mood is rooted in the avoidance of responsibility, to be sure, but the influence of criminogenic, far-reaching state power in the commission of the crime also allows them to avoid claiming agency. Even for those who consider themselves the victims of circumstance, such redemption stories may be powerful. Virtually all the perpetrators I interviewed in Rwanda told me that they feel they are better people after the genocide. One man claimed, “I am different because at the time of the genocide I was taught to kill, to commit the crime. But now I have been taught to be a good person, to have reconciliation with my country.”71 Another man said, “I am different person now because I know God. . . . I’ve changed completely.”72 These perspectives may be psychologically and politically useful. In Rwanda today, all convicted perpetrators and many nonperpetrators have to undergo civic education programs known as ingando, which help them craft narratives related to the genocide and the state’s ideal political identity in the present. People who recount stories of atrocities often compare their involvement favorably relative to more sadistic perpetrators.73 For example, one Rwandan perpetrator emphasized: “I killed [only] one person and I am proud to say that.”74 Prisoners also often construct moral hierarchies, perhaps as a means of diminishing the moral toxicity of their own acts of transgression and achieving some form of moral superiority.75 Perpetrator expressions of remorse may be an act of conscience, but it is impossible in practice to separate conscience from context, just as it is impossible to separate the self from others. For perpetrators who produce redemption

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scripts, we may ask whether such scripts are a matter of reinvention or reclamation: are perpetrators creating new selves or are they just returning to their old selves? This question is, of course, impossible to answer. Selfhood is itself dynamic and ephemeral. Yet we can say that there is some truth to perpetrator self-representation. The external image of the perpetrator, in being fixed and enduring, cannot be a real self, or at least not a complete self. The Researcher’s Perpetrator Finally, how do we, as researchers, see the perpetrator? Like law, academia is a profession with its own habitus and culture. And like all occupations, it is often banal and directed inward at meeting the individual interests of researchers and organizational interests of universities and grant-giving organizations. Doing field research with perpetrators is as much a matter of administrative procedure and paperwork as it is of “confronting evil.” And positivist ideals hold that research and researchers are objective. Yet, like the other imaginaries outlined, ours is also shaped by purpose. In this final imaginary, I reflect on research as a practice and a position to consider how the researcher’s perpetrator compares to other imaginaries. Consider the following ethnographic vignette derived from my research with Rwandan genocide perpetrators: August 2009, Ruhengeri Prison, Rwanda “Théoneste” regards me pensively as I scribble notes. We are sitting with my interpreter at the visitor center of Ruhengeri Prison in northwestern Rwanda, the three of us gathered around a scratched wooden table in a small room bound by red brick walls. Théoneste has spoken of terrible things. He remembers watching two Interahamwe militiamen kill a woman. He was forced to bury her. His eyes grow distant as he remembers. My cough brings him back to the present and our eyes meet. “I need to tell you something.” He says that he was wrongly imprisoned. That he testified, as a protected witness, at a trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). When you disappear from prison for weeks at a time, everyone knows you have gone to Arusha. He claims that he testified against a relative of one of his gacaca judges and that she disregarded the testimony of the real killers in an apparent act of vengeance. He tilts his head slightly to the side, sizing me up. Am I believing his story? I respond to Théoneste’s soft-spoken protestations with commiseration. I had heard many such stories in interviewing perpetrators. I imagine some

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were true and some were not. I also received many requests from prisoners, ranging from bags of sugar to legal assistance. I decide, in this case, that it would be appropriate to take things further, given his status as a protected witness. A couple of weeks later I’m in an air-conditioned office in downtown Kigali. A court official sits across from me, smiling expansively in his dark suit. I relay Théoneste’s story and he responds by sighing and rolling his eyes. “Let me tell you something that you might not know,” he starts. “All Rwandans are liars.” I’m not sure how to respond. He tells me he’ll investigate Théoneste’s allegations and get back to me. I never hear from him again.76

Can we, as researchers, trust perpetrator narratives? Stories or “truths” emerge through a dynamic interplay between researcher, subject, and society.77 The perpetrator is at once a person who lives within the bounds of their self-image and a product of others’ imaginations. He is an accused, a research subject, and a person who, as criminologists Marie-Sophie Devresse and Damien Scalia note in this volume, can be a valuable source of information about judicial systems. The stories that perpetrators tell are often ones that are useful in both an instrumental and an emotional sense. Stories build relationships and establish identity. I’m still not sure whether Théoneste was being truthful with me, but I know his story was part of who he was, and who we were together, in that room in Ruhengeri Prison. Are we contributing to injustice if we uncritically present perpetrator narratives? Conversely, if we align ourselves with the victims are we losing our neutrality? The researcher’s neutrality in the interview is an important technique designed to facilitate an open and loquacious interview environment and to meet standards for ethical research. Yet interviewing perpetrators is not value neutral, especially where they have already been found guilty of horrendous crimes by a court. Essentially all research on genocide operates under the implicit assumption that genocide is wrong. This is justifiable when one considers that researchers are also citizens and social actors, and in principle they should seek to reduce, or at least avoid doing, harm. However, given the unequal relationship between researcher and subject, one might ask whether perpetrators are vulnerable subjects, despite their involvement in the victimization of others.78 For researchers who use perpetrator interviews or written testimonies, the perpetrator’s story becomes an input to be processed as data in the production of research outputs. Like many researchers, I experience moments of exultation when I get what I want from the interview, but such exaltation can reflect bias and a lack of empathy for the interviewee. There is a recent shift in oral

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historical research toward collaborative approaches, often involving shared authority over the structure and use of research, yet such approaches face significant challenges in overcoming structural power imbalances between institutions in the North and South, or between researcher and “subject.”79 The analysis of the narrative, or acts, ultimately functions as a process of translation. As researchers, we—like artists—are often representing something that we have not directly experienced. Through the process of analyzing interview materials, we may also be evaluating the imaginaries of victims and perpetrators, in what historian Catherine Baker calls a “struggle for the power to interpret and represent.”80 The researcher’s power over the perpetrator is that once the researcher has left the “scene” of the interview, the researcher will continue to characterize and transform the words and motivations of perpetrators, often while their interviewees remain incarcerated in distant countries. Meanwhile, perpetrators may perceive participation in research projects as an opportunity to advance their story. They may also perceive researchers as a source of financial enrichment. How should researchers respond to requests for compensation, and should there be a distinction between the compensation or commiseration the researcher gives to perpetrators and to victims? We must acknowledge that “perpetrator stories” have value for the researcher, although it is difficult to monetize this. Interviews may contribute to professional advancement and book royalties where they are utilized in certain scholarly publications, yet they remain one element in a complex formula that includes the researcher’s broader outputs and activities. Ethical research should approach even “unloved” participants with respect and due regard. Yet, when researching perpetrators, we must also acknowledge that we bring our own biases and assumptions. Our image of the perpetrator may affect our research design and our analytical lens. We may seek to maintain distance from our subjects that goes beyond methodological considerations. This distance may be challenged in interviews where perpetrators lose their composure and suffer emotional breakdowns. Such breakdowns may challenge our own composure as well as present researchers with the uncomfortable position of comforting those who have gravely harmed others. They may also indicate that the research process is harming or traumatizing interview subjects. Moreover, it interrupts the desired flow of the interview and interferes with anticipated results by preventing the completion of the interview, especially when using “closed” questionnaires. Yet as political scientist Lee Ann Fujii notes, even “unsuccessful” interviews often present valuable data.81 Most individuals who conduct interviews are not therapists, thus not equipped to deal with signs of unexpected trauma. Nonetheless, as historian Emma Vickers argues, the researcher may employ basic transactional analysis

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techniques in such instances—namely, drawing the subject away from the trauma and back to the present moment.82 The dilemma of emotional breakdown also illuminates that interviews are not always equally valuable for researcher and subject (though we must also remember that subjects are present voluntarily). In doing qualitative fieldwork in diverse settings, I found that the agency or social power of the perpetrator to perpetrate or abstain from perpetration varies significantly between contexts. Yet in nearly all cases, the perpetrators whom I have interviewed have emphasized their lack of agency. This derives from the perpetrators’ wish to align themselves with socially desirable norms of behavior. Accordingly, the perpetrators I interviewed sought to distance themselves from perpetration and to persuade me of their distance. Research among perpetrators thus must be considered for the imaginary that the researcher imposes on their subjects. Researchers strive to be objective, to examine the subject of study with a clear perspective, free from assumptions (or to transparently acknowledge their assumptions). Yet in transforming actuality into theory, we are ultimately translating perpetration and the perpetrator into an abstraction. For researchers, the perpetrator, as an “unloved” participant and as a “subject,” may also not be a fully realized human being.83 Our understanding of the perpetrator is still shaped by our biases, objectives, and professional norms in doing perpetrator research. Conclusion: Intersecting Imaginaries Having outlined these archetypical positions, I now consider whether and how these imaginaries intersect and influence each other. Is there an “original imaginary” that has influenced all imaginaries and representations to follow? Perhaps the modern image of the atrocity perpetrator as hateful and irredeemable arises from the 1945–46 Nuremberg Tribunal, in which the victorious Allied Powers punished Nazi leaders for their atrocities, but the demonization of criminals has long historical antecedents.84 Indeed, it would be overly simplistic to argue that the revulsion that the world felt at the sight of Holocaust victims’ bodies and concentration camp crematoria was rooted solely in the Nuremberg Tribunal. This interpretation would completely ignore the rootedness of our reaction to the Holocaust in centuries of accumulated moral norms, in which genocide—which the UN General Assembly recognized “shocks the conscience of mankind”—is a relatively modern legal phenomenon.85 Consequently, our attempt to establish a fictitious perpetrator who is remorseless, evil, and very much unlike ourselves, may be rooted in a sense of moral disgust

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and repudiation. Through such a construction we condemn the perpetrators while simultaneously distancing ourselves from human evil. Evil, then, is a foreign country.86 We visit it from time to time, if only to assure ourselves of our own fundamental goodness. The nature of the perpetrator as someone we cannot recognize is, at its heart, a comforting thought. The prevalent artist’s image of the perpetrator as one-dimensional and essentially evil would appear to be the most persuasive and pervasive imaginary. But artistic representations of perpetrators may lag behind social scientific understandings. First-generation genocide scholarship was often strongly normative and grounded in assumptions about the sorts of people who perpetrated genocide. The idea of an essentially evil perpetrator was supplanted by the ordinary perpetrator of Stanley Milgram and Christopher Browning.87 However, this ordinariness is now rejected by many social scientists and historians as “flattening” the diversity of individual propensity and motivation. In a sense, many literary interpretations of perpetrators trail social science through their rejection of the possibility and desirability of understanding perpetrators. Through rehumanizing perpetrators, we begin to understand the more nuanced roots of human evil rather than resting in comfortable assumptions. However, at their best, artistic representations of perpetrators may also bring us closer to perpetrators than qualitative research may allow. Researchers often seek to comprehend the subject’s perspective, yet interviews only present a limited and “translated” version of perpetrators’ innermost thoughts and convictions. Conversely, artistic representations can take us inside the minds of perpetrators, albeit as understood by the author. The fields of the lawyer and the scholar seem, at first glance, to be hermetically sealed systems, defined by their internal rationality and attempts at objectivity. Yet in reality, neither imaginary is “protected”: rather, they are both influenced by deeper cultural myths and understandings about the perpetrators and perpetration. The inexorable perpetrator, useful to legal accounts, may also be shaped by artistic representations. Lawyers, like our other archetypes, are storytellers. The law seeks to produce singular narratives through the outcome of the judicial process, but in order to reach this point, competing stories are also tested. The positivist habitus of the law also leads to privileging of legal narratives over other forms. The court must clarify competing narratives, yet it also reshapes and destroys narratives that do not align with the judicial “story.” In becoming a witness, for example, individual stories are reshaped to emphasize particular events and perspectives and remove ambiguities and are instrumentalized to suit the purposes of the prosecution or defense. The mediation of the perpetrator’s perspective in literature may not be so different from the mediation of perpetrator perspective in research. Researchers

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curate perpetrator testimony in order to advance a theoretical finding, or perhaps to also “protect” the listener from the horrors of perpetration. This protective function of curation, whether in academic research or in the museum, may also be a means of protecting victims and victimization from a voyeuristic gaze, particularly regarding photographs or the remains of the victims. Adams argues that there is a “complicitous dimension to the literary consumption of horror.”88 Is there also a complicitous dimension to the scholarly consumption of horror? As researchers, are we identifying with the perpetrators if we present their perspective? How do we approach perpetrators without such complicity? If there is an “ethics of encounter,” as Adams argues, what does it constitute? Perhaps such an ethics of encounter is centered on the purpose of the encounter, an awareness of the implications of the encounter, and decency toward the research subjects. Of course, the latter factor is encapsulated by ethics review processes at universities, but the other two factors are likely rooted in our place as individual researchers. The production of knowledge through research is an end in and of itself, but perhaps perpetrator research requires more than the mere production of knowledge but also the production of socially useful knowledge. This is debatable, of course, but it seems clear that research involving such acute human suffering must consider benefits beyond the enrichment of the researchers and their institution. Both victim and perpetrator try to reclaim their identities after mass violence—a quest that is shaped by broader social forces of recognition or denial. Victimization and perpetration are deeply personal experiences, but talking about victimization and perpetration are essentially social—the narrative is produced through the interaction between speaker and audience. The perpetrator imaginaries outlined in this chapter do differ, but they are also intimately connected, a web of presumptions, informed by one another but also grounded in a more universal desire to remain distant from violence and human evil. The perpetrator is often presented as inhuman, as a beast, whether it is literary representations like David Grossman’s novel See: Under Love or juridical representations such as the prosecution’s opening statement in the Eichmann trial, arguing that Eichmann was “born human but lived like a beast in the jungle.” As all the perpetrator imaginaries make clear, we must not draw too close to the beast. What can we make of all these different perspectives? Is there any point in trying to understand the perpetrator? The best answer to these questions is that there can never be a singular perpetrator, just like there can never be a singular self. The self is, as Sartre noted, a “collection of relations.”89 For this reason, the perpetrator will likely remain a contradictory specter in popular culture but also a person. Selfhood itself is spectral, but the act of perpetration eternalizes a moment in time for perpetrator, victim, and society.

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Notes 1. Rebecca Jinks similarly wrote of a “genocidal imaginary” composed of “the images and narratives that form the various representations of genocide.” See Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 29. This chapter owes a debt of thanks to literary scholar Susanne Knittel, whose workshops “Teaching about Perpetrators” have informed my thinking about this subject and provided resources for artistic works on perpetrators. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 170–71. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), 90. 4. Sartre, The Imaginary, 8–9. 5. These interviews were generally semistructured, conducted with an interpreter, and with interview subjects identified through random selection. They constituted part of my doctoral thesis research on the causes of genocide perpetration, published in Kjell Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (London: Routledge, 2018). Accordingly, in terms of the archetypes that I discuss in this chapter, the interviews only inform the sections on perpetrators, victims, and the researcher. 6. Susanne Luhmann, “Managing Perpetrator Affect: The Female Guard Exhibition at Ravensbrück,” in Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity, ed. Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 248. 7. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 7. 8. Bernard Schlink, The Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 157. 9. Jeremy Metz, “Reading the Victimizer: Towards an Ethical Practice of Figuring the Traumatic Moment in Holocaust Literature,” Textual Practice 26, no. 6 (2012): 1022. 10. Metz, “Reading the Victimizer,” 1026. 11. It should be noted that there is also a long history of more nuanced literary portrayals of perpetrators. See, for example, Stephanie Bird, “Perpetrators and Perpetration in Literature,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, ed. Susanne Knittel and Zachary Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 2020), 301–10. 12. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 41. 13. David Grossman, See under Love, translated by Betsy Rosenberg (London: Vintage Books, 2010). 14. Metz, “Reading the Victimizer,” 1026. 15. See, for example, Erin Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More: Female Genocidaires in the Aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 1 (2015): 73. 16. Cited in Metz, “Reading the Victimizer,” 1030, 1033. 17. Joanne Pettitt, Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives: Encountering the Nazi Beast (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3.

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18. Cited in Metz, “Reading the Victimizer,” 1025. 19. Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 2. 20. United States Military Tribunal, United States of America v. Ohlendorf et al., “Einsatzgrüppen Trial Judgment, 3 L.R.T.W.C. 470,” April 8, 1948. 21. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. Taken in the context of his essay, Adorno was arguing that “to persist, after Auschwitz, in the production of monuments of the very culture that produced Auschwitz . . . is to participate by denial in the perpetuation of that barbaric culture and to participate in the process (reification) that renders fundamental criticism of that culture literally unthinkable.” See also Brian Oard, “Poetry after Auschwitz: What Adorno Really Said, and Where He Said It,” Mindful Pleasures, March 12, 2011, http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.nl/2011/03/poetry-after-auschwitz-what-adorno .html. 22. Susanne Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 163. 23. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 267n. 24. See, for example, Mark Hay, “Nazi Chic: The Asian Fashion Craze That Just Won’t Die,” Vice Magazine, February 12, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ xd5bdd/nazis-chic-is-asias-offensive-fashion-craze-456; and David Clay Large, “The Developing World Thinks Hitler Was Underrated,” Foreign Affairs, October 5, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/05/the-developing-world-thinks-hitler-is-under rated-duterte-world-war-ii-nazi-politics/. 25. Zbigniew Libera, Lego Concentration Camp, 1996, https://artmuseum.pl/en/ kolekcja/praca/libera-zbigniew-lego-oboz-koncentracyjny; Tom Sachs, Prada Deathcamp, 1998, https://www.tomsachs.org/work/prada-deathcamp. 26. Norman Kleeblatt, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (New York: Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2002, 133. 27. Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 2. 28. William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 29. Schlink, The Reader. 30. Jinks, “Representing Genocide,” 94. 31. Susanne Luhmann, “Managing Perpetrator Affect: The Female Guard Exhibition at Ravensbrück,” in Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity, ed. Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 251. 32. Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). 33. Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, “Perpetrating Selves: An Introduction,” in Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity, ed. Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 4.

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34. Jonathan Little, The Kindly Ones, translated by Charlotte Mandell (London: Vintage Books, 2010). 35. Jenni Adams, “Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, nos. 2–3 (2011): 23. 36. Adams, “Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones,” 46. 37. Diana Popescu, “Representing Infamous Others: Perpetrator Imagery in Visual Art,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, ed. Susanne Knittel and Zachary Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 2020), 322. 38. Vann Nath, “Paint Propaganda or Die,” The Art History Archive, http://www .arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/asian/Vann-Nath.html. 39. Barbora Holá, Joris van Wijk, Francesca Constantini, and Armi Korhonnen, “Does Remorse Count? ICTY Convicts’ Reflections on Their Crimes in Early Release Decisions,” International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (2018): 349–71. 40. This section is derived, in part, from Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide. 41. Frédéric Mégret, “Practices of Stigmatization,” Law and Contemporary Problems 76 (2014): 310. 42. In recent interviews I conducted with Ongwen’s former LRA “colleagues,” as well as his family, people expressed frequent bafflement that Ongwen was the only LRA insurgency-related suspect on trial at the ICC. 43. R34, interview with author, August 2009, Musanze, Rwanda. 44. For an in-depth discussion of the extensive literature relating to the individualization versus collectivization of guilt, see Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, eds., Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). 45. Taner Akçam, The Young Turk’s Crimes against Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 137. 46. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Michael Joseph, 1986). 47. Mégret, “Practices of Stigmatization,” 290. 48. Mégret, “Practices of Stigmatization,” 300. 49. Prosecutor v. Samuel Hinga Norman, Moinina Fofana, and Allieu Kondewa. Case No. SCS 0314-I, “Opening Statement” (prosecution), Special Court for Sierra Leone, June 3, 2004, http://www.rscsl.org/Documents/Press/OTP/prosecutor-opening statement060304.pdf. 50. Leigh Payne, “Unsettling Accounts: Perpetrators’ Confessions in the Aftermath of State Violence and Armed Conflict,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, ed. Susanne Knittel and Zachary Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 2020), 138. 51. Lyndsey Stonebridge, “The Perpetrator Occult: Francis Bacon Paints Adolf Eichmann,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, nos. 2–3 (2011): 103. 52. Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 10, ed. L. Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 174–221. 53. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Exploration of Conscience (London: Vintage Books, 1983), 178.

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54. C06, interview with author, November 2008, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 55. Aaron T. Beck, Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence (New York: Harper, 2000). 56. R47, interview with author, September 2009, Nyamata, Rwanda. 57. R66, interview with author, October 2009, Kigali, Rwanda. 58. R66, interview. 59. Amy Simon, “The Modern Haman: Ghetto Writers’ Understanding of Holocaust Perpetrators,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, nos. 2–3 (2011): 139. 60. R44, interview with author, September 2009, Nyamata, Rwanda. 61. Charles Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner’s, 1902). 62. See, for example, Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide. 63. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 64. Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, 8th ed. (New York: Worth, 1999), 183. 65. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2013), 23. 66. Steven High, “Introduction,” in Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, ed. Steven High (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015), 18. 67. R37, interview with author, August 2009, Rwaza, Rwanda. 68. Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001). 69. Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide. 70. Gresham Sykes and David Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency,” American Sociological Review 22, no. 6 (1957): 231. 71. R36, interview with author, August 2009, Rwaza, Rwanda. 72. R04, interview with author, July 2009, Kigali Central Prison, Rwanda. 73. Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying (Frankfurt: Verlag Fischer, 2011), 82. 74. R32, interview with author, August 2009, Butare, Rwanda. 75. Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg, “Introduction: What Is the Story?,” in Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime, ed. Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 26. 76. In this one instance, my audio recorder was confiscated by a prison guard on entering the facility despite my letter of authorization. 77. Lee Ann Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (London: Routledge, 2018), 3. 78. Courser argues that researchers have ethnical obligations when “representing vulnerable subjects . . . [who] . . . are unable to represent themselves in writing.” G. Thomas Courser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), xii.

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79. See, for example, Yolande Bouka, “Collaborative Research as Structural Violence,” Political Violence at a Glance, July 12, 2018, https://politicalviolenceataglance .org/2018/07/12/collaborative-research-as-structural-violence/. 80. Catherine Baker, “The Frames We Use: Narratives, Ethnicity, and the Problem of Multiple Identities in Post-Conflict Histories [Bosnia-Herzegovina],” in Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, ed. Steven High (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015), 286. 81. Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research, 5–6. 82. Emma Vickers, “Unexpected Trauma in Oral History Interviewing,” Oral History Review 45, no. 1 (2019): 138–39. 83. Nigel Fielding, “Mediating the Message: Affinity and Hostility in Research on Sensitive Topics,” American Behavioral Scientist 33, no. 5 (1990): 608. 84. At Nuremberg, crimes against humanity required a nexus with aggressive war— meaning that only atrocities that could be connected to Nazi aggression fell within the jurisdiction of the court. The court, however, used a broad definition of nexus in order to incorporate many of the atrocities committed against civilians, particularly the genocide against the Jews, Roma, and Sinti. 85. United Nations General Assembly, “Resolutions Adopted on the Reports of the Sixth Committee 96: The Crime of Genocide,” December 11, 1946, https://www .refworld.org/docid/3b00f09753.html. Raphael Lemkin’s conception of genocide was equally rooted in the Armenian genocide and in the Holocaust. See Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, ed. Donna-Lee Frieze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 86. I am playing on the phrase “the past is a foreign country” from Leslie Poles Hartely, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 1. 87. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2004); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper, 1998); Lee-Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 88. Adams, “Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones,” 44. 89. Sartre, The Imaginary, 12.

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Kjell Anderson

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

Vict im s Eve r y w h e re , P e r p e t r a t o r s N o w h e re Lo c a t i n g a n d Ta l k i ng to P e r p e t r a t o r s i n Cam bodi a t I m ot H y W I L L I A m S

S

ince the seminal academic dispute between historians Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Christopher Browning in the early 1990s and in the aftermath of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, there has been a strong influx of research into perpetrators. Historians have cast their net wider and found all manner of new sources for looking at World War II and Holocaust perpetrators, social psychologists have integrated their research, and research on Rwandan perpetrators has burgeoned.1 Rwanda has proved particularly interesting as a site of research because it has been possible to speak with the actual perpetrators. This has significant advantages over relying on documents created in court cases or other criminal justice procedures, written testimonies by perpetrators such as diaries or memoires, or oral documentation such as secret recordings in prisoner of war camps.2 In Rwanda, researchers have been able to identify and interview hundreds of former génocidaires, talking to them about their motivations and the dynamics behind their participation in the “1994 genocide against the Tutsi.” Inspired by these developments, I have undertaken a research project to ascertain the motivations underlying participation in the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. From 1970 onward, civil war raged in the country on the fringes of the Vietnam War, with the Maoist-nationalist

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revolutionary forces of the Khmer Rouge taking control of the country from 1975 until they were toppled by Vietnamese forces in 1979. During this time, they instituted a system of totalitarian control, eradicating ethnic minorities, people who had served the previous regime, and increasingly, people they suspected of being internal enemies trying to undermine the revolution. As in other cases, it is hard to clearly delineate which individuals should be classed as perpetrators or, more specifically, what kinds of actions should count as perpetration. The most narrow definition would classify perpetrators only as the people who were members of killing units or militias who had the right and responsibility to kill people perceived to be enemies.3 A broader understanding of perpetrators—which underlies this study—understands those individuals who participated in the broader processes that led to the killing to be perpetrators too: for example, individuals who arrested and guarded the men and women who were later killed; local leaders who ordered arrests or killings; interrogators who elicited forced confessions; and group leaders who reported on antirevolutionary behavior of their group members. My project was inspired by research already conducted in Rwanda and also drew on methodological frameworks from other fields. However, I had to adapt my research design in the field because of an array of challenges that will be discussed in this chapter. While these challenges and opportunities are discussed specifically for the Cambodian case and refer to idiosyncrasies of looking for and interviewing former Khmer Rouge cadres, other ethnographic researchers may also be confronted by some of the challenges and opportunities when working in the field with other perpetrators of mass violence. This chapter’s purpose is not to explain why people participate in genocide or to delve into the self-perceptions of former Khmer Rouge in any substantive way but is instead to interrogate some of the methodological, conceptual, and ethical questions that emerged during this research project. First, I introduce the research project and its goals for the ethnographic fieldwork. Second, I present the ideal approach to data collection as was planned for the project, before subsequently discussing the methodological, conceptual, and ethical problems associated with the plan’s implementation. Finally, I offer an alternative approach to conducting such fieldwork, as was pragmatically applied while in the field. The Project: Testing a Conceptual Model with Cadres of the Khmer Rouge This section briefly introduces the underlying research project, thus allowing for critical reflection on fieldwork practices surrounding

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Timothy Williams

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perpetrator research. Prior to the fieldwork, I had developed a conceptual model on why people participate in genocide, drawing on theoretical literature and empirical studies on the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust. I planned to test the model empirically in the least likely case of Cambodia.4 The aim of this research endeavor was threefold. First, the project sought to gauge the complexities of perpetration, bringing together the experiences of a plethora of different actors to show how varying motivations can be. Second, it aimed to bring a systematic lens to previous research and attempt to categorize and model these various motivations. Third, the project sought to ascertain whether the motivations that lead to genocide perpetration are similar across different contexts and cultures or whether all cases offer differing, idiosyncratic responses to the question of why people participated in genocide. Taking on the developments in the literature on the Holocaust and the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and combining these with socialpsychological, sociological, and anthropological findings, I have developed an intercontextual model of why people participate in genocide. The so-called Complexity of Evil model differentiates between motivations as the impetus for action, facilitative factors that do not actually cause perpetration but make it easier for the individuals, and contextual conditions that create the genocidal context within which this participation occurs. Motivations can be focused on ingroup factors: that is, interactions within the perpetrator group, which include individuals being motivated to participate by obedience to authority, peer pressure, social conformity, taking on a role, and coercion. Conversely, outgroup-focused motivations are built on perceptions of the victim group and include emotions toward the victims such as fear, anger, or hatred as well as ideological reasons. Last, opportunistic motivations appeal to the perpetrators’ cost-benefit rationale and include incentives such as career aspirations, personal or political feuds, economic gain, status, the thrill of participation, and sadism. Facilitative factors include moral justification through legitimating ideologies and euphemistic language; moral disengagement through dehumanization of the victims or social, physical, and emotional distancing from the victims; the power of groups through the displacement or diffusion of responsibility in them, deindividuation and anonymity in this group, and the effects of a division of labor; and time-sensitive factors such as desensitization over time and the continuum of destruction and escalating commitments.5 With this model in the back of my mind, I embarked on fieldwork in Cambodia to find and interview former cadres of the Khmer Rouge, establish what had motivated them to join the Khmer Rouge, and why—in these positions— people participated in the regime’s genocidal violence. The aim was to relate individuals’ motivations back to the conceptual model and evaluate whether

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Cambodia supported or undermined the credibility of the model. As such, it was less about understanding precisely what individuals had or had not done but instead focused on the meanings their actions had for them and why they purported to have engaged in them. The Ideal Approach: Respondent-Driven Sampling In this section I provide a short sketch of the approach I had devised for conducting my fieldwork.6 Cambodia does not provide the ideal situation of Rwanda (from a perpetrator research perspective), where hundreds of thousands of accused and sentenced individuals could be found in prisons around the country, providing a large population of perpetrators whose legal guilt has been established. By contrast, in Cambodia there is a near absence of any transitional justice measures targeted at low-level perpetrators. While the hybrid United Nations-Cambodian tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), is a transitional justice institution that has identified alleged perpetrators and legally established their guilt, the tribunal has only sentenced three high-level individuals. It thus became necessary to identify perpetrators who had not been judicially processed. The first of two main problems inherent in this approach is that this made it considerably harder to find a randomized selection of perpetrators.7 Additionally, interviewing only sentenced individuals who pled guilty minimizes the incentives people have to lie, thus meaning that this other approach will necessitate an even more critical acceptance of interviewee statements.8 Without access to such a population of sentenced individuals, Cambodian perpetrators can be categorized as a “hidden population,” meaning that “first, no sampling frame exists, so the size and boundaries of the population are unknown; and second, there exist strong privacy concerns, because membership involves stigmatized or illegal behavior, leading individuals to refuse to cooperate, or give unreliable answers to protect their privacy.”9 To reliably identify as many former perpetrators within the Khmer Rouge as possible, the approach I chose was that of respondent-driven sampling (RDS).10 The plan was to begin the research project with around one dozen interviewees who had already been identified by my research assistant and translator Keo Duong as having been in roles strongly associated with the violence of the regime and part of the killing process, taking these as a seed group for further chain sampling. RDS stipulates that from here the interviewees are not asked to recommend people they know for interviewing (as is the case in snowballing) but instead

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Timothy Williams

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to approach their peers themselves and encourage them to come for interviews. In the original design of RDS, interviewees were given three vouchers for which they will be given a monetary compensation if their peers bring them and successfully complete an interview.11 The key advantages that RDS hopes to solve vis-à-vis traditional snowballing methods is that it reduces biases based on a nonrandom original sample by going through several iterations. Each iteration of referrals diversifies the sample more—although only assuming no segregation between various theoretically interesting subgroups within the population. Further, recruitment through peers means that there is not just the incentive of conducting the interview but also peer support asking people to participate in the study. Third, it solves the problem of “masking,” in which people do not want to “unmask” their peers and reveal that they are a member of the target group. Because they do not need to name their contacts to the researcher but instead approach them themselves and ask if they would be willing participate, they retain the anonymity of their contacts until the moment those contacts decide to participate in an interview themselves. Last, by allowing only three referrals from each individual, the sample will not grow disproportionately from individual respondents with large personal networks (which exist when taking unlimited lists in snowballing).12 With this approach, I hoped to be able to recruit a large number of Khmer Rouge cadres who would ultimately be an approximately random selection of the population; I planned to implement this RDS in two distinct areas to draw random samples in both and compare them.13 I expected people to thus be more willing to recommend other people and that those recruited individuals would bring with them significant amounts of trust as they had been recruited by peers who had already been interviewed. Finally, this approach would have allowed for a relatively reliable identification of perpetrators as well as nonperpetrators. Methodological Challenges: Lack of Social Ties and Taboo of Speaking about Violence This section looks into the various methodological, conceptual, and ethical challenges that arose from the methodological premises of my ideal approach. First, and as discussed in the previous section, it was not possible to draw a randomized sample of the population of Khmer Rouge cadres as no lists exist due to the lack of judicial dealing with the past. The consequences of this were that it would not be as easy to generalize from the sample (which would thus possibly be biased) to the wider population of perpetrators. Thus I chose to implement RDS in two target areas: one that was a former stronghold

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and another that was not. This focus on two areas was important because RDS as a “method is not suitable for drawing national samples” because respondents must have geographic proximity in order to have contact with each other and thus share ties.14 However, and this constitutes the second major methodological issue, these shared ties were the Achilles heel of the project because when asked to recruit further former cadres of the Khmer Rouge for interview, most interviewees stated that they did not know anyone whom I or they could approach. In the context of rural interviews, this meant that while I had hoped people could tell me the name and village of other alleged perpetrators, for the most part interviewees did not know where former cadres lived: the person had moved, but they did not know where to or they had forgotten. Social relations did not need to be tight but did necessitate an awareness of the person’s past and their current location. They explained that they had no more contact with people whom they had known during that time. Methodologically, it is irrelevant whether people stated this as a cover for not wanting to give me further contacts or whether it was genuinely because they did not know anyone. Only very few people were able to recruit others for the study, mostly by telling me the name of the person and where to find them. This lack of referrals meant I could not implement RDS. Also, because people decided not to contact others themselves but instead gave me their names, the idea of allowing the respondents to exert a degree of peer support in encouraging others to engage in an interview also did not work. Two issues can be discussed in more detail here. To begin, it is important to reflect on whether it is actually plausible that these people had no further contacts who could have been recruited as respondents. Alternatively, they could just have been saying this to mask their contacts’ identities as former perpetrators. In my interviewees’ narratives, it became clear that most were recruited to the Khmer Rouge from their home villages but were subsequently deployed to work in a succession of different units (normally coming continuously closer to the locus of violence), which would take them to various parts of their region, if not all over the whole country. When the Khmer Rouge regime lost its control over the whole country after the invasion of the Vietnamese in January 1979, many of my interviewees fled to the Thai border for a short time before returning to their home villages, or they returned immediately to their home villages. In the chaos of the retreat to the border or the departure to their home villages, many interviewees set off on their own, and it is credible that people have had no contact with any of their comrades from during the Khmer Rouge period. Also, during the time of the Khmer Rouge, the regime had very strict control over all facets of daily life, and there was an extensive network of internal spies who would report on people who committed anything that

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Timothy Williams

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could be construed to be counterrevolutionary. My interviewees reported that this meant that they did not converse much with their comrades and thus did not build strong social ties with them. For example, one former security center guard from Kampong Chhnang province told me that “they spied on each other within the group. . . . I could not even ask other people anything. If I did, that person would go to tell the higher and the higher would ask me who ordered me to ask this question. I would have made a mistake.” This lack of social cohesion within the units of the Khmer Rouge cadres means that it is also less surprising that they did not attempt to retain contact with each other after the regime. Altogether, it is plausible that my respondents did not have any existing contacts to whom they could refer me. Only very seldomly were people able to name one or two people who had also been Khmer Rouge cadres in the positions interesting to me, but when they approached them on our behalf, none consented to be interviewed. There is also a second issue regarding why people were not enthusiastic about referring people themselves. Key to RDS is the researcher’s intention to provide a double incentive for participating in the interview: being rewarded monetarily for the successful completion of the interview as well as for bringing further respondents forward.15 This approach was adapted for this project, as compensation for a respondent’s time has been argued to be ethical by anthropologists, although monetary payment for interviews remains controversial in the social sciences.16 I opted to offer interviewees no monetary reward to avoid introducing more biases and predisposition to give answers that the interviewee expected me to want to hear; this is particularly virulent in the Cambodian context in which, culturally, people attempt to answer strategically to not offend their conversation partner. At the end of the interview, however, to fulfill cultural expectations of gratitude when it could no longer influence their responses, I gave the respondent a small gift as a token of my appreciation, mostly cans of condensed milk. Finally, it was not possible in interviews to raise and discuss all issues that were important for the project. The interviewees spoke openly and frankly about their lives before the Khmer Rouge, how they came to be cadres (recruitment or volunteering themselves), what their everyday lives were like during the regime and the tasks they were involved in, as well as the downfall of the regime and their lives in the aftermath and thereafter. The sole topic that remained difficult to confront was, unsurprisingly yet frustratingly for the concrete project, the topic of violence and its use during the regime. Thus it became impossible to follow the approach I had originally devised in which I would talk to them directly about this topic, talking to them instead about “abstract third people.” While this opened people up to speaking about violence, it meant

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that it became impossible to differentiate between those dynamics and motivations in which they were referring to themselves (under the cover of speaking about others) and those that were for certain specific others. As a result, it was no longer possible to take these insights and create various perpetrator motivation profiles as had been originally planned. Instead it was only possible to talk about motivations for, and dynamics of, participation in the broader processes of violence more generally. Conceptual Challenges: Perpetrators Who See Themselves as Victims When approaching perpetrators in the Cambodian context, another key difference to other cases emerges: the fact that people who are former cadres of the Khmer Rouge for the most part do not see themselves as perpetrators but instead claim to be victims.17 They did not claim to be victims of the postconflict transitional justice process, as in the Rwandan case, but genuinely victims of the regime itself.18 My interviewees spoke of being hungry and getting only very small rations with very little nutritious value, of having to work very long and hard days, and of getting little sleep and being constantly exhausted. For example, a former security center guard and interrogator from Kampong Chhnang province said that “they did not care about how hard and tired we were.” All interviewees spoke of also being constantly afraid of the regime and that they themselves would be accused of being an internal enemy for having made a mistake, and thus being arrested, interrogated, and ultimately killed. This constant fear was underlined by frequent statements that they were “fearful for their security,” and indeed, most interviewees lost family members during the time. One woman cadre of the Khmer Rouge from Pailin province explained these fears like this: “I did not understand anything; I was just worried about my life. When they said, “No gain for keeping, no loss for weeding out,” I thought about myself and when it would be my turn. I was worried about my security. Even after I got married, I told my husband that if he was arrested, please not to name me; and if I was arrested, I would not name you. If you died, you died alone; don’t die together.” Thus, the interviewees self-categorized as victims—a categorization that is probably quite apt, although from my perspective they should also be categorized as perpetrators, given that they all carry some responsibility for the implementation of the regime’s totalitarian and genocidal policies.19 What is more striking than their self-categorization as victims is that they are also commonly seen as such by their neighbors.20 Of the fifty-eight people I interviewed, only one spoke of any form of targeting and blame leveled at him by

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Timothy Williams

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members of his community. This is also supported by a survey among victims of the Khmer Rouge: respondents were asked to (dis)agree with the statement “Low-level former Khmer Rouge were just following orders and are also victims of Ângkar.”21 Only about one in six respondents disagreed with this statement (17.3 percent), while over half agreed (53.7 percent), indicating that a majority of victims of the Khmer Rouge afforded low-level former Khmer Rouge a status as victims too.22 Conceptually, there is no reason why an individual cannot be seen as both a perpetrator and a victim, but what is difficult for the researcher in this context when trying to apply a framework such as RDS or simple snowballing is how to describe to the interviewees what one is looking for in other respondents that one wishes them to put one in contact with.23 Naturally, I did not use the word “perpetrator” during the interviews with these former cadres of the Khmer Rouge but instead spoke about their roles and their tasks without using this normatively charged word; and it was by keeping this open mind that it became obvious that they actually saw themselves as victims. When then trying to ask for other people within the hidden population of perpetrators, it was not possible for me to ask for “other perpetrators” without them feeling that this is how I (mis)categorized them myself. I could also not ask for referrals to “other victims” as I would have received a mass of referrals to any other member of society during that time. The route I chose was to ask for referrals to “other members of the Khmer Rouge who also came into contact with violence in some form.” The idea was that their status as perpetrators—in the broad understanding underlying this study—could then be verified during the interview by hearing what actions the person had engaged in, if I were to have had any referrals. While for RDS it is specified that it is important that “the trait defining membership in the population must be verified objectively, lest interview and recruitment incentives motivate some respondents to claim falsely that they are members of the population,” given the nature of being a Khmer Rouge cadre it is unlikely that someone would voluntarily take on this identity without it being true.24 As such, my interviewees did not need to adhere to the label of perpetrator, but my analytical usage of the term to describe them as such draws on the actions that they told me they had engaged in during the regime. Ethical Challenges: Physical and Psychological Safety of the Interviewee and Confidentiality Several ethical challenges were thus raised by this ideal approach and by its implementation. First, and tying into the previous point made on

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conceptual challenges, it could be construed as problematic to be asking people for referrals to other people whom the project sees as perpetrators, albeit they were not seen this way by the interviewees. Thus, my respondents were incriminating their contacts even though during the open interview conversation their narrative of being a victim had not been countered. Thus, people possibly did not feel the necessity of “masking,” not “protecting friends by not referring them.”25 On the other hand, if the self-categorization is questioned (allowing them to not unwittingly unmask people), this could have significant negative consequences for the emotional or psychological state of the interviewee as he or she is confronted with guilt or even trauma regarding what he or she has done. To protect respondents as much as possible, I did not challenge their self-categorizations, thus allowing them to possibly, inadvertently “unmask” an acquaintance. This is the less problematic option, as I went to great lengths to secure the anonymity of the respondents, hence not having any legal or other consequences for the “unmasking.” An important principle when discussing the ethical conduct of fieldwork is that of “do no harm.”26 While the first scholars to talk about harm conceptualized this in the context of fieldwork primarily as an issue of confidentiality, today there is a much broader understanding of the harm researchers can cause in the context of ethnographic fieldwork.27 The presence of researchers in a politicized (post)conflict setting can change the incentive structures underlying ongoing violence or the forms of dealing with the past.28 Furthermore, their presence can negatively impact the safety of the individuals they are engaging with, waken false expectations by communities who hope for some relief from (the aftermath of ) their conflict through the researcher, or retraumatize individuals through the interviews they give to researchers.29 Beyond this, other participants can be emotionally burdened by sharing very private information.30 Further issues pertain to the misuse of one’s results by conducting contracted research and issues of confidentiality and data protection.31 It is crucial to avoid harm to the researcher and any research assistants or translators.32 An approach that takes these “do no harm” principles seriously should be seen as important as a normative guiding principle and as a minimum standard for ethical research.33 Of particular gravity for perpetrator research in the context of interviewing former Khmer Rouge cadres were the ethical issues of the potential danger to the safety of the interviewee, potential retraumatization, and issues of confidentiality. First, given the acts in which potential interviewees were involved and the general violent and oppressive nature of the Khmer Rouge regime, it could be expected that families of victims of the regime would react to the knowledge that someone is a former Khmer Rouge by targeting them for private vengeance. However, given that society at large predominantly sees them also as victims

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Timothy Williams

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of the regime, there is little sense that revenge is necessary at a general level. At a personal level, the fact that people were moved around a lot during the regime in various postings also means that most people do not know about the actual acts that their neighbors who were Khmer Rouge cadres committed; moreover, as these people were mostly working in other areas, the former cadres are not confronted with the relatives of their original victims. Thus, there is relatively little danger to the safety of the Khmer Rouge cadres being interviewed. Nonetheless, when trying to locate potential interviewees in their villages, I never mentioned the context of the research project nor their status as former Khmer Rouge cadres in order not to ignite any potential problems between my interviewee and other members of the community. Second, and more relevant given interviewees’ self-identification as victims, is the danger of causing trauma or retraumatization during the interviews as respondents discuss in detail their actions during the time but also the many experiences they had. To avoid this potential negative outcome, I was very careful in my conduct of the interviews and attempted to allow the respondent as much control over the conversation as possible. When I did steer the conversation and broach new subjects, I was attentive to the interviewee’s emotional reaction, and if any sign of distress emerged, I offered to change the topic or terminate the interview. Only once in all the interviews did a respondent seem to be uncomfortable and emotionally moved; however, he asked to continue talking and his distress ceased very soon after as he continued telling me about his experiences. Third, issues of confidentiality were an important concern during fieldwork given that the ECCC, the hybrid Cambodian–United Nations tribunal charged with judicially dealing with the Khmer Rouge past, were still investigating in Cambodia. While it is highly unlikely that my interviewees would be investigated and prosecuted themselves, given that they were relatively lowlevel cadres, it is very plausible that they could be called on to testify in court during the proceedings. Given that this should be their own decision and that my research should not alert the court to their existence, I went to great lengths to retain the anonymity of my interviewees, never personally knowing their names and saving all audio and written records under unidentifiable codes. It is quite plausible that my interviewees could have felt nervous about the ECCC, even if the actual threat of their prosecution was nonexistent. However, most former Khmer Rouge cadres’ self-ascription of victimhood reduces any fear of prosecution and even leads to demands for more prosecution of high-level individuals, who are seen as being solely responsible. Informed consent is the go-to method for attempting to put the interviewerinterviewee relationship on an equal and ethical footing and for raising the

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issue of confidentiality.34 I made use of the instrument of informed consent to inform the interviewees about the project, what would happen with the results, and my precautions regarding confidentiality as well as to emphasize that they were in control of the interview and had the right to decide what they did and did not want to talk about. An Alternative Approach: Individual Identification and Violent “Abstract Third People” My final approach was considerably less sophisticated than had been originally planned, but it allowed me nonetheless to find, approach, and talk to people who had been cadres of the Khmer Rouge, and in this way I had come into contact with the machinery of violence that the regime introduced. In the absence of ties between former cadres, the quasi-randomized selection process hoped for with RDS was not possible, thus exposing me to all the problems of trying to identify members of a hidden population to interview and then winning them over for an interview. I resorted to a “convenience sample,” combining several approaches to finding interviewees, still starting with my translator’s contact group but then expanding these by lists of previous interviewees by other researchers, an interviewee list from a publication, and also the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), which has conducted several thousand interviews about the Khmer Rouge.35 I was able to then go through these many individuals and, for some provinces, identify people who had been members of militias, former commune and district chiefs, or on staff in administrative units: in essence, individuals who had been in positions in which they could have plausibly participated in the regime’s violence. Some local, nongovernmental organizations also helped put me in touch with individual former cadres with whom they had previously worked; while it is not always clear how they identified their beneficiaries, for the most part it seems to have rested on personal connections built up in certain locations where they worked. This approach did not allow me any kind of randomization and was tinged with selection biases, including a bias toward people easily accessible by other organizations and individuals, such as vocal people who had previously been prepared to speak to outsiders, younger cadres who are still alive, and so on. While the absence of enduring social ties between former Khmer Rouge was methodologically impractical, that absence is empirically interesting as it gives insight into important social dynamics at the time, and the direct aftermath,

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of the regime even today. The weak social ties speak not only to the recruitment and reassignment strategies of the Khmer Rouge that saw people transferred regularly and seldom assigned to work in their own communities but also to the climate of fear that was created through internal purges and mutual denunciations. The chaotic breakup of the regime and people’s subsequent movement to their home communities without the possibility or will to keep in touch with each other is a testament to the weak nature of social ties under the regime. At the same time, it becomes very obvious that stronger ties were not necessary to allow the regime to work and the horrendous violence of the Khmer Rouge to be wreaked, but other organizational mechanisms functioned instead. On a more practical level, this approach did not allow me to transfer trust from one interviewee to another, as is often hoped for in RDS or snowballing methods. Also, I was obviously not able to identify and trace in-depth social networks between several cadres of the Khmer Rouge or look in more depth at the dynamics within units of the Khmer Rouge from multiple perspectives. However, this approach did allow me to talk to people from a very broad range of positions within the Khmer Rouge hierarchy and across ten different provinces, thus providing me with a broad geographical spread. This would not have been possible with my original approach. Thus, while not allowing me to trace the social dynamics in two specific areas, the new approach enabled me to at least identify a significant number of individuals who were diverse by geographical origin and role in the Khmer Rouge and thus approach them independently of each other. Having identified the individuals whom I felt would be appropriate for the project, I approached them, and a majority agreed to let me interview them. As mentioned, the resulting interviews were conducted in a relatively open fashion to best understand interviewees’ experiences prior to and during the Khmer Rouge regime. While I was interested in talking to them about their experiences during the Lon Nol regime (and before this), as well as their everyday lives during the Khmer Rouge, my core interest was in investigating their motivations for joining the Khmer Rouge and their subsequent involvement in violence. It soon became clear that in very few situations were people going to honestly admit to their participation in violence, as the incentives—the relevant subjective threat of judicial reprisal (objectively nonexistent) or social repercussions, and particularly the acute and very real consequence of losing face to me and my translator—were clearly stacked against such an admission. While I did periodically ask people about their own participation in violence, this almost always led to denial, even if from their previous explanations it was plausible that they may have participated, at least under duress.

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Not being able to ask directly about their own motivations and dynamics of joining in violence, I opted to talk about “abstract third people” as proxies for the interviewees. In this way, I hoped that they would be able to, first, talk honestly about their own experiences without the danger of losing face in the interview, and second, relate to me their experiences and impressions from conversations with other cadres. While most people started speaking about people using violence only in reaction to orders and in the face of coercion should they be disobeyed, a strategy that obviously attempts to minimize personal responsibility, in deeper conversations about participation in violence, a whole host of further motivations emerged. For example, various opportunistic motivations were discussed, such as better access to food, more rest, easier career progression, or the hope of more security (even if mostly unfounded). Interviewees’ ideological frameworks and a genuine belief in the danger posed by internal enemies also sometimes provided a framework within which people came to participate. There are two downsides to this “abstract third people” approach. First, it would have been better to have had the information about these stories and dynamics of how people came to participate directly about themselves rather than about others. While I attempted to gauge the veracity of what people were telling me by detailed questioning, it cannot be completely ruled out that some of these stories were fabricated, though this is also possible when talking about oneself. Second, a further problem with this approach is that I cannot always differentiate which motivations belong to which “abstract third person” when interviewees referred to multiple people and multiple motivations but did not specify names to maintain people’s anonymity. This resulted in my inability to analyze people’s motivations as I had planned, as I could not cluster them systematically and create a series of “profiles.” Conclusion The title of this chapter, “Victims Everywhere, Perpetrators Nowhere,” is relevant to several of the themes discussed here. First, and most obviously, this refers to the numerical dominance of people not associated with the Khmer Rouge vis-à-vis former cadres as well as the fact that they are not readily identifiable as such to the researcher. Hence the necessity of a methodology like RDS to find the members of this hidden population. More interestingly, though, I chose the title to hint at the situation in Cambodia whereby society at large and former cadres of the Khmer Rouge more specifically do not see these former cadres as perpetrators but allow them to classify themselves as

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victims, rendering it conceptually and ethically difficult to ask for referrals. The title ultimately also refers to my interviewees, who saw nothing but victims and claimed that they had no more contact with other former cadres. This chapter has not tried to develop a new methodology for approaching perpetrators, nor has it provided solutions to the many problems involved in qualitative fieldwork on this topic. It has been considerably more modest in its goals, presenting my planned, ideal approach to fieldwork and the many methodological, conceptual, and ethical challenges that frustrated it. RDS as a methodology would have solved the problems of not having a clearly defined population of perpetrators to choose from for interviews. However, this approach was undermined by a lack of social ties between former cadres of the Khmer Rouge as well as conceptual and ethical problems about their self-identification as victims. Further ethical challenges that came up in the course of my chosen alternative approach included the potential danger to the safety of the interviewee, possible retraumatization, and issues of confidentiality, which I discussed along with my mitigation strategies. In the end, I put forward not a proposal for new best practice on these issues but my own tentative ways of dealing with the challenges I experienced in the field. This chapter is thus designed to stimulate discussions on some core methodological, conceptual, and ethical issues, although it is clear that further research is still needed to systematically improve our approaches to studying perpetrators. Notes 1. For World War II and the Holocaust, see Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1996); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011); Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2006); and Harald Welzer, Sönke Neitzel, and Christian Gudehus, eds., Der Führer War Wieder Viel Zu Human, Viel Zu Gefühlvoll (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2011). For social psychology research, see James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For Rwanda, see Luke Fletcher, “Turning Interahamwe: Individual and Community Choices in the Rwandan Genocide, ” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 1 (2007): 24–48; Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Omar McDoom, “Antisocial Capital:

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A Profile of Rwandan Genocide Perpetrators’ Social Networks,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 5 (2014): 865–93; Omar McDoom, “Who Killed in Rwanda’s Genocide? Micro-space, Social Influence and Individual Participation in Intergroup Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 4 (2013): 453–67; and Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 2. Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten; Welzer, Täter; Welzer, Neitzel, and Gudehus, Der Führer War Wieder Viel Zu Human, Viel Zu Gefühlvoll. 3. Christian Gudehus, “Violence as Action,” in Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Dynamics, Motivations and Concepts, ed. Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 36–57; Timothy Williams, “Thinking beyond Perpetrators, Bystanders, Heroes: A Typology of Action in Genocide,” in Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Dynamics, Motivations and Concepts, ed. Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 17–35. 4. A least likely, extreme case was chosen in which the theory is unlikely to hold as it does in other more typical cases. Thus, if the theory does unfold its explanatory power even in this case, then it will update our confidence in the theory very strongly, a Bayesian logic similar to so-called smoking-gun tests in the process tracing literature. Cambodia is such a least likely, extreme case, as it is very different from the cases of the Holocaust and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda from which the model was developed, presenting a very different cultural context, with violence not against an “ethnic other” but against members of one’s own group; furthermore, the political context and the Maoist ideological foundations underpinning the killing make the case fundamentally different. Stephan van Evera, Guide to Methods of Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 31–32. 5. Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020). 6. The fieldwork was conducted between July 2014 and January 2015, with a preparatory visit in February 2014. 7. Straus, Order of Genocide, 99. 8. Straus, Order of Genocide, 99–100. 9. Douglas Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling: A New Approach to the Study of Hidden Populations,” Social Problems 44, no. 2 (1997): 174. 10. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling”; Douglas Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling II: Deriving Valid Population Estimates from ChainReferral Samples of Hidden Populations,” Social Problems 49, no. 1 (2002): 11–34. 11. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling.” 12. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling.” For an impressive application within the field of peace and conflict studies, see Alexandra Scacco’s study of mobilization during riots in Nigeria. Alexandra Scacco, Who Riots? Explaining Individual Participation in Ethnic Violence (New York: Columbia University, 2010). 13. One area was to be a longtime Khmer Rouge stronghold; another, an area that after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 had been taken by the invading Vietnamese and thus had had very different postregime experiences.

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14. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling,” 180. 15. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling,” 197. 16. For anthropologists, see “Statement on Ethics: Section 7. Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships,” American Anthropological Association, http://ethics.americananthro.org/ethics-statement-7-maintain-respectful-and-ethical -professional-relationships/. For the social sciences, see Kristine Höglund and Magnus Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation,” in Understanding Peace Research: Methods and Challenges, ed. Kristine Höglund and Magnus Öberg (London: Routledge, 2011), 197. 17. Timothy Williams, “Perpetrator-Victims: How Universal Victimhood in Cambodia Impacts Transitional Justice Measures,” in Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling, ed. Nanci Adler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 194–212. 18. Erin Jessee, Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2017). 19. For a broader discussion, see Timothy Williams, “Agency, Responsibility, and Culpability: The Complexity of Roles and Self-Representations of Perpetrators,” Journal of Perpetrator Research 2, no. 1 (2018): 39–64. 20. Williams, “Perpetrator-Victims.” 21. Ângkar is the name of the organization of the Khmer Rouge that held totalitarian power during the Khmer Rouge regime. 22. Timothy Williams, Julie Bernath, Boravin Tann, and Somaly Kum, Justice and Reconciliation for the Victims of the Khmer Rouge? Victim Participation in Cambodia’s Transitional Justice Process (Marburg, Germany: Center for Conflict Studies; Phnom Penh: Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law; and Bern: Swisspeace, 2018), 56. 23. Erin Baines, “Complex Political Perpetrators: Reflections on Dominic Ongwen,” Journal of Modern African Studies 47, no. 2 (2009): 163–91. 24. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling.” 25. Heckathorn, “Respondent-Driven Sampling,” 175. 26. H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira, 2006), 223; Karen Brounéus, “In-Depth Interviewing: The Process, Skill and Ethics of Interviews in Peace Research,” in Understanding Peace Research: Methods and Challenges, ed. Kristine Höglund and Magnus Öberg (London: Routledge, 2011), 141; Susanne Buckley-Zistel, “‘Ich Bin Dann Mal Weg,’” Zeitschrift Für Friedens- Und Konfliktforschung 1, no. 2 (2012): 315–23; Jonathan Goodhand, “Research in Conflict Zones,” Forced Migration Review 8, no. 4 (2000): 12–16; Höglund and Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation,” 195; Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” Qualitative Sociology 29 (2006): 373–86. 27. For early conceptualization of harm, see Joan Cassell, “Ethical Principles for Conducting Fieldwork,” American Anthropologist 82, no. 1 (1980): 31. 28. Goodhand, “Research in Conflict Zones,” 12. 29. On issues of safety, see Brounéus, “In-Depth Interviewing,” 143; Kristine Eck, “Survey Research in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies,” in Understanding Peace

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Research: Methods and Challenges, ed. Kristine Höglund and Magnus Öberg (London: Routledge, 2011), 174; Goodhand, “Research in Conflict Zones,” 12. On wakening false expectations, see Goodhand, “Research in Conflict Zones,” 14. And on retraumatizing individuals, see Brounéus, “In-Depth Interviewing,” 142; Eck, “Survey Research in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies,” 173; Goodhand, “Research in Conflict Zones,” 14; Höglund and Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation,” 195; and Anthony Zwi et al., “Placing Ethics in the Center,” Global Public Health 1, no. 3 (2006): 267. 30. Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology, 223. 31. On contracted research, see Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, “Ethics,” in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed. Bernard H. Russell and Clarence C. Gravlee, 2nd ed. (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 139. On issues of confidentiality, see Brounéus, “In-Depth Interviewing,” 142; Eck, “Survey Research in Conflict and PostConflict Societies,” 178–79; Fluehr-Lobban, “Ethics,” 140; Goodhand, “Research in Conflict Zones,” 13–14; Höglund and Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation,” 196; Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” 381; and Zwi et al., “Placing Ethics in the Center,” 267. 32. Brounéus, “In-Depth Interviewing,” 142; Buckley-Zistel, “‘Ich Bin Dann Mal Weg’”; Eck, “Survey Research in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies,” 178–79; Kristine Höglund and Magnus Öberg, eds., Understanding Peace Research: Methods and Challenges (London: Routledge, 2011), 9; Höglund and Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation,” 197. 33. Fluehr-Lobban, “Ethics,” 137; Ulrike Krause, “Ethische Überlegungen Zur Feldforschung” (Conflict Studies Working Papers, Phillips-Universität Marburg, 2016), https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/es/2019/0015/pdf/ccs-wp-20.pdf. 34. Eck, “Survey Research in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies,” 174; FluehrLobban, “Ethics”; Höglund and Öberg, “Improving Information Gathering and Evaluation,” 196; Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” 379–81. 35. This is not uncommon in conflict situations. See Eck, “Survey Research in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies,” 171.

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

S e e in g Mon s te rs , H e a r in g Vi cti m s T h e P o li t i c s o f P er p etr ati on i n P o s t g e n o c i de Rw anda ERIN jESSEE

I

n 2007 and 2008 I conducted eight months of oral historical and ethnographic fieldwork in Rwanda, with the goal of analyzing particular forms of symbolic violence that had occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. From April to July 1994, an estimated eight hundred thousand civilians, most of whom were members of the nation’s Tutsi minority population, were murdered by extremists affiliated with the nation’s Hutu majority population.1 To successfully prosecute individuals for the crime of genocide, defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention as the attempt to annihilate, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, prosecutors associated with international criminal courts and tribunals are required to prove the accused acted with genocidal intent, or dolus specialis. This means prosecutors must prove that the accused demonstrated the intent to commit genocide (the mens rea or mental element) that then translated into criminal acts (the actus reus or physical crime). Recognized crimes include killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions intended to bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.2 During my previous work as a forensic archaeologist specialized in the exhumation of mass graves resulting from genocide and other mass human

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rights violations, I had conversed with several prosecutors who bemoaned genocidal intent as the single greatest impediment to their ability to successfully prosecute genocide as a crime under international law. With these conversations in mind, it seemed natural to investigate whether it might be possible, using a combination of ethnographic, oral historical, and forensic archaeological methods, to find ways to more clearly and convincingly demonstrate genocidal intent. I settled on a feature common to many genocides: namely, the comparatively rare but nonetheless meaningful acts of symbolic violence through which some perpetrators inscribed their victims’ bodies in a manner that they felt befitted the victims’ perceived status as members of an unwanted national, ethnic, racial, or religious community. While I could find some discussion of different forms of symbolic violence that occurred during the genocide in Rwanda through newspaper articles, trial transcripts, and forensic reports, it quickly became apparent that I would need to conduct interviews to gain a clear understanding of how civilians interpreted the violence: whether they perceived certain forms of violence as inherently genocidal or as communicating some other form of criminal intent or purpose, for example. I established an interdisciplinary methodology for probing the deeper cultural and political meanings associated with particular categories of symbolic violence that occurred during the genocide in Rwanda. To inform this study, I decided to combine ethnographic research with multiple life history and thematic interviews with Rwandan survivors, bystanders, and officials as well as génocidaires—perpetrators of the genocide. I sought out génocidaires’ perspectives for two reasons. First, it seemed unethical to place the “narrative burden” of giving testimony related to the genocide solely on survivors and bystanders, many of whom faced significant mental and physical health challenges in the postgenocide period that could be exacerbated by spending long periods of time talking about their experiences of genocide.3 This is not to say that génocidaires have been spared similar mental and physical health challenges, or that they should not be regarded with the same degree of empathy as other interviewees—indeed, as I will discuss at length in this chapter, many of the génocidaires I interviewed exhibited anxiety, paranoia, and emotional distress in discussing the genocide and their subsequent imprisonment, suggesting they too had been deeply and negatively affected by the violence they had enacted as well as their experiences of Rwanda’s postgenocide transitional justice system. However, to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of genocide, it is important for perpetrators to share in the burden of speaking about their experiences, in addition to survivors and bystanders, wherever it is possible to gain access to their accounts. Second, I recognized that it was important to consider the experiences of génocidaires, in conversation with the experiences of survivors and other

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cohorts, to gain insight into how different parties to the conflict make sense of the genocide, and Rwandan history more generally, in the postgenocide period. This is particularly relevant as survivors and bystanders may not fully comprehend the various factors that motivated perpetrators’ actions surrounding periods of genocide, for example, or may not have been party to specific details regarding the planning and inciting of genocide in their communities. In these instances, perpetrators are perhaps better positioned than most to shed light on their crimes, even though their narratives are frequently “laced with deceptive information, disingenuous denials of culpability, and dubious assertions about their political motivations.”4 As such, much can be learned from engaging with génocidaires’ narratives. However, the process of conducting oral historical research among Rwanda’s génocidaires—and indeed other perpetrator communities—is fraught with challenges. In particular, I frequently found myself caught between official and popular perceptions of génocidaires as monsters and genocidal ideologues, which circulated both within and beyond Rwanda, and the intimate narratives—often dominated by assertions of victimhood—that emerged during multiple life history and thematic interviews with the twenty génocidaires who ultimately consented to participate in my research. Most of the génocidaires I interviewed consistently presented themselves as victims of political, social, and historical injustices and made allegations of illegal imprisonment, torture, forced confessions, and unfair trials, even as they acknowledged their own—often minimized—criminal actions during the genocide. However, engaging with the resulting narratives of injustice posed critical ethical, legal, political, and personal challenges for my research. Given the crimes of which these génocidaires have been convicted, is it appropriate to discuss the ways in which they might also be victims? And what are the potential consequences of doing so? These questions are particularly salient given that engagement in any meaningful way with génocidaires’ narratives can place researchers at risk of being identified as suspected political subversives (igipinga) by the Rwandan government and its supporters, impacting researchers’ ability to disseminate the outcomes of their research, minimize harm for their participants, and ensure ongoing access in Rwanda.5 Hearing Monsters: The Politics of Perpetration in Postgenocide Rwanda To gain access to convicted génocidaires, I applied to Rwanda’s Ministry of Internal Security (MININTER) for a permit to conduct research

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in the prisons—a process that was made mercifully straightforward owing to my research assistant’s contacts in the government. My credentials were thoroughly checked, but the officials involved were not openly concerned about my proposed project. My intended research interests were not at odds with the government’s interests related to the genocide, and as a young Canadian woman and graduate student, I was regarded as malleable—a perception I encouraged by practicing full transparency regarding my research interests and inviting government gatekeepers to provide feedback on any elements of my proposal or sample questionnaires that they thought might “create problems.”6 As I have discussed elsewhere, postgenocide Rwanda constitutes a “highly politicized research setting” in which the government often seeks, at times aggressively, to control how people speak about the genocide and other events in the nation’s past. Anthropologist Jennie Burnet—among other scholars—has commented on how the Rwandan government has created a “shibboleth of genocide” that permits people to speak publicly about their experiences of the genocide only in terms that uphold the dichotomous official narrative in which Tutsi are victims and Hutu are perpetrators.7 To this end, my initial meetings with government gatekeepers were often marked with warnings that by seeking out the narratives of génocidaires or other likely political subversives—a term that they often applied to ordinary rural Rwandans—I would be exposing myself to genocide ideology, lies, and manipulations that could mislead my research findings. Once had I acquired a permit from MININTER, I then arranged meetings with the directors of the prisons in which I was interested in conducting interviews. These meetings too were often marked with expressions of concern, and in one instance astonishment, that a young woman such as myself was interested in speaking to “these horrible génocidaires” whom the director argued were “beyond rehabilitation.”8 Furthermore, I was warned repeatedly that should I offend them during our interactions, many génocidaires were entirely capable of having members of their personal networks attack me. As evidence of this, officials often referenced the allegedly commonplace murders of survivors who testified against alleged génocidaires before gacaca—an indigenous Rwandan dispute resolution mechanism that was reinvented after the genocide to address the nearly two million cases of genocide-related crimes committed by Rwandan civilians.9 They assured me that such attacks were rife in Rwanda, even though they were rarely reported in the media.10 These impressions were further reinforced by the manner in which génocidaires were typically portrayed in Rwandan and international media accounts, which seemed to routinely portray génocidaires as psychopathic monsters, lunatics who attributed their criminal actions to possession by the devil, or

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ideologues blinded by anti-Tutsi hatred, among other sensationalist stereotypes. This tendency is particularly evident in the media accounts pertaining to female génocidaires, who often endured enhanced stigmatization related to the fact that by participating in acts of extreme physical violence, they transgressed Rwandan gender norms that dictate the appropriate behavior of women whether in times of peace or political upheaval.11 Approaching Génocidaires: Ethics and Methodology amid Complex Political Perpetrators Despite the negative perceptions that surrounded génocidaires, Rwandan officials allowed me to proceed with my research, and the prison directors I contacted did not hesitate to connect me with convicted génocidaires who had taken on leadership roles within their respective prisons by preparing their fellow génocidaires to have their cases tried before gacaca.12 I then asked these gacaca representatives to serve as intermediaries to help me identify convicted génocidaires—both men and women—within the prison who might be willing to participate in my research project. We then arranged preliminary meetings with each potential participant in a small office just inside the prisons’ main gates. These preliminary meetings focused on introducing potential participants to the research project and giving them ample opportunity to ask questions about my qualifications and the overall purpose of my research. If people seemed willing, I then began the process of establishing informed consent, making sure in particular that each participant was aware of his or her rights within the project—a subject we revisited in subsequent interviews as necessary. Ultimately, twenty convicted génocidaires—twelve men and eight women— consented to be interviewed. Once informed consent had been established, initial interviews focused on documenting participants’ life histories in as little or as much detail as they felt was necessary. Once each participant was satisfied with his or her life history, I then switched to thematic interviews in which I asked questions specific to my interest in genocidal intent. This process meant that I met with each génocidaire multiple times—as few as two and as many as eight. These interviews were not recorded, in accordance with my MININTER permit, and so the narratives discussed below have been reconstructed from thorough field notes, the contents of which were verified with individual participants in subsequent interviews.

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Génocidaires’ Narratives: From Monsters to Victims? In starting the interview phase on my fieldwork, the warnings I had received from various Rwandan officials were difficult to forget. I was apprehensive about exposing myself to these allegedly dangerous participants: whereas in my interviews with survivors and bystanders I practiced full transparency in answering any personal questions they might have had, I considered the possibility that deception about such matters might be the wiser course surrounding my interviews with convicted génocidaires. Of similar concern was the realization that while my personal safety could be relatively assured by leaving Rwanda, the same could not be said for the Rwandan research assistants who provided simultaneous translation during these interviews. I similarly worried about how to address the lies, manipulations, and deceptions I had been told to expect in a project that was intended to result not only in a doctoral dissertation but have tangible legal applications as well. As I have discussed in a previous article on the limits of oral history, I was conscious of the possibility that ideologues might see my research project as an opportunity to imbue their personal political agendas with academic authority, justifying the massacre of Hutu political moderates or Tutsi or Twa civilians as necessary because of their perceived inherent inferiority or contaminating presence, for example.13 Similarly concerning was the possibility that in some circumstances, génocidaires might “perform” monstrous or psychopathic behavior in the interviews at the prison administrators’ request in order to lend credence to the government’s official narrative.14 This phenomenon, a variation on what anthropologist Antonius Robben has termed “ethnographic seduction,” has remained a point of concern throughout my fieldwork in Rwanda and beyond, regardless of my interviewees’ status as survivors, perpetrators, officials, or bystanders, for example.15 However, the misleading potential of ethnographic seduction was heightened in my work with génocidaires because of my inability to spend significant time with them to analyze the everyday contexts in which they were embedded. My initial day of interviews did little to assuage these concerns. I met with Alexandre and Gabriel—two men who had been leaders in their communities prior to the genocide and as such had been instrumental in organizing and inciting genocide in their communities. While neither man was hostile toward me or the research assistant with whom I worked during these interviews, their behavior—particularly the graphic and at times enthusiastic manner in which they described the atrocities in their communities—was unsettling. Alexandre took the initiative to draw some of the atrocities that had occurred during the

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genocide using a pen and piece of paper that he requested I give him. He took particular care in depicting the evisceration of pregnant Tutsi women and other forms of sexual violence, explaining that such forms of violence were necessary to demonstrate to these women that they were nothing and had no right to act so proud and superior toward Hutu men. In doing so, Alexandre was referencing the politics of beauty in Rwanda whereby Tutsi women, owing to their alleged Caucasian heritage and associated tendency to have lighter skin, more gracile features, and superior manners and intelligence, were regarded as more desirable wives and lovers than “pure African” Hutu women.16 Yet in describing this violence, Alexandre often seemed remorseless. He demonstrated an awareness that the part he had played in inciting this violence was regarded as criminal by modern Rwandan standards, yet he did not express an awareness that this violence was morally wrong. Conversely, he frequently exhibited excitement when describing the brutal forms of violence to which Tutsi women were subjected, and in a couple of instances laughed while recounting how Tutsi women cried and begged for mercy or a quick death without rape, noting it was “funny” to see such proud women reduced to begging or being exposed in the streets. He added that such violence was acceptable during the genocide because leaders encouraged the Hutu extremists to use Tutsi women as tools and regard their victims as animals rather than human beings. Throughout our interviews, Alexandre only once expressed anything approaching remorse, and this occurred when discussing the murder of a Tutsi woman whose death he ordered. Upon finding a Tutsi woman who he claimed had been eviscerated and left to die a slow death, he ordered one of his soldiers to kill her in order to end her suffering. Alexandre’s remorse was not related to his decision to end the woman’s life—he regarded this as an act of mercy. However, his order to kill the woman was observed by several other soldiers and meant that his perceived criminal involvement in the genocide went beyond general organization and incitement—already constituting Category 1 crimes under Rwanda’s penal code—to include sexual violence against Tutsi women, regarded as much more serious in Rwandan law.17 As a result of this one act of violence, he received a life sentence, which he felt was grossly unfair given his version of events. My interview with Gabriel was similarly troubling. Unlike Alexandre, he did not include examples of the extreme violence that occurred during the genocide as part of his life history. Indeed, his life history was characterized by his inability to explain what had happened in Rwanda surrounding the genocide and his efforts to secure forgiveness and a reduced sentence despite the fact he was unwilling to accept responsibility for his involvement in organizing and inciting the genocide in his community. He was alone among the

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génocidaires I interviewed for insisting that “Satan has attacked Rwanda” and had forced people like him to commit heinous crimes.18 In his case, this entailed indirect crimes such as distributing weapons to Hutu civilians and encouraging them to kill their Tutsi compatriots as well as engaging in activities that supported the interim government, even as it became clear they had embarked on a genocidal campaign against the Tutsi. To this end, Gabriel admitted that he had no moral concerns about the killings and related atrocities and indeed felt very safe until the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) arrived in his community and began killing Hutu who were suspected of organizing the genocide.19 Gabriel was arrested by the RPA while attempting to escape to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, then Zaire). In the postgenocide period, he attempted to minimize his complicity in the genocide by presenting himself and the other génocidaires as victims of satanic possession, and he refused to take responsibility for his crimes, even as he requested forgiveness from genocide survivors and appealed for a reduced sentence. Unsurprisingly, his appeal and requests for forgiveness from those his criminal actions had harmed had not been forthcoming, prompting him to rant about how this was typical behavior for the Tutsi, who enjoyed nothing more than forcing the Hutu to grovel for their approval, only to respond with further oppression and injustice. Yet, this initial day of interviews aside, as my research in the prisons continued it became clear that I was not necessarily dealing with the monsters, psychopaths, and ideologues against whom I had been warned. As I began interviewing low-level génocidaires, a more complicated vision of Rwanda’s génocidaires began to emerge: one in which some of my interviewees’ claims to victimization began to seem more justified and indeed aligned with my knowledge and experience of the reduced civil liberties and human rights violations that characterized life for many Rwandans in the postgenocide period. Historical Injustices It is perhaps unsurprising that it was a Rwandan history teacher who first prompted me to think more critically about génocidaires’ efforts to cast themselves as victims in the postgenocide period. Philippe was a quiet, unassuming man with a passion for Rwandan history and the role he had played in negatively shaping his nation’s future. He freely acknowledged that during the genocide, he had helped massacre Tutsi women, children, and elders who had sought refuge in a church in his community and then hunted the survivors in the fields, swamps, and forests where they hid. He similarly admitted

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to having raped Tutsi women and looted Tutsi properties as a “reward” for his “work.” By the time the genocide began, the Tutsi were, in Philippe’s estimation, the natural enemies of the Hutu people and deserving of their fates, regardless of the physical or mental suffering that fate entailed.20 Nonetheless, Philippe presented himself as more victim than génocidaire. He saw himself as a victim of the fear and uncertainty associated with living through more than three years of a civil war initiated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF); a victim of the greed and opportunism that prompted him to crave the enhanced status and wealth he received from the Tutsi he helped murder; a victim of the RPF, those “foreign Tutsi” who upon taking control of the nation held him accountable for the atrocities he perpetrated with what he referred to as “victor’s justice”; and a victim of the international community whose apathy made it possible for him to be forgotten in a Rwandan prison, in violation of his basic human rights, and without access to adequate legal representation or a fair trial. But first and foremost, Philippe perceived himself to be a victim of history. Throughout our interviews, Philippe framed his criminal actions during the genocide as the inevitable outcome of generations of internalized anger, fear, and resentment toward the Tutsi. From his perspective, this victim identity was an important part of what it means to be a Hutu, whether in the present or distant past. He described his grandparents—and indeed, every generation that preceded them since the arrival of the Tutsi in Rwanda—as slaves, forced by the Tutsi to carry hot pots on their heads and work endlessly in the fields for just enough food to sustain them, while the Tutsi claimed the most fertile land for their cattle. This narrative of Hutu enslavement is not uncommon among Hutu who were educated under Hutu presidents Grégoire Kayibanda (1962–73) and Juvénal Habyarimana (1973–94). Much like other regimes that have ruled Rwanda, including the current regime of President Paul Kagame (2000–present), these leaders invested in creating and disseminating an official history that legitimized their political dominance and justified the oppression of those they considered enemies of the state (inyangarwanda). To this end, most historians approach official and unofficial histories of Rwanda as mythico-histories, a term political scientist Liisa Malkki introduced in reference to those narratives that are “not only a description of the past, not even merely an evaluation of the past, but a subversive recasting and reinterpretation of it in fundamentally moral terms.”21 According to Philippe’s life history, his parents experienced a slight improvement to their quality of life with the arrival of the German and Belgian colonists and the Christian missionaries. The Hutu majority—as part of their education under Belgian colonialism—were taught about democracy and human rights,

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which in turn inspired them to fight for political reforms aimed at overthrowing their colonizers and the Tutsi-dominated monarchy ruling Rwanda. The resulting 1959 Hutu Revolution and the 1962 elections ushered in Rwandan independence under Kayibanda, representing an important political opportunity for the Hutu majority. Unlike previous generations from his family, Philippe was able to complete primary and secondary school, train as a history teacher, and by his mid-twenties could afford to marry, have children, and purchase a small piece of land for farming. However, the stories of oppression and slavery related to Philippe by his parents and grandparents offered lessons that were difficult for him to forget. In 1990 the RPA—composed primarily of Tutsi exiles whose families had fled previous periods of ethnic violence in Rwanda—invaded northern Rwanda, triggering a civil war. Philippe claimed he was, for the first time in his life, overwhelmed with an intense fear of the Tutsi. He joined a local youth militia—the Interahamwe (those who fight/work together)—with the intention of defending Rwanda from the Tutsi returnees who he believed were determined to reestablish the Tutsi monarchy and reenslave the Hutu masses. Rumors of atrocities perpetrated by RPA troops against Hutu civilians in the north further convinced Philippe of the legitimacy of his beliefs. When Habyarimana was assassinated on April 6, 1994, Philippe did not question the Interahamwe leaders’ orders to set up roadblocks and massacre Tutsi civilians. The Hutu Power elites in his community claimed that the RPF was responsible for Habyarimana’s assassination, and Philippe had no reason to doubt them. He argued it was this historical legacy that made it possible for him— a devout Christian man with no criminal record prior to 1994—to participate in the torture, massacre, and mutilation of unarmed Tutsi men, women, and children as a means of striking at the heart of the enemy RPF. Many of the génocidaires I interviewed referenced historical injustices perpetrated by Tutsi political elites against the rural Hutu majority as a significant motivating factor underlying their decision to join the Hutu extremists in torturing and murdering Tutsi civilians. For example, Martin had a similar impression of daily life under the Tutsi monarchy, noting that ubuhake— a system of patronage whereby political elites, usually Tutsi, gave a cow to a peasant in exchange for their labor and loyalty—was used to enslave the Hutu.22 According to Michel, any Tutsi man, regardless of his relationship to the Tutsi monarchs, was able to subjugate the Hutu in his community by using his cattle to bind them to his will.23 By giving a Hutu peasant a cow—a symbol of prestige and a valuable opportunity for social advancement—the Tutsi patron ensured that in the future he would be able to call upon that Hutu to give him a share of his crops, cattle, or any other wealth he might acquire, as well

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as labor. Thus, the Tutsi were able to amass wealth without having to burden themselves unnecessarily with doing hard manual labor or contaminate themselves by doing work deemed socially inferior. To add insult to injury, Michel believed that ubuhake allowed the Tutsi to spread rumors that the Hutu as a people were poorly mannered, stupid, and unattractive, justifying their oppression by the Tutsi. Michel argued this prejudice emerged from the fact that the hard, forced manual labor necessitated by ubuhake gave the Hutu few opportunities to better themselves, while the Tutsi were left free to pursue education, eat well, and avoid activities that might cause their bodies to degrade more rapidly, such as intense manual labor. In this manner, it became clear that many of the génocidaires with whom I spoke had internalized a range of stories that demonized the Tutsi monarchy and the Tutsi more generally for enslaving the Hutu masses and subjecting them to a range of human rights violations. Yet in explaining why these stories affected them so intimately, motivating them to torture and murder their Tutsi compatriots during the genocide, génocidaires often cited the fact that the Tutsi refused to acknowledge what they had done. Maxime was particularly outspoken on this point, noting that many of the tensions between Hutu and Tutsi could be undone if the Tutsi would simply acknowledge “the truth” about Rwanda’s past: that the Tutsi had enslaved and oppressed the Hutu.24 Instead, he claimed the Tutsi had, throughout Rwanda’s past, refused to acknowledge the oppression endured by the Hutu compatriots, which in turn made the Hutu hate them. Even the German and Belgian colonizers were better in Maxime’s opinion, as they had recognized their error in supporting the Tutsi monarchy and eventually shifted their allegiances to facilitate Rwanda’s shift to democracy and independence. The Tutsi, however, continued to act as though the precolonial period had been a utopia with all Rwandans living as equals, which, in Maxime’s mind, was inexcusable and only served to exacerbate tensions between Hutu and Tutsi in the postgenocide period. Legal and Political Injustices An additional source of claims to victimization in the life history narratives of génocidaire participants is related to the human rights violations they allegedly endured in the postgenocide period. In the aftermath of the genocide, Rwanda’s prisons were overwhelmed by suspected génocidaires who had been arrested by the RPF on charges ranging from organizing and inciting genocide and engaging in mass rape or murder to crimes against property, such as looting. At the height of the arrests in 1999, Rwanda’s prison

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system—with its maximum capacity at 12,000 prisoners—held as many as 150,000 suspected génocidaires.25 Rwanda’s justice system had been devastated by the genocide though, and so the RPF reinvented gacaca to resolve the overflow by trying the cases of low-level génocidaires. Over a decade, an estimated 1,958,634 cases of genocide were tried through gacaca courts located across Rwanda.26 Those individuals who were found innocent were released following a typically three-week period of rehabilitation via a state program known as ingando; released as well were those individuals whose sentences amounted to the same or less time than they had already spent in prison awaiting trial. As a locally conceived transitional justice mechanism, gacaca has met with both accolades and criticism. The RPF claims gacaca’s primary legacy has been to promote national unity and reconciliation, providing genocide survivors with an opportunity to hold accountable those who were responsible for carrying out the worst atrocities during the genocide and providing perpetrators with an opportunity to confess and seek forgiveness for their crimes. Beyond Rwanda, political scientist Phil Clark has argued that gacaca consistently provided both justice and a public space in which reconciliation and forgiveness thrived.27 More commonly, however, experts have argued that gacaca is intricately embedded with Rwanda’s postgenocide official narrative and, as such, has become a highly politicized mechanism through which ethnic and political tensions are exacerbated rather than reduced.28 In large part, this criticism emerges from the tendency of gacaca trials to focus on the wrongdoings of Hutu civilians related to what is referenced in official parlance as “the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi,” disallowing the possibility of non-Tutsi victims during the genocide. Meanwhile, the atrocities endured by Hutu civilians at the hands of RPF troops surrounding the genocide, as well as the overall suffering of Rwanda’s tiny indigenous Twa minority population, remain unaddressed.29 A further source of tension related to gacaca lies in the often-problematic nature of the evidence according to which individual cases are tried. Gacaca trials typically involved one or more genocide survivors giving testimony before their community related to the alleged criminal actions of the accused. Genocide survivors’ testimonies were in some instances based on firsthand experiences of violence at the hands of the accused but in other instances might be motivated by interpersonal conflict, such as land disputes, rather than actual crimes.30 The accused would then have an opportunity to speak in his or her defense and call upon supporters from the wider community to do likewise. The accused was often encouraged as part of his or her testimony to confess and express remorse in order to receive a reduced sentence. Then the panel of judges would deliberate and come to a final decision regarding the accused’s guilt or innocence and the length and nature of the sentence, if required. As a result,

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sentences were often based almost entirely on eyewitness testimonies, raising concerns among survivors and accused perpetrators alike of witness tampering, false allegations, and corruption.31 Such perceptions contributed to widespread dissatisfaction with the Kagame regime, and the RPF more generally, within the prisons. When questioned about their perceptions of postgenocide Rwanda and the possibilities for longterm reconciliation and multiethnic collaboration, nearly all the génocidaires with whom I worked responded negatively, in large part because of the many perceived injustices they had experienced at the hands of representatives of the current government. For example, Gérard was arrested when he tried to return to Rwanda from the DRC after the genocide, and prior to being interred in the prisons he spent several weeks in a cachot (dungeon), where he was beaten and starved.32 As noted by human rights expert Carina Tertsakian in Le Chateau: The Lives of Prisoners in Rwanda, horrific experiences in the cachots were not uncommon for the newly arrested, particularly between 1994 and 1999, because the soldiers who guarded the prisoners could act with impunity.33 In Gérard’s case, he believed that the RPF had treated him badly because they wanted revenge, and he was frustrated that Rwandan authorities and the international community had ignored the humiliation and torture he experienced in the cachot. He felt it was only fair that Rwandans be forced to acknowledge all the atrocities that occurred surrounding the genocide and not just those endured by the Tutsi. Philippe was similarly frustrated by what had become of his life under the Kagame regime. He claimed he had confessed to all his crimes during the genocide, and he certainly spoke more openly than most about the nature of his participation and the motivating factors that made it possible for him to shift from being a teacher to a génocidaire. However, he felt that some of the charges brought against him were not properly investigated, causing him to receive a much harsher sentence than he felt he deserved. Philippe confessed to participating in several massacres as well as targeting a few individuals with whom he had a long history of interpersonal conflict. However, in addition to these crimes, he was sentenced to life in prison for planning the genocide in his community. He argued that the municipal leaders in his community fabricated these charges, and he refuted them by arguing that a teacher would not have the experience or status necessary to organize such violence. Furthermore, after being sentenced, Philippe’s wife remarried and his family was “destroyed,” leaving him to conclude that the extra charges against him were intended to break up his family.34 Since then, Philippe claimed he had lost hope for the future. He concluded that his “life has become meaningless” because he had neither family nor friends.35

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With the RPF now in power, meanwhile, several génocidaires argued that their participation in the genocide, while dishonorable on many levels, was nonetheless justified. Many refused to acknowledge that the violence that overwhelmed Rwanda in 1994 was, in fact, genocide, preferring instead to describe the period as part of the civil war. They acknowledged that most of the people they killed were unarmed and lacked military training but maintained that their murder was necessary to undermine political support for the RPF. For example, Alexandre was unapologetic about his overall role in inciting genocide.36 While he acknowledged upon reflection that the brutal violence with which Tutsi civilians were killed was dishonorable—both to those who inflicted it and those who suffered it—Alexandre interpreted the genocide as one small part of the larger civil war that had enveloped Rwanda since 1990. He recalled that, in the moment, he perceived the killing of Tutsi civilians as an honorable act. By killing Tutsi men, women, and children, the Hutu extremists became intore (warriors), earning status by eliminating not only the foreign Tutsi threat that sought to overthrow the Hutu government but also those Tutsi who had enslaved their ancestors in the past, a category that he extended to all Rwandan Tutsi regardless of political affiliation, age, or gender. Furthermore, Alexandre contended—like many of the génocidaires I interviewed—that the RPF’s treatment of the Hutu majority in Rwanda since the genocide was evidence that the Hutu extremists had been correct to resist the RPF using any means possible. He argued the RPF had imprisoned Hutu for the slightest provocation, while RPA war criminals went free. Despite having not left the prison in fourteen years, Alexandre had heard that the Tutsi were once again in control of the Rwandan government, military, and media. In his mind, this was a modern version of the Hutu enslavement that had occurred under the Tutsi monarchy, and one that justified his efforts to resist RPF hegemony through genocidal violence. Gender-Based Discrimination In the case of the female génocidaires I interviewed, the narratives that emerged, particularly among low-level perpetrators, were dominated by claims of gender-based discrimination.37 For example, Devota was, by all accounts, a monster. Prior to our first meeting, prison administrators and génocidaires alike had referenced her as a particularly infamous perpetrator who, during the genocide, killed unarmed Tutsi women and children in particularly brutal ways using household implements. Adding to her fearsome reputation, she was heavily pregnant during the genocide—a factor that would

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have allowed her to excuse herself from the violence. Nonetheless, Devota allegedly chose to participate in the torture and murder of her Tutsi neighbors. Her crimes were so brutal and so widely condemned by her surrounding community that several people had voluntarily testified against her before gacaca. Devota had further demonstrated her monstrous nature by allegedly appearing remorseless before gacaca, refusing to confess to the crimes of which she had been accused or apologize to the surviving families of the people she had harmed. Devota admitted that she had been found guilty of killing Tutsi women and children by stabbing them with small wooden skewers used for cooking meat brochette and sentenced to fifteen years. However, she maintained she had committed no such crimes during the genocide. She had witnessed a murder and had asked the victim’s family for forgiveness for failing to intervene on the victim’s behalf. She also confessed to looting the homes of murdered Tutsi in her community. But in terms of the Category 2 crimes of which she was accused, Devota maintained her innocence and lamented the harsh sentence she had received. Throughout our interviews, Devota consistently described herself as “just a normal person” who, as a woman, was in no way capable of the crimes of which she had been accused.38 She explained that prior to the genocide, she had been a poor farmer. Her family was often unable to afford food beyond what they grew, and for this reason, Devota was illiterate and had minimal education. She claimed she never felt unsafe in the years prior to the genocide and felt no animosity toward her Tutsi compatriots. She only began feeling unsafe after the genocide when a neighboring merchant, fearing imprisonment by the RPF, threatened her so she would remain silent after she witnessed him murder a Tutsi man during the genocide. While Devota knew the man’s murder was wrong, at the time she did not interfere because the victim had a reputation in her community for being proud and selfish. The merchant’s decision to commit murder was motivated by the fact that the victim had refused to lend the merchant money some months earlier. As for the other charges against her, Devota claimed that a Tutsi neighbor with whom she had lived for many years in peace had invented the story of her having killed Tutsi women and children with brochettes. Prior to her 2001 arrest, she claimed that her accuser’s cousin had asked to buy Devota’s land. Devota refused, and shortly after she was arrested on suspicion of murdering Tutsi during the genocide. She was adamant that her imprisonment was punishment for her refusal to sell her land. After her arrest, her land would have passed to her husband and children to cultivate or sell. Devota had not seen or heard from them since she had arrived in prison and so had no idea what they

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had decided to do. She suspected, however, that her arrest had prompted her family to sell and to leave the community so as to minimize the social stigmatization they would otherwise endure for supporting a génocidaire.39 However, Devota’s story changed in important ways over the course of our interviews. While she continuously professed her innocence, she added details that further stressed her identity as a victim. She repeatedly referred to herself as a “weak woman” who was incapable of torture or murder and stressed how being in prison had negatively and unjustly affected her life. She stated that she was no longer Rwandan or a woman—that both aspects of her identity had been taken from her by those responsible for her imprisonment. In her opinion, a woman’s identity was defined by staying at home and taking care of her husband and children, a privilege that Devota had been denied since her arrest. As a result of her inability to care for her family, they had apparently rejected her, having never visited her in prison. Devota realized they were likely suffering as well because of her arrest: in addition to the loss of her labor, the families of génocidaires were often subject to subtle forms of discrimination within their communities. When the rumors of her complicity in the genocide began to circulate, Devota recalled that people passed her on the street without greeting her and refused to buy her produce. It was worse for a woman, she argued, because women were supposed to be pure and incapable of harming others, but her husband and children were certainly being stigmatized too. Devota was formally denied other privileges. Unlike men génocidaires, who occasionally perform community labor and related activities outside the prison, Devota was confined to her shared cell or the room where she worked with other women to make and repair prisoners’ uniforms.40 Adding to her suffering, Devota found her gender identity had been further rendered obsolete by the conditions imposed on her through everyday life in prison. In particular, she found the shapeless pink uniform worn by génocidaires demoralizing because it obscured both her gender and her individuality. Combined with the shaved hairstyle demanded by the authorities to prevent the spread of lice, Devota felt there was nothing to distinguish her from the countless other women prisoners with whom she lived. As a result, Devota suffered far more than she felt she deserved, particularly given her alleged innocence. Devota’s narrative was broadly representative of the challenges faced by the other Category 2 and 3 women génocidaires I interviewed in the prisons. In terms of background, they were all subsistence farmers from rural communities whose lives were characterized by moderate to extreme poverty. As a result, they had achieved only basic levels of education and had married young in order to provide their families with much-needed bridewealth. They had multiple

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children and prior to the genocide had viewed child-rearing and the maintenance of their homes and farms as their primary responsibilities. None of them admitted to having harbored anti-Tutsi sentiments prior to the start of the genocide, and in discussing their alleged crimes, only one woman ever confessed to participating in the acts of torture and murder of which she had been accused.41 The other Category 2 and 3 women génocidaires I interviewed confessed only to informing on Tutsi, revealing their hiding places to the attackers, and looting their properties. In all instances, they claimed their actions were not motivated by anti-Tutsi sentiment but rather by fear of social repercussions within their communities if they refused to support the Hutu Power extremists as well as by occasional indifference to the fates of the victims owing to a history of interpersonal conflict within the community. In addition, these low-level women génocidaires frequently referenced the gender-based discrimination they endured and its impact on their ability to identify as Rwandan women. They endured abandonment by some, if not all, of their family members—particularly their husbands and children—because their complicity in genocidal violence was inevitably interpreted as evidence that they were monsters in addition to being bad wives and mothers. Unlike the men génocidaires I interviewed, who received visitors according to their family’s resources and were given gifts of valuable commodities like sugar to improve their well-being in the prisons, low-level women génocidaires claimed to receive little support from the outside world. They instead relied on the goodwill of prison administrators or prisoners who were willing to share or purchase necessities on their behalf in exchange for money or sexual favors. The resulting system of exploitation was not something that women génocidaires could discuss in much detail given that it still surrounded them and they were dependent upon it for their survival. However, they all acknowledged its existence and the negative impact it had on their morale.42 Conclusion Taken together, the narratives analyzed in this chapter demonstrate that the particular circumstances through which individual Rwandans come to be regarded as génocidaires are often complex and in need of analysis in relation to the nation’s current political climate. While some political elites could arguably be best understood as ideologues whose criminal acts were inspired by virulent hatred of Rwanda’s minority Tutsi population, the vast majority of the génocidaires whom I interviewed claimed they were provoked to participate in the genocide through some combination of fear of the RPF and its

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supporters, opportunism, and peer pressure, among other related motivations. This is not to say that their crimes should be forgiven or excused but that their motives were far more understandable—even ordinary—than might be anticipated from the official history and popular accounts that circulate in postgenocide Rwanda.43 Similarly, the fact remains that many génocidaires have endured significant human rights violations related to the genocide and its aftermath. These human rights violations should not be ignored: even in instances where génocidaires have perpetrated violent crimes, they still have rights and protections under customary international law and as articulated by such treaties as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, among others.44 Under the circumstances, génocidaires’ allegations should be considered with equal weight as those of noncriminal elements of Rwandan society. That said, discussion of génocidaires’ rights and the human rights violations they have endured is not a popular topic in postgenocide Rwanda. Many Rwandans, particularly genocide survivors and government officials, understandably find it morally repugnant to approach the plights of convicted génocidaires with empathy or compassion, as do many Rwandan and foreign scholars.45 To this end, researchers and human rights activists who have sought to draw attention to the various ways that génocidaires are disadvantaged or suffering in the postgenocide period have often found themselves in conflict with survivors’ organizations and government officials. In my experience, such conflicts can have several root causes, including the perception that Rwanda is held to unfair standards for achieving human rights and democratic reforms given its recent genocidal past. However, the most common foundation for such conflicts is officials’ belief that the prisons are hotbeds of “genocide ideology.”46 Among political elites and those who have been radicalized by their journeys within Rwanda’s transitional justice program, this may be true. It is certainly accurate to say that Rwanda’s prisons are full of people who harbor serious anger and resentment toward the RPF, if not the Tutsi more generally. However, for many génocidaires, this anger and resentment appears specifically political in nature rather than ethnic. They hold the RPF accountable for having “wrongly” imprisoned them and having subjected them to victor’s justice rather than allowing the Rwandan people to engage in conflict resolution on their own terms as they might have done in the past. They do not necessarily conflate the RPF with the Rwanda’s minority Tutsi population, particularly the petit Tutsi that many rural génocidaires lived alongside prior to their arrest and who shared in the difficulties and successes of everyday life in pregenocide Rwanda. However, efforts to draw attention to such nuances

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in génocidaires’ perspectives can easily result in the researcher herself being labeled inyangarwanda, allegedly contaminated by genocide ideology and the lies, deceptions, and manipulations of her génocidaires informants.47 More often, however, these researchers have attempted to contextualize the lies, deceptions, and manipulations to which they are exposed, whether in the prisons or in other avenues of everyday life in postgenocide Rwanda to “open up new forms of dialogue and public debates, which can lead to disclosures of new truths and knowledge.”48 However, negative responses are understandable given the extreme emotional responses that memories of the genocide evoke in officials, survivors, bystanders, and interested members of the public alike. Yet the fact remains that by privileging narratives that would dismiss these génocidaires as monsters and silence their experiences of human rights violations, the Rwandan government and its supporters among Rwandan civil society and the international community are complicit in diminishing the public’s ability to relate to génocidaires in terms that might facilitate dialogue and understanding across ethnic and political lines. Furthermore, such official narratives run the risk of denying the Rwandan people crucial opportunities to promote postgenocide social repair and prevent further bloodshed in Rwanda. Dialogue around the postgenocide fates of génocidaires and the extent to which they might at times be able to simultaneously claim space as victims may not be easy for the Rwandan people to accept. However, as noted by Kirsten Doughty, the path toward genuine social repair is an inherently violent and discomforting process for which there are no shortcuts or easy solutions.49 Notes 1. The number of victims of the genocide is controversial, with conservative estimates—including the one cited by Alison Des Forges that I adhere to above— concluding that between four hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand Rwandans from different ethnic backgrounds died. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 15–16. Conversely, the Rwandan government maintains that over one million Rwandan Tutsi were murdered during this period. See, for example, National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, “Genocide,” 2013, http://www.cnlg.gov.rw/-Genocide-.html. A Journal of Genocide Research Forum concluded in 2020 that the lower estimate provided by Des Forges is likely more accurate than the higher estimate provided by the Rwandan government and its supporters. See, for example, Jens Meierhenrich, “How Many Victims Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? A Statistical Debate,” Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 81.

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2. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948, Article II, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/ UNTS/Volume%2078/volume-78-I-1021-English.pdf. 3. For more on narrative burden as it relates to survivors of sexual violence, see Kimberly Theidon, “Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women and War,” Journal of Human Rights 6, no. 4 (2007): 453–78; and Kimberly Theidon, “The Milk of Sorrow: A Theory on the Violence of Memory,” Canadian Woman Studies 27, no. 1 (2009): 8–16. 4. Kathleen Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993): 597. 5. The term igipinga can be used in reference to someone who has strong principles, but it also connotes stubbornness. In recent years, it has been increasingly used in reference to Tutsi who are resistant to the current government. 6. Erin Jessee, “The Limits of Oral History: Ethics and Methodology amid Highly Politicized Research Settings,” Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 287–307. 7. Jennie Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 128. 8. Field notes, 2008. 9. For a comprehensive overview of Rwanda’s approach to transitional justice, see Gerald Gahima, Transitional Justice in Rwanda: Accountability for Atrocity (Routledge: London, 2013). For information on gacaca, more specifically, see Bert Ingelaere, Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). 10. Several prominent human rights organizations both within and beyond Rwanda have documented cases of intimidation and retaliation killings of people who have testified against alleged génocidaires in their communities. See, for example, Hirondelle, “IBUKA report: 167 Genocide Survivors Murdered since 1995,” July 15, 2008, http:// www.hirondellenews.com/ictr-rwanda/412-rwanda-political-and-social-issues/17187 -en-en-150708-rwandasurvivors-ibuka-report167-genocide-survivors-murdered-since -199562386238; and Daniel Sabiiti, “IBUKA Raises Alarm over Killing of Survivors,” East African, April 18, 2014, http://reliefweb.int/report/rwanda/ibuka-raises-alarm -over-killing-survivors. 11. Erin Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More: Female Génocidaires in the Aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” Conflict and Society 1 (2015): 60–80. See also Nicole Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide: Mothers or Monsters?,” International Review of the Red Cross 92, no. 877 (2010): 69–102. 12. For more information on the controversy that surrounds gacaca, see Ingelaere, Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts; Max Rettig, “The Sovu Trials: The Impact of Genocide Justice in One Community,” in Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence, ed. Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 194–210; Théoneste Rutayisire and Anemiek Richters, “Everyday Suffering outside Prison Walls: A Legacy of Community Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Social Science and Medicine 120 (2014): 413–20; Susan Thomson and Rosemary Nagy,

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“Law, Power and Justice: What Legalism Fails to Address in the Functioning of Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 5, no. 1 (2011): 11–30. 13. Jessee, “The Limits of Oral History,” 287–307. 14. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this possibility. 15. Antonius Robben, “Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina,” Ethos 24, no. 1 (1996): 71–106. 16. These perceptions were very much shaped by European values during Rwanda’s colonial period from 1895 to 1962, which cast the Tutsi as descendants of the biblical figure Ham. For more on how colonial politics shaped perceptions of beauty in Rwanda, see Erin Baines, “Body Politics and the Rwanda Crisis,” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2003): 479–93; Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (New York: Berg, 1999), 55–97; and Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 82–86. 17. Rwanda’s criminal code initially recognized four categories of criminal complicity, including: Category 1—instigators, inciters, and planners of the genocide as well as those who engaged in acts of sexual torture; Category 2—perpetrators of intentional homicide or serious assault resulting in death; Category 3—perpetrators of serious assaults not resulting in death; and Category 4—persons who committed crimes against property. Government of Rwanda, “Organic Law No. 08/96 of August 30, 1996, on the Organization of Prosecutions for Offences Constituting the Crime of Genocide or Crimes Against Humanity Committed Since October 1, 1990,” http:// www.preventgenocide.org/law/domestic/rwanda.htm. 18. Interview with author, 2008. 19. The RPA was the military arm of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which wrested control of Rwanda in July 1994 and is currently the leading political party in Rwanda. 20. There were rare exceptions to this statement, and Philippe claimed that he did not hesitate to rescue those Tutsi he knew personally were not a threat to the Hutu, providing food, intelligence, and shelter during the genocide. 21. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 54. For more on génocidaires’ allegations of Hutu enslavement during Rwanda’s precolonial and colonial period, see Erin Jessee and Sarah Watkins, “Good Kings, Bloody Tyrants, and Everything in Between: Representations of the Monarchy in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” History in Africa 41 (2014): 35–62. 22. Interview with author, 2008. While Tutsi court notables were more likely to serve as patrons in this relationship, the gift of cattle could be made to Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa peasants and as such was not inherently intended to disadvantage or discriminate against the Hutu specifically. The practice of ubureetwa, through which specifically Hutu farmers provided unpaid labor in exchange for access to land controlled by Tutsi court notables, was far more exploitative toward the Hutu. For more information on ubuhake, see Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 47. On ubureetwa, see Catharine Newbury,

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“Ubureetwa and Thangata: Catalysts to Peasant Political Consciousness in Rwanda and Malawi,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 100. 23. Interview with author, 2008. 24. Interview with author, 2008. 25. Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us, 136. 26. National Service of Gacaca Courts, cited in Théoneste Rutayisire and Anemiek Richters, “Everyday Suffering outside Prison Walls: A Legacy of Community Justice in Post-genocide Rwanda,” Social Science and Medicine 120 (November 2014): 2. 27. Phil Clark, The Gacaca Courts: Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice without Lawyers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 28. See, for example, Ingelaere, Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts; Rettig, “The Sovu Trials,” 194–209; Rutayisire and Richters, “Everyday Suffering,”; and Thomson and Nagy, “Law, Power, and Justice.” 29. Robert Gersony, Alison Des Forges, and more recently, the United Nations have documented a range of atrocities perpetrated by the RPF against Hutu civilians and alleged génocidaires following the genocide. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 705; United Nations High Commission for Refugees, “Summary of UNHCR Presentation before Commission of Experts,” October 10, 1994, http://richardwilson author.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/gersony_report.pdf; United Nations, “Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003,” August 2010, http://www .ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/ZR/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FiNAL_EN.pdf. The RPF has, in rare instances where it acknowledges these atrocities occurred, dismissed them as individual revenge killings by undisciplined RPA troops rather than evidence of some systematic plan conceived by the RPF to terrorize or perpetrate a second genocide against Hutu civilians. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 714. 30. For more on the use of gacaca to resolve interpersonal conflicts, see Ingelaere, Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts; and Max Rettig, “The Sovu Trials.” 31. See, for example, Max Rettig’s work in Sovu as well as Human Rights Watch and Penal Reform International’s reports on gacaca. Rettig, “The Sovu Trials,” 194– 209; Human Rights Watch, “Killings in Eastern Rwanda,” January 2007, http://www .hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/africa/rwanda0107/rwanda0107web.pdf; Penal Reform International, “Final Monitoring and Research Report on the Gacaca Process,” 2010, http://www.penalreform.org/resource/final-monitoring-research-report-gacaca-process/. 32. Interview with author, 2008. The term cachot is used in reference to the Rwandan detention centers where alleged génocidaires were held prior to being transferred to a prison. 33. Carina Tertsakian, Le Château: The Lives of Prisoners in Rwanda (London: Arves Books, 2008), 238–48. 34. Interview with author, 2008. 35. Interview with author, 2008. 36. Interview with author, 2008.

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37. There were two important exceptions to this statement that emerged from the two women political elite génocidaires I interviewed. I discuss the important variations in their narratives, which failed to include claims of gender-based discrimination, in Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More.” 38. Interview with author, 2008. 39. While many rural Rwandans have family in prison for crimes related to the genocide, people often choose to distance themselves lest their support for their loved one be misinterpreted by the authorities as support for their alleged genocidal actions or resistance to national unity and reconciliation, prompting the authorities to take a negative interest. Carina Tertsakian, “‘All Rwandans Are Afraid of Being Arrested One Day’: Prisoners Past, Present and Future,” in Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights After Mass Violence, ed. Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 212. 40. In Le Château, Carina Tertsakian describes these work spaces, and the women’s sections of Rwanda’s prisons more generally, in more positive terms, highlighting the camaraderie that exists between women and their efforts to make life within the prisons more pleasant. Tersakian, Le Château, chapter 5. 41. Esperance, a young mother of two, confessed to committing murder as part of a larger mob that surrounded a Tutsi neighbor and beat her to death using clubs. Esperance was unsure who struck the lethal blow, but as a “weak woman” she argued she was incapable of having committed murder. Nonetheless, she confessed to this murder as well as to indirect complicity in several other murders where she cheered on the attackers. For these crimes, she was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. 42. Nicole Hogg argues that women génocidaires who participated indirectly in the genocide frequently received preferential treatment related to the “chivalry” of men, whereby “male witnesses, investigators, prosecutors and judges are so infected by gender stereotypes that they either cannot perceive of women as criminals or feel protective towards them in spite of their suspected or proven criminality.” However, when direct criminal responsibility for murder, mutilation, or other serious crimes was established, female génocidaires were “regarded as ‘evil’ or ‘non-women’ and treated with the full force of the law.” Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide,” 81, 71. 43. For a nuanced discussion of génocidaires’ diverse motives for participating in the genocide, see Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Charles Mironko, “Igitero: Means and Motive in the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 1 (2004): 47–60; and Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 44. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights and Prisons: Manual on Human Rights Training for Prison Officials (New York: United Nations, 2005), http://www.penalreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/man -2005-humanrightsandprisons-en.pdf. 45. Tertsakian, “‘All Rwandans Are Afraid,’” 211.

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46. The prohibition against genocide ideology—first mentioned in the 2003 Rwandan Constitution but not proscribed by Rwandan law until 2008—is controversial among human rights experts owing to the vague definition of the term and its widespread application to individuals who attempt to shed light on the RPF’s various human rights abuses and lacking democratic reforms. As noted by Amnesty International, Law No. 18/2008 defines genocide ideology as “an aggregate of thoughts characterized by conduct, speeches, documents and other acts aiming at exterminating or inciting others to exterminate people basing [sic] on ethnic group, origin, nationality, region, color, physical appearance, sex, language, religion or political opinion, committed in normal periods or during war.” According to Amnesty International, “These broad and ill-defined laws have created a vague legal framework which is misused to criminalize criticism of the government and legitimate dissent. This has included suppressing calls for the prosecution of war crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In the run-up to the 2010 elections, legitimate political dissent was conflated with ‘genocide ideology,’ compromising the freedom of expression and association of opposition politicians, human rights defenders, and journalists critical of the government.” They further argue that “there appears to be an emerging pattern of Rwandans being prosecuted on their return to Rwanda under ‘genocide ideology’ for statements made in exile or as part of asylum proceedings abroad.” Amnesty International, “Rwanda: Safer to Stay Silent: The Chilling Effect of Rwanda’s Laws on ‘Genocide Ideology’ and ‘Sectarianism,’” August 31, 2010, 7, 22–23, http://www.amnesty.org/ en/library/info/AFR47/005/2010/en. 47. Several academics and human rights activists have commented on the government surveillance, interference, and open hostility that has surrounded their research on subject matter that has been deemed too politically sensitive in postgenocide Rwanda, including Alison Des Forges, Erin Jessee, Elisabeth King, Scott Straus, Carina Tertsakian, Susan Thomson, and Filip Reyntjens. 48. Lee Ann Fujii, “Shades of Truth and Lies: Interpreting Testimonies of War and Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 2 (2010): 240. See also Elisabeth King, “From Data Problems to Data Points: Challenges and Opportunities of Research in Postgenocide Rwanda,” African Studies Review 52, no. 3 (2009): 127–48. 49. Kirsten Doughty, “Law and the Architecture of Social Repair: Gacaca Days in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 2 (2015): 419–37.

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

Perpetrators among Ou r s e lv e s I VA N A m AČE K

W

ars in former Yugoslavia started with the Slovene declaration of independence in 1991, followed by declarations of independence by five of the six federal republics. Serbia and Montenegro were the only republics that did not declare independence, and thus what was sometimes referred to as “the rest of Yugoslavia” was in fact Serbia.1 The former Yugoslav Federal Republic of Serbia also included two autonomous regions, Vojvodina and Kosovo. In 1999 Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Most of these declarations were followed by armed conflicts of various lengths and intensities: Slovenia (the Ten-Day War in 1991), Croatia (1991–95), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991–95), and Kosovo (1999). They were all grounded in nationalistic politics, which led to ethnic cleansing of ethnonationally blended regions.2 In Bosnia and Herzegovina this process was especially lethal, since it was the most diverse of the republics. None of its four major ethnonational groups—Bosnian Muslims (today called Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Yugoslavs—constituted a majority.3 The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement officially ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and recognized it as a sovereign state with three constitutive national groups: Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. It also recognized two relatively autonomous political territorial units, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (between Bosniaks and Croats) and Republika Srpska (predominantly Bosnian Serb), effectively validating aggression and ethnic cleansing as a way to obtain nationally homogeneous territories.4

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In 1993 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in The Hague, and the highest-level politicians and army commanders who ordered violence against civilians were prosecuted until the ICTY closed in 2017. Yet the people who gave orders were not the only ones who were responsible for the atrocities. In this chapter I explore the meanings of perpetration in the Yugoslav wars and their aftermath. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Sweden during and after the Yugoslav wars, including observations, my own experiences, and relationships and interviews with other people who had experienced these wars, I discuss some new conceptual, methodological, and ethical insights about research with perpetrators. Who Are the Perpetrators? The question of how individuals and groups are defined as perpetrators is one of the central themes of this volume, and I want to start with a theoretically informed discussion of materials from my fieldwork sites in Croatia and Sarajevo. We will see that not only are the “facts” in some legal sense difficult or impossible to ascertain in such fluid, many-sided wars but that they also matter less than how perpetration is interpreted later and how former soldiers feel about their past as they try to make sense of their actions in a very different context and in relation to others’ imaginations of the war.5 The social construction of perpetration, as well as the personal and interpersonal reconstruction of memory, are important theoretical insights that are developed in this chapter and throughout this volume. When I saw the call for chapters on perpetrators, I initially thought that during my twenty-five years of research on mass political violence, I had not worked with any perpetrators. I was thinking of what might be called “spectacular perpetration,” such as especially infamous Nazis, génocidaires held in Rwandan prisons, and merciless murderers in various militias portrayed in many documentaries and feature films.6 Having all this in mind, I did not realize that, in the course of my work on the siege of Sarajevo and the lives of refugees from the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sweden, I, too, have interviewed some individuals who might be called perpetrators. The people whom I saw as closest to “spectacular perpetrators” were soldiers whom I met during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Even away from the front lines, there was something very sensitive about talking to a soldier. I soon realized that their unease came from the fact that most of them did not know whether they had killed anyone while shooting at the “enemy.” The uncanny

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feeling arose because we shared an understanding that they probably had done so, but since most of their shooting with rifles and mortars was done at a considerable distance, often while hiding in a trench and as a part of larger military operations, the shooter could not see or hear whether someone was shot or, even less, judge whether it was their own shots that did it.7 They simply did not know for sure whether they had killed. Avoiding the subject altogether, they would rather talk about the losses and deaths they had witnessed on their own side, among their soldier comrades and in their civilians’ homes. These were the facts that they had witnessed and experienced, and that I could also easily see. More importantly, it was ethically much easier to speak about victimhood than perpetration. For the soldiers to remain moral persons, perpetration needed to be hidden by the distance that weapons could cover and by the moral barriers of not wanting to hurt a fellow human being.8 For these reasons, victimhood is much easier to capture in ethnographies of war, mass political violence, and genocide. Interestingly, no soldier I spoke with argued that he shot in self-defense, although this is most often the official justification of war killings and destruction. A military nurse, however, justified the actions of soldiers on her side, while she condemned harshly the ones on the other side. This was one of the most terrifying conversations I had during my fieldwork in Sarajevo during the siege. She was some ten years older than me and was a cousin of a war friend of mine who introduced us.9 We were sitting in a downtown bar during a ceasefire one evening, and this was the only time we talked about the war. I remember the darkness outside, and I remember the goosebumps that her words suddenly aroused. She was telling me about serving at the front line and tending to wounded and dying soldiers, especially during battles. Although she had been hardened by these experiences, they were obviously affecting her. She went on to explain how her attitudes had changed. Like most Sarajevans, she remembered and mourned life before the war when people did not care much about their own or others’ ethnonational backgrounds. She was angry at those who had destroyed it, and in accordance with the official war explanation on this side of the town, which was under the control of the Muslimdominated Bosnian government, she blamed the Serbs on the surrounding mountains who were besieging and shelling Sarajevo. Then she said that she could never again fall in love with a Serb. I was surprised by the categorical tone of her declaration, so I asked her how she would know a man was a Serb and how could she avoid falling in love with an attractive guy. Okay, she admitted, she might fall in love with someone not knowing he was a Serb; but the second she found out that he was, she would break it off. She could not be with someone whom she knew was shooting at her town; she could not have children

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with him. Or even if he was not shooting, “someone of his blood” surely was, and perhaps also murdering innocent people in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The phrase “someone of his blood” got to me. I fell silent. There was something primordial and beyond cognition in her words and attitude. This is what I have called the “soldier position” in my previous analyses of the Sarajevan siege: a way of understanding the war as a conflict between morally righteous defenders of civilized life and morally depraved enemy perpetrators.10 In this part of Sarajevo, the Serbs were the enemy and the Bosnian Muslims were the victims and defenders.11 In addition to the “soldier” position, I have also described “civilian” and “deserter” positions. The “civilian” way of relating to the war was characterized by bewilderment that the war could happen, since in this perspective wars happened somewhere else, not to “us.” The “deserter” position was characterized by the realization that there are good and bad people on all sides and that everything one does is one’s own responsibility. Of course, the circumstances are not one’s responsibility, and the available choices might be few and all bad, but one is still responsible for making them.12 For example, in Sarajevo the “deserter” position was expressed by a middle-aged male war friend who told me how he came to recognize that not everyone in his own national group, the Bosniaks, was good and that not all Serbs were bad. He had witnessed a young man die beside him at the front, which convinced him that fighting this war made no sense. He managed to remove himself from direct combat by getting his military post shifted to logistics in the rear, and he dissented from the prevailing nationalist ideology. A less typical example of the “deserter” position is a story that I was told during the war in Croatia: a young Croat soldier who could not kill when ordered to do so by his commanding officer lost his mind and was discharged as mentally ill. In this case, the young man’s psyche made the decision to desert for him.13 Let us return to the female military nurse, who did nothing but try to save lives and yet was a fierce supporter of the nationalist ideology that fueled the war and still makes Bosnia and Herzegovina a dysfunctional state twentyfive years after the Dayton Peace Accords. Perhaps the fact that she was saving soldiers’ lives, not civilians’ lives, might explain why she endorsed the “soldier” perspective more fiercely than she would have otherwise: in that view, the soldiers on one’s own side are righteous, and thus helping them is a moral act. Otherwise, helping soldiers is helping potential killers.14 So, does this “soldier” viewpoint make her a perpetrator? To consider this question, we need to begin by recognizing the continuum of perpetration, including not only spectacular perpetration and perpetration by soldiers but also perpetration by supporters of any ideology that morally defends or encourages mass killing.15 In the

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modern world, as in the case of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and former Yugoslavia, these ideologies have been primarily nationalist.16 Thus, we move from an idea of a delimited group of perpetrators to an awareness of perpetrators among ourselves. In 1991, at the height of the war in Croatia, I saw a mother in Zagreb walking in a park with her three-year-old son, whom she had dressed in a camouflage uniform.17 She seemed to think that soldiers fighting in the Croat war were a good role model for her son, and she probably supported the Croatian nationalist ideology enforced by the regime of then president Franjo Tuđman.18 Was she a perpetrator? Or was she just giving in to her little boy, who was fascinated by soldiers and shooting and had no idea that war was not simply a game? I reacted with anger to this sight; at the time I was angry at everyone and everything that had the slightest connection with Croatian nationalism and the war. During my work in Sarajevo, however, I realized that the “soldier” stance toward the war was just one of three options among which individuals were constantly shifting depending on the social situation, the military situation, and their state of mind. I could see that the “soldier” position was useful for enabling people to sort out the opaque and shifting information we were constantly receiving about who did what to whom as well as what we were supposed to do to survive as best as possible.19 Even I came to treat nationalistic attitudes as normal, although I rarely failed to question them with a counterexample. I knew, as Sarajevans knew, that the nationalistic “soldier” story was not the only one. It was just one part of the everyday reality of the war. Perpetrators are people who commit, or are responsible for, an action that is either morally condemned, such as a deception, or actually unlawful. The problem is that many acts that in peacetime are considered crimes, such as material destruction and killing, become lawful and even desirable in war. This conflict creates moral confusion and, in some cases, intolerable pressure. The young Croat soldier went mad because he could not reconcile the two moral systems: that killing is wrong and that killing the enemy was right. While the ICTY prosecuted only the highest-level politicians and army commanders, national and local courts took care of the rest. The problem with this arrangement was that, as in most nation-states, the national politicians, commanders, and soldiers serve the interest of the nation, and thus only the enemy is perceived as guilty of perpetration.20 In such cases, I suggest that the continuum of perpetration is a more useful tool for understanding the sociopolitical processes that lead to unacceptable violence than identifying a group of perpetrators and considering the rest lawful and ethical. Thus, in the continuum of perpetration, perpetrators can be legally prosecuted génocidaires and generals as well

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as mothers encouraging their children to wear uniforms and their husbands to take up weapons. This understanding also implies considering our own roles when we do not want to push our friends or close family members into taking responsibility for what they have done, despite the lack of “evidence” or “hard facts.” That I have failed to do so when talking with soldiers in Sarajevo, and also in the following ethnographic case, is closely related to the intersubjective methodology of interviewing, where identification with people in the field and building close and trusting relationships with them is the means to more nuanced knowledge. The Afterlife of Perpetration This section offers an in-depth analysis of one complex, intergenerational, and transnational family story.21 I discuss social and familial support for persons who might be considered perpetrators by others and who themselves might be troubled by internal moral qualms about their past actions, the entanglements between perpetration and victimization, the salience of context in the construction of perpetrators and victims, and the resulting moral ambiguity of these concepts and ethnographic methods. Here, the definition of a perpetrator is not a hard fact that I can present or a judgment that I could make, and yet it permeated all the materials and relationships in the field, even when only through silence. In this family, the father, Nebojša, had been a soldier in the Bosnian Serb Army (Vojska Republike Srpske, VRS), which is often considered to have committed most of the atrocities during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the officially recognized genocide in Srebrenica.22 In Sweden, Nebojša held a steady, responsible job that did not demand a high level of formal education. His wife, Slavica, was an engineer in one of the largest Swedish industries, which had recruited her from Germany. They did not come to Sweden as refugees, but it was war that made them leave Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the time I met them, they lived in a newly built middle-class area of family houses just outside a middle-sized town. They had two children: a daughter, Antonia, aged thirteen; and a son, Nikola, aged eleven. Although the parents are idiosyncratic in several respects, their ways of narrating their experiences exemplify many themes that are present in the stories of most of the families I have met. Significantly, they share a history of wars and ways of recounting war experiences that stretch back to World War II. The parallels between narrating experiences of the 1990s war and those of World War II have not yet been properly examined, and neither has the role of perpetrators’ intimate social networks during

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and in the aftermath of perpetration.23 Foreign commentators assume that “history repeats itself ” in this region, meaning that people belonging to different ethnonational groups have always tried to exterminate or expel each other and will keep on doing so. The analysis often stops at this point, never considering the fact that people meet and build important and intimate social relations across ethnonational divisions. Indeed, this omission means that outsiders, including those considered experts, come dangerously close to the prejudiced conclusion that a propensity for interethnic violence and even genocide is inherent in people who live in the Balkans.24 Looking more closely at what people say and how they talk about their experiences of war, both with their children and with the interested anthropologist, allows for a more nuanced understanding of memory, intergenerational transmission, and most importantly for our purpose here, the meanings of perpetration that might exist only in affects and silences. Before the war, both Slavica and Nebojša lived in a small town where all three major ethnonational groups were well represented and none had a majority. During the war the town was taken by the Bosnian Croat Army (Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane, HVO), and after the war it remained part of the Federation between Bosniaks and Croats. Today Croats are a majority, closely followed by Bosniaks, but there are almost no Serbs left. Slavica and Nebojša never considered a person’s ethnonational background important, and they still do not. Except for Nebojša’s parents, their families are ethnonationally heterogeneous, and all their siblings and parents fled their hometown during the war. Now only their aging parents have returned to live there. Slavica told me that her parents attempted to leave but did not succeed. Her mother was a Serb and her father was a Croat, and he felt insecure on the small country roads, so they returned. As the town soon came under the Bosnian Croats’ control, they remained there. Slavica told me that, despite the fact that her mother was a Serb, her parents had no problems for the rest of the war. Nebojša’s parents were both Serbs and fled the town in 1992 to a nearby Serb-held village where they had a summerhouse. Nebojša said that they returned after the war and did not experience any problems either. On the contrary, he said that when his father died some years ago, almost everyone in the town came to the funeral, which for him proved that his father was respected regardless of his ethnonational background. Nebojša told me that he avoided being recruited into the Bosnian Serb Army by fleeing to Serbia in 1992 to continue his studies. After a year, however, his aging parents were unable to support him, so he needed to find a source of income. He explained that he was not a very pushy or resourceful man, so he could not make his living by smuggling, which was the way many of his friends got by.25 His only other option, as he saw it, was to register for the

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Bosnian Serb Army, which paid. He knew that as a student he would be excused from service during the academic year and would have to be in uniform only during the summer months. I mean, when I look at what I could have understood down there [pause]. The army did not go anywhere, they didn’t, at least [in this region] there was not much waging of war [nije se puno ratovalo]. And the [front] lines were held, the borders were known from the start, because they [already in] ’92 had the borders of demarcation [razgraničenja], the same as the borders between the Federation [between Bosniaks and Croats] and [Republika] Srpska now. They did not wage war [ratovali] in the way they fought, like in [the rest of ] Bosnia [mumbled quietly]. There was no shifting of the lines: these attack, these defend themselves, these attack [pause]. No, there was none of that. And [pause] and that is one of the reasons why I went down there. Simply, there was no such [pause] problem of waging war. Just so that we understand each other.

When I asked him whether his unit was sent to some other front, as I knew was common practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he explained: Yes, they did, they did, two [or] three times, but I missed it all of these times. They did not send [the unit] when I was down there [chuckling]. It happened, I mean, they could have called [the unit] in [to another front] also during the time I was there. They did not [do that] before I came down there. They did the year after [I joined], but I could not have known that they would, right? I did not know that they would. [pause] Perhaps I would have reasoned differently before I registered if they had been sending [the unit to other fronts earlier]. But, simply, they were sent in ’94 and ’95 on two occasions to Goražde, and it was dangerous for them, but, but they simply held some positions again, they didn’t, not anything, they did not get killed, someone that I would know [about], I don’t know [of anyone]. But, I mean [pause], to get back to, to, to the essence, they did not [wage] some war, there was not much of a war, so that is the reason [why I registered in the army].

Nebojša seemed embarrassed partly because he avoided the active front and partly for excusing himself because he could not have known that the unit would be sent to a front. It was as if he were arguing his innocence in relation to two opposed ethical viewpoints: one that considered Serb soldiers to be defenders, and another that defined them as perpetrators. I was struck by his chuckling and his slight embarrassment at not having been sent to Goražde, one of the UN “safe areas” that the Bosnian Serb Army held under siege and attacked in the spring of 1994 and in May 1995, although they did not manage to seize

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the town as they did with the other two East Bosnian UN Protected Areas: Srebrenica and Žepa.26 Nebojša stressed several times that it was merely by coincidence that he did not participate in any fighting. His absence from the offensives on Goražde in 1994 and 1995 could not have been coincidental, however, since these campaigns were waged during the spring while he was still away for his studies. The Serb Army offensive on Srebrenica in July 1995 that followed closely on its failure to capture Goražde in May 1995, in contrast, was waged when he was in service. Was his unit not sent to Srebrenica? Was it already gone when he arrived after the end of the term? One thing was certain: although he registered in the army of his free will, he was not interested in fighting and was one of many people in Bosnia and Herzegovina who did not care about ethnonational differences. To prove this point, he told me that he was once assaulted in a bar by a fellow soldier who disliked him, and he thought that this was probably because he avoided fighting at the front. His story of the war was very characteristic, not only of the narratives of other former soldiers I met in Sweden but also for those I talked with during the war: the front where one served was not active; one’s unit did not really go anywhere and was certainly not involved in fighting; and the little shooting that occurred was directed against oneself, not a matter of one’s own unit shooting at someone else. While during the siege of Sarajevo the most uncanny thing for the soldiers was the fact that most of them did not know whether their shots had hurt or killed someone, this man did not even allow for that possibility: “That is, I was in uniform twice, for two, for two months in uniform. Without a single bullet fired. Simply, there was none, it simply happened so. To, to my joy.” When he told me that no one from his unit was killed during the offensives on Goražde, he was making a similar point: his unit was not engaged in any serious combat. Nebojša’s double and contradictory embarrassment, for being a Serb soldier on the one hand and for avoiding the offensive on Goražde on the other, is symptomatic of the double and contradictory definitions of perpetrators. On the one hand, Serbs are held as the main culprits of this war by almost everyone else except the supporters of Serbian nationalist doctrine, but on the other hand, he was betraying the Serbian cause by not participating in his unit’s military actions. I had a feeling that Nebojša was withholding information, which was not strange since we had only just met. I heard similar claims about never shooting a bullet from other former soldiers, and I might have been wrong about Nebojša, but it never sounded convincing. Who was shooting, if not the soldiers?27 I did not push the point, however, as my aim was not to search for objective truths or to induce people to tell me things they did not want to disclose. Rather, I wanted to see how people related to their different experiences

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of war. Was my methodology making me a passive bystander in relation to war violence, silently accepting Nebojša’s denial, or was the relationship of trust that I was building with Nebojša facilitating his testimony and my own position as witness contributing new knowledge about perpetration? Most parents in Sweden have not told their children much about the war in Yugoslavia, but this couple had not told them anything. When I asked thirteenyear-old Antonia whether she knew why they were in Sweden, she said: “Err, there was war in Bosnia. Mum studied in Berlin . . . Errrr, Dad, I actually do not know what he did. He never said.” After a while I returned to the subject and asked whether she knew something about the war. She said, “I have not thought about it,” and explained that she was not curious: “There is nothing special about it [pause]. War is war.” “Could you picture it somehow in your mind?” I asked. “Naah [pause]. It was very terrible [pause]. That is the only thing I know.” Her eleven-year-old brother, Nikola, also knew that there was a war and that their mother was in Germany before coming to Sweden, but he knew nothing about the war or his parents’ experiences at that time. The children’s lack of interest in the war and their perception that there was nothing special about it cannot be ascribed merely to their young ages. In a family from Srebrenica, two daughters of the same ages both knew quite a lot about the war and what had happened to their parents and relatives. They were also very engaged in helping refugees from other countries in Sweden as well as in sending help to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the damaging floods in 2015. The stark difference between the children’s knowledge about the war in these two families points once again to the fact that it is much easier to speak of victimization and to victims than it is to speak of perpetration and to perpetrators. It also indicates that Nebojša and Slavica classified Nebojša’s choices and experiences as possible perpetration, whether by their own standards or by the standards of the surrounding society in both the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sweden. Like most of the parents I interviewed, Nebojša said he would wait for his children to grow up a bit and start asking their own questions; then he would tell them anything they wanted to know. Interestingly, in other families with older children, the children sensed quite correctly that their parents were reluctant to talk about the war. Most of them told me that the war was still a very sensitive subject and that it was hard for their parents to explain what happened without falling into simplistic explanations of a situation that was difficult to understand.28 It is thus unlikely that the children in this family will pose many questions about the war, even when they grow older. In summing up the role that the war had played in their coming to Sweden, Nebojša told me quite explicitly:

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It was not so much the war [pause]. It did affect us, but it did not directly make us come [here]. I don’t know, we do not like to talk about it much, about the war and [pause] so far the children are not much interested either [pause] so they do not know.

Many of the parents I met in Sweden place the responsibility for gaining knowledge about the war on their children, which they did not do with other important experiences in their lives. The difficulty of talking about adverse experiences, which are often traumatic and on the verge of what is impossible to tell, is a well-known phenomenon in instances of massive political violence.29 Research on the Holocaust, for instance, has shown that the parents either completely avoid talking about what they have been through or overload the children with moral messages and commemorations, sometimes even naming them after lost members of the family.30 Significantly, Slavica never mentioned that Nebojša was in the Bosnian Serb Army. She said only that he started studying in Serbia in 1992 to avoid recruitment into the Serb reserves “because he did not want to” join or participate in the war. When she explained what she thought was worst in their hometown during the war, she said that it was not so much the Serbs who were shelling the town, because that was somehow impersonal: you did not know who did and did not do it. But when the Bosnian Croat Army took over the town, they expelled the Muslims: “People would come to the door and take you out, and take you away, and beat you maybe, and I don’t know what; that some sort of close contact happened.” She thought that the Croats should ask for forgiveness instead of expecting Muslims to forget, but that did not happen and she saw it as a major problem today. In “soldier” terms, she was excusing the Serbs, the group to which her mother, her husband, and her parents-inlaw belonged. Her father was a Croat, yet she was blaming the Croats for both wartime ethnic cleansing and postwar denial, which is a “deserter” stance. In her experience, there were obviously Croats and Croats: some who committed and never apologized for ethnic cleansing, and others who, like her father, were “Bosnian and Herzegovian patriots” who yearned for an ethnonationally blended country. When she was talking to me, however, her stance was clearly “civilian”: the war and nationalism were simply unacceptable and should never have been allowed to happen. She had believed that after World War II nothing similar would ever happen again. Yet it did, and she determinedly refused to understand why, since all the explanations seemed to justify the war. This was still a point of disagreement with her husband, she acknowledged. Perhaps it was one of the reasons why they could not explain the war to their children. He attempted to understand how and why it happened and why people made

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certain choices: a “deserter” stance. She took an uncompromisingly pacifist and antinationalist “civilian” position: “I do not want to look for an explanation at all, or to understand that sort of stupid, ugly idea. . . . No, I want to say ‘that is not good,’ and now I want to do something that would repair that. Instead of explaining it.” Slavica’s position gains a completely new significance when we consider her family background and what she told me about their experiences in World War II. Her mother, a Serb, was born after her Serbian father had been killed by Ustaše (Croat nationalist and fascist soldiers) in 1941. Her mother seemed especially sad because in the recent war, too, she lost many Serb friends and relatives. Slavica’s parents came from the same ethnonationally mixed village, where during World War II all the Croats were Ustaše and all the Serbs were killed. By default, this situation makes Slavica’s father’s family, who were Croats, killers of her maternal grandfather. According to all her parents’ stories, however, members of the two groups socialized and got along nicely in the village after the war. Only her maternal grandmother, who had lost her husband to Ustaše, told her what had happened and how she felt. Slavica was the only one of her siblings who was interested in these stories. She heard from her maternal grandmother that she was not pleased when her mother decided to marry a Croat, but she liked him as a person and never felt or held anything against him. On her father’s side of the family, no one ever talked about World War II. “I do not know that other side,” she told me. Perhaps, she guessed, it was because they felt ashamed that they did not do something to stop the Ustaše from killing Serbs. Her father, who was a child at the time, told her that he never talked with his parents about it. She recounted: “They also had a period when they, when—Now, who came into [the town], četnici or partizani? Who would know?—when they, too, were refugees for a few months, and returned to the burned down houses, and so. I mean, what do I know. Very, very hard situations to understand, to grasp who did what, how they did it. But, I tell you, they too had that period when they were refugees during the Second World War, and they were coming back again.” While Slavica’s maternal grandmother occupied a characteristic “victim” position in this story, the story of her father’s family was more ambiguous. Were some of them Ustaše, or supporters of Ustaše, who killed the Serbs? Or were they passive bystanders who could have done something to help their neighbors and friends but did not? While she had not asked and could not answer these questions, she could tell me that they, too, had suffered. The whole story has a “deserter” character, which does not really fit with her otherwise “civilian” stance. Moreover, in describing potential perpetrators as victims, it resembled

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her husband’s description of his unit that was sent to attack Goražde: as proof that his unit did not do much harm in Goražde, he told me that as far as he knew nobody in the unit was killed! As if the only possible way of telling about combat is to place oneself in the position of the victim: we were also shot at, although luckily nobody got killed. The twist of perspective from perpetrator to victim is significant: it seems impossible to say that someone one is closely associated with did, or could, actually harm someone. Slavica thought that one reason why her father’s family did not talk much about World War II was that the postwar period, when he was growing up, was future oriented and characterized by the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity (bratstvo i jedinstvo). Perhaps one did not [pause] like, did not care to turn back and look, they [family] did not much insist on telling, and then it went like that. . . . Until that situation comes again, so that one starts now again to think about it: what happened, how it happened, perhaps I should have been told more, perhaps I should have been more interested or something. What do I know? I do not know. But otherwise, at least I, like, I cannot say that my opinion about everything that is going on is correct, but still, when I look at it, people somehow avoid [pause] they avoid admitting that they did some bad things. I mean, I do not know why this is so hard. We blew it [light chuckle]. That is why I say: so okay, so we blew it, we can try to set it right and go on. But people somehow rather want to find an excuse, why this is so, they did this, we did that [pause]. I don’t know.

Here we see that Slavica thinks that one should admit, apologize, repair, and go on, but in her own stories of World War II and of the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she does not ask whether her paternal family and her husband were perpetrators, while the story of her mother’s family as victims stands clear. Her own family in Sweden seems to be in a situation that resembles her father’s situation growing up in postwar Yugoslavia, where all people were to live together in harmony and there was no need to look back. She is raising her children as Swedes in Sweden, where the future possibilities are many and the diversity of backgrounds is respected. Like her father, she sees no reason for her children to look back or ask sensitive questions. Yet Slavica is clearly aware of the problem: Should I, as a parent, say more? Should I, as a child, have been more interested, asked more questions? So far, both she and her husband have taken no responsibility for transmitting their experiences of war to their children. And the children will probably not ask about things they feel are sensitive subjects and seem too complicated to understand, just as she herself did not pose these questions to her parents.

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This example supports the conclusion that who is perceived as a perpetrator is context bound, that perpetration is socially stigmatized, and that telling and researching it is done in terms of victimhood, which illuminates the entanglements of perpetration and victimization. Moreover, telling is laden with affect that often leads to silences, and research raises moral dilemmas and questions of complicity. Entanglements of Victimhood and Perpetration In the many violent fields of the 1990s and early 2000s, anthropologist have discovered that victims and perpetrators are not distinct categories, as many had thought, but that the same person could often be both.31 Ethnographies about child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone, for example, have poignantly shown that most of the children were abducted and violated in many ways before they became perpetrators themselves.32 In genocide studies, which were for a long time dominated by research on the Holocaust, the insight that the victim-perpetrator-bystander division is a circle of fluctuating positions has recently started to gain ground as historians have increasingly worked with oral history and local people who still remember and tell stories of mass political violence.33 In psychology, it is well understood that in our inner worlds, the shift between feelings of victimhood and perpetration can happen very quickly. Indeed, many perpetrators of peacetime violence had been harmed earlier in their lives.34 A recent incident in Sweden illustrates the presence of perpetratorvictimhood in our lives and the swiftness with which we can shift between the two positions. In my son’s school, a boy came back from the swimming pool quite shaken, as another boy he did not know had hit him in the changing room. Apparently the other boy was offended by something he had said, although he swore that he had not even noticed the other boy before he was hit. When the parents discussed this incident after school, the parent of the boy who had been hit reacted with surprisingly intense anger, as if wanting to scare the boy who had been offended, to threaten him so he would remember and never do this again. When another parent pointed out that the boy who had been offended must be used to others saying insulting things about him, which was probably why he misunderstood the boy whom he then hit, overreacting with violence, the parent of the boy who had been hit calmed down and felt ashamed about wanting to hurt a child. This episode has nothing of the scale that we associate

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with perpetrators of mass political violence, but the psychosocial processes are similar: the shift between the son’s victimization and the parent’s impulse to retaliate was almost instantaneous; the probable social reality behind the quick shift to perpetration by the boy who had been offended was his daily exposure to discrimination. Victimhood and perpetration are two faces of the same coin. In the aftermath of the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, victimization and perpetration are unavoidably intertwined: in Slavica’s story about World War II, the Croat part of her family were both refugees and potential perpetrators; in Nebojša’s story about the 1990s war, the other soldiers in his unit could kill and be killed. In telling me these stories, however, it was impossible for either of them to say that the people they were associated with were possible perpetrators. Temporally, spatially, and socially distant perpetration is easier to talk about: Slavica seemed to have more tolerance for the impersonal violence of the Bosnian Serb Army’s shelling of her hometown than the more direct, face-to-face ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Croat forces, and she could not bring herself to tell me that her husband was in the Serb forces. Nebojša, who was a soldier in the Bosnian Serb Army that did the shelling, felt the need to free himself from any doubt or suspicion that he might have caused injury or death. In Sarajevo, the uncanny feeling arose because in most cases soldiers did not know whether they had killed or not. Thus, the ethical dimension of perpetration is crucial to what will not be told. This is an important ethnographic fact but even more significant methodologically. The moral confusion of war experiences makes it difficult to understand “who did what,” as Slavica put it. The “hard facts” are hard-to-get facts, and truth is a matter of sociopolitical construction in a certain context, just as perpetration is.35 Yet understanding is essential for survival during a war, as well as for the stories told in its aftermath. Slavica expressed her wish to understand World War II better, but the complexity of the situation and the lack of stories about it made that difficult. The “soldier” position, which perceives one’s own soldiers as defenders and “the other side’s” soldiers as aggressors, makes it possible to structure the chaos of war in a more comprehensible way as well as to tell a clear and ethically acceptable story about it. Interestingly, though, most of my interlocutors who had experienced the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Croatia never remained in the “soldier” position for long. In the family story here, both parents were clearly avoiding the “soldier” position: Slavica mostly taking the “civilian” stance and Nebojša mostly taking the “deserter” stance. As a result, their story of the war remained unstructured, contradictory, and morally complicated. Thus they were silent about the war, and their children lacked knowledge about it.

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Context, Intersubjectivity, and Effects of Perpetration For stories told in the aftermath of a war, the sociopolitical context is crucial. For Slavica’s and Nebojša’s children, as for their maternal grandfather, the context of their growing up affects what they will ask and get to know about their parents’ war experiences. Their grandfather grew up in futureoriented postwar Yugoslavia, where his family’s experiences of the war were ambiguous and, according to the country’s official history, on the perpetrator side. Thus, what the family experienced during World War II was best left in the past. Similarly, for the children growing up in Sweden, there is no need to dwell on their father’s ambiguous role in the 1990s war. Memory researchers have shown that family stories can create a counternarrative to the official ones—“a different kind of war story,” to use Carolyn Nordstrom’s phrase.36 In this case, however, the absence of an official story of the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sweden is quite similar to the absence of family stories. To the extent that Swedes have a shared understanding of what happened, it is that the Serbs were guilty and the Bosniaks suffered— a very simplistic “soldier” position that puts Nebojša’s experiences on the morally condemned side. Methodologically, the context in which the stories were told to me also affects their content and the ways in which they were told. Anthropological fieldwork and the collection of first-person narratives is an intersubjective process shaped by the researcher’s relations and interactions with interlocutors.37 During the various periods of my work, I have had different personal relations to the violent contexts and different intersubjective relations with my interlocutors. Relatedly, I also used somewhat different ethnographic methods. In Croatia in 1991, I was personally implicated as a citizen and reacted strongly against the omnipresent state nationalism. Early on, I realized that doing research on war in Croatia would be ethically too hard for me to tolerate and emotionally too costly. In Sarajevo I was a partial outsider, but I also shared a common belonging to former Yugoslavia, the very country that was dissolving through the war. I was both a “stranger and a friend,” to use Hortense Powdermaker’s classic expression, which gave me a rich understanding of people I met but also a sense of distance that made it possible to observe and reflect without being overwhelmed by emotions and ethical dilemmas.38 Yet in Sarajevo I was exposed to violence. That experience enabled me to understand its citizens and everyday life better but also took a psychological toll.39 This is one of the reasons why I designed my next research project differently: I situated it in peaceful Sweden, and I focused on what was being remembered and

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communicated about mass political violence, not on what it was like to live in a war zone. I came into contact with the family I have presented here through their close friends, which created a positive atmosphere, although we did not know each other before I began interviewing them. I had been to the war, as they had, and I had a son born in Sweden after the war, just as their children were. Being a stranger and a friend allowed for many insights but also made some research questions impossible to address.40 The fact that this was our first meeting may help explain why some sensitive details were omitted. At the same time, the fact that I had been in the war enabled me to pose more informed questions, for example, about sending the military units to other fronts. But I did not know much about the situation in their hometown during the war, so many nuances may have escaped my attention or simply not been offered by these rather taciturn parents. Therefore, during our conversations, as well as afterward while listening to their recordings, I have been sensitive to slight shifts in the speed of speech, lowered or heightened tones, an uncomfortable chuckle, or a resigned “I do not know” uttered at moments of heightened ambiguity. These small affective shifts usually pointed to something meaningful in the story.41 This approach can be a central methodological technique for doing research on experiences that are morally charged, seldom spoken of, and hard to verify. Yet the meaningful truths of people’s perceptions and perspectives are present in their affects, or silent avoidances of affects. Because of the intersubjective, emotionally ambiguous, and ethically charged nature of work with mass political violence, it takes its toll on the researcher. The ethnographic method, in which we use interpersonal relations and our own experiences as sources of knowledge, means that we are engaged as complete beings in the phenomena that we are studying. In the case of mass political violence, this immersion evokes a range of strong feelings and bodily reactions.42 In addition to “disrupted sleep and a lot of weeping,” this type of research arouses moral qualms and may inflict psychic injuries.43 What thoughts and feelings flow through our minds and bodies when we meet a perpetrator? Are we disgusted, or are we terrified? Are we angry, frustrated, and irritated, or are we overwhelmed with sadness? Do we have nightmares, feel depressed and hopeless, become anxious or nauseated? Some scholars of genocide have described feelings of fear, terror, and nausea while working with perpetrators, while sorrow and anger seem to be more dominant in work with victims and their losses.44 Yet all work with mass political violence also involves adrenalin kicks and excitement.45 The thrill of this work is often hard to admit because it is morally ambiguous: How can we find reading about Nazi perpetrators exciting? Some of it might come from the

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adrenalin that rises when we feel danger, which we often do when researching mass political violence. Not only are we sometimes in physical danger, but we may also be politically and morally compromised. Most of the emotional charge, however, probably comes from our genuine curiosity and the sense of heightened existential relevance of this kind of research. Indeed, many researchers have felt the gratification that engaging in existentially significant work creates, and meeting resilient and generous people is also profoundly gratifying.46 Moreover, many of us have felt a sense of awe for life that always exists after, parallel to, and beyond perpetration. Anthropologists’ research questions and fieldwork methodology involve subjectivity and social interactions with our subjects. I have used a direct and personal tone in this chapter in order to be methodologically and ethically clear about the intersubjective aspect of research that is invaluable in perpetrator research yet remains relatively rare because it is often discomfiting, poses difficult dilemmas, and arouses strong emotions. This writing style also allows me to achieve a higher degree of reflexivity and self-reflexivity, a methodology I have tried to exemplify when discussing ethnographic examples in the chapter. Thus, regarding the central issues of methodology and ethics in this volume, I suggest that reflexivity and self-reflexivity are necessary in studies of perpetrators and perpetration.47 Conclusion To sum up the insights presented in this chapter, the definition of perpetration is a matter of larger, often national contexts, intimate social relations, and inner moral dilemmas. At the same time, the very concept of “perpetration” poses theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas: It seems that we need to implicitly deny the possible perpetration in order to be able to even start talking about it with our interlocutors. Moreover, the meaning of perpetration as a theoretical concept is questionable once we understand how unstable it is and how impossible it is to separate it from victimhood. Thus theory, methodology, and ethics are inseparable in this kind of research, just as they are in the world we study. We have seen that one and the same person can be seen as a hero in one context and as a perpetrator in another, and that acts that are seen as perpetration are most often done by “ordinary men” and women who are accepted and supported by their social networks, just like Nebojša is.48 This intimate social acceptance, which may be reinforced by societal and national acceptance, along with the psychological need to feel that one is a moral person and to associate

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with other moral persons, makes it almost impossible to talk about oneself and other important people in one’s life as perpetrators. Thus, a lot of conversation will focus on perpetrators’ victimization. Using the intersubjective methodology will put us in the position to understand them, if not accept their deeds. This is further complicated by the fact that perpetrators often also are victims, and realizing this, as researchers, we might find ourselves in morally, politically, and socially ambiguous and uncanny positions. I suggest that, although the exclusive categories such as perpetrator and victim are useful in some ways, they do not do justice to the complicated, often obscured, and contradictory events and people we study. I have suggested the concept of a “continuum of perpetration” in order to capture the spectrum of different roles that actors can have and of choices they can make, in contexts ranging from “spectacular perpetration” to seemingly benign situations that we usually do not connect with perpetration. The same concept also captures the processes of group mobilization by evoking affects of fear, leading to instantaneous psychological process through which real or perceived victimization is redirected into potential or actual acts of perpetration toward the perceived threatening “other.” I have analyzed ethically contradictory positions in different narratives through the concepts of “civilian,” “soldier,” and “deserter” stances. While the “civilian” stance gives us the vision of a world devoid of perpetration and thus silences the perpetration already committed, the “soldier” stance orients us by the means of oversimplified moral dichotomies of victims and perpetrators. The position of “deserter,” however, opens up a space for new insights that are closer to the intricate and contradictory world of mass political violence. My hope is that by using the nuanced methods of intersubjective communication through affects and silences, as well as reflexively and self-reflexively broadening our understanding about what has been said or not said, we can find more nuanced concepts and processes in all the untold stories of perpetration and its ideological and moral accomplices.

Notes 1. Montenegro, the only republic that was left with Serbia in what remained of Yugoslavia, seceded from the union peacefully in 2006. For useful accounts of the breakup of former Yugoslavia, see Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1992); Mark Thompson, A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (London: Vintage, 1992); Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); and Susan

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Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1995). 2. For an explanation of the term “ethnonational” and the relationships among national, ethnic, and religious belonging and identification in Sarajevo, see Ivana Maček, Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 124. 3. The ethnonational blend of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the result of its dynamic history. For detailed accounts, see Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and Cathie Carmichael, A Concise History of Bosnia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4. See also Elissa Helms, Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 120; and Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: “Normal Lives” and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 27. 5. For more about imagining perpetrators, see Kjell Anderson’s chapter in this volume. 6. See, for example, Gustav Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (1947; repr., Boston: Da Capo, 1995); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; repr., London: Penguin, 2006); Eugene Bird, Prisoner #: Rudolf Hess: The Thirty Years in Jail of Hitler’s Deputy Fuhrer (New York: Viking, 1974); Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1975; repr., Bronx: Ishi Press International, 2010); and Anne Kubai, “Conducting Fieldwork in Rwanda: Listening to Silence and Processing Experiences of Genocide,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 111–26. Films on genocide and mass political violence include Blood Diamonds (2006) and Woman See Lot of Things (2006) about war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), The Killing Fields (1984) about the Cambodian genocide (1975–79), and Hotel Rwanda (2004), Sometimes in April (2005), and Shake Hands with the Devil (2007) about the Rwandan genocide in 1994. 7. Snipers, who could see clearly through the sniper scope the person they were aiming at, were perceived as guiltier than other soldiers. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (1981; repr., London: Athlone, 1999). 9. I use the term “war friends” for people whom I met in Sarajevo during the siege and with whom I quickly built a strong friendship, which was a common phenomenon during the war. Maček, Sarajevo under Siege, 29–30. 10. See, for example, Ivana Maček, “Sarajevan Soldier Story: Perceptions of War and Morality in Bosnia,” in No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, ed. Paul Richards (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 57–76; Maček, Sarajevo under Siege, 5; and Ivana Maček, “Predicament of War,” in Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, ed. Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder (London: Routledge, 2001), 197–224. 11. For a different categorization of victims, defenders, and perpetrators on the Sarajevan Serbs’ side, see Ionnis Armakolas, “Sarajevo No More? Identity and the Sense

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of Place among Bosnian Serb Sarajevans in Republika Srpska,” in The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, ed. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 79–100. 12. Several anthropologists have written about situations of political violence where choices could be made only among bad options, yet they were possible and sometimes necessary to make. See Begoña Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Chris Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Ivana Maček, “Making Involuntary Choices, Imagining Genocide, and Recovering Trust,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 140–58; Mats Utas, “Agency of Victims: Young Women’s Survival Strategies in the Liberian Civil War,” in Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth as Emerging Categories in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Alcinda Honwana and Filip de Boeck (Oxford: James Currey, 2005); and Timothy Williams, “The Foot Soldiers of Evil: On the Importance of Individual Perpetrators in Genocide Prevention,” in Last Lectures on Prevention and Intervention of Genocide, ed. Samuel Totten (London: Routledge, 2017), 53–59. Lawrence Langer, a historian of the Holocaust, coined the concept “choiceless choice” for this phenomenon. Lawrence Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Death Camps,” Centerpoint 4, no. 1 (1980): 222–31. 13. “Ordinary men” generally manage to follow orders to kill unarmed people. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Alexander Hinton has analyzed the extreme psychic conflict, or “cognitive dissonance,” felt by people who committed atrocities that were politically approved by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia but violated their personal and cultural ethics. Alexander Laban Hinton, “Why Did You Kill? The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998): 93–122. The psychic collapse of the young Croatian solider could be understood in terms of overwhelming cognitive dissonance. 14. The wartime legalization and legitimization of what would be crimes during peacetime is an essential element of the “soldier” position. 15. Several anthropologists have written about the continuum of violence, or “genocidal continuum,” between peacetime and wartime. See, for example, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (1995): 409–20. 16. In most nation-states, peacetime laws tolerate high levels of nationalism and hatred as long as people do not act on their views violently. 17. Dressing children in military uniforms is a widespread phenomenon. See, for example, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 18. Most of the fighting in Croatia initially took place around the barracks of the former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and during its retreat, while the later fighting was in regions with large Serb populations. When the war ended in 1995, most of the

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Croatian Serbs in these regions had been ethnically cleansed by the Croatian Army in an internationally supported offensive called “Oluja,” or “Operation Storm” in the English-language news media. 19. Maček, Sarajevo under Siege, 203–7. The obscurity of facts in contexts of mass political violence was first described by anthropologist Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (London: Routledge, 1992), 17. 20. A case in point is the Croatian general Gotovina, who was wanted by the ICTY but seen by many in Croatia as a war hero. See Vjeran Pavlaković, “Croatia, the ICTY, and General Gotovina as a Political Symbol,” Europe-Asia Studies 62, no. 10 (2010): 1707–40. 21. This family story is part of the materials gathered within a recent project, “Intergenerational Transmission of Experiences of War among Bosnians in Sweden: A Study in Psychological Anthropology,” financed by the Swedish Bank’s Tercentenary Fund (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). The fieldwork was carried out in 2014–15. 22. All personal names are fictive, but they reflect the ethnonational identity of my interlocutors, as this identity is important for understanding their choices and attitudes during and after the ethnonationally framed war. 23. For the importance of family research as a link between public and private, or the political, sociocultural, and psychological, see Astri Erll, “Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 42, no. 3 (2011): 303–18. 24. See, for example, George Kennan, “The Balkan Crisis: 1913 and 1993,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 1993, 3–7. 25. My impression of Nebojša corresponded with his self-description, as did the differences between his and Slavica’s education, employment, and incomes in Sweden. 26. Carmichael, A Concise History of Bosnia, 154. 27. Silences about the Serbian perpetration have also been described by Jelena Obradović-Wochnik, “The ‘Silent Dilemma’ of Transitional Justice: Silencing and Coming to Terms with the Past in Serbia,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 2 (2013): 328–47. 28. Maček, “Family Stories,” 29–40; Maček, “Transmission and Transformation,” 15–35. 29. Maček, “Engaging Violence: Trauma, Self-Reflection, and Knowledge,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 1–24; Ivana Maček, “‘It Starts to Burn a Little’: Intergenerational Transmission of Experiences of War within a Bosnian Family in Sweden,” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 37 (2017). 30. Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (London: Penguin, 1988); Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); Natan Kellermann, “Psychopathology in Children of Holocaust Survivors: A Review of the Research Literature,” Israel Journal of Psychiatry & Related Sciences 38, no. 1 (2001): 36–46.

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31. Maček, Sarajevo under Siege. 32. Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers; Mats Uta, Sweet Battlefields: Youth and the Liberian Civil War (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2003). Other books and films on child soldiers have also shown that they were both victims and perpetrators. See, for example, Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008); the documentary film Woman See Lot of Things (2006); Chris Abani, Song for Night (New York: Akashic Books, 2007); Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); and Delia Jarrett-McCauley, Moses, Citizen, and Me (London: Granta Books, 2005). 33. Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 34. Tomas Böhm and Suzanne Kaplan, Revenge: On the Dynamics of a Frightening Urge and Its Taming (London: Carnac Books, 2011); Ervin Staub, The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults, and Groups Help and Harm Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 35. See Maček, Sarajevo under Siege, 137. 36. Astri Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 37. See Marita Eastmond, “Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 248–64. 38. Hortense Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (New York: Norton, 1966). 39. Maček, “Engaging Violence.” 40. Maček, Sarajevo under Siege, 131. 41. I have shown elsewhere that when parents expressed affects in their stories about their experiences of war, the stories were meaningful to the children and they remembered them. Further, the facts of parental stories were often lost or changed in children’s narratives, while affects were correctly understood and remembered. See Maček, “‘It Starts to Burn a Little’”; and Ivana Maček, “Family Stories: Between Experience and Myth,” Etnofoor 30, no. 1 (2018): 29–40. 42. See Maček, “Engaging Violence.” 43. Debórah Dwork, “To Work with the History of the Holocaust,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 32. 44. Katherine Bischoping, “Identity and Mutability in Family Stories about the Third Reich,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 56–73; Kubai, “Conducting Fieldwork in Rwanda”; Mats Utas, personal communication, 2002. 45. See, for example, Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So (New York: Grove, 2014 [1999]).

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46. Ervin Staub, “Life in the Trenches: Hope in the Midst of Human Tragedy,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 34–41. 47. For a similar call for reflexivity in research on mass political violence, see Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, eds., Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 48. Browning, Ordinary Men.

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

G e t t in g C l o s e w i th Perpetrators in Ar g e n t in a EVA VA N Ro E K E L

O

ften concerned with the oppressed and persecuted, anthropological studies of war and violence have frequently been dedicated to making victims’ voices heard. To gain more insight into violence in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of perpetrators of genocide and human rights crimes.1 During my ethnographic fieldwork on the renewed crimes against humanity trials in Argentina, I devoted a great deal of my time to engaging with the perpetrators of the last military dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983.2 Among the most notorious crimes were the death flights during which (imagined or real) opponents were drugged and thrown still alive from an airplane over the South Atlantic. Critical journalists, left-wing politicians, progressive priests, university teachers, intellectuals, union leaders: anyone could be chupado (sucked up) in broad daylight by the civil-military regime and never seen again. Any form of political deviance to the regime could be lethal. Pregnant women were captured and tortured too. Military families and their supporters appropriated the newborns without revealing the infant’s identity or informing its biological families about their “adoption.” These children are sometimes called the “living disappeared.” Ever since, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have not stopped the collective search for their stolen grandchildren.3 Many victims, human rights activists, prosecution lawyers, and even some federal judges in Argentina’s courts understand and frame the crimes against

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humanity, such as torture with the picana (electric prod) and disappearance, as “genocidal” and its executers “genocidas” (perpetrators of genocide), though framing the state crimes of the last dictatorship in Argentina in terms of genocide is controversial.4 The main reason for the unsettled dispute about this legally and morally potent legal prohibition is that the targeted group of Argentinians did not belong to one ethnic or religious community, for example, but instead were persecuted because of their perceived political affiliations, which is a form of social group that is not included in the United Nations (UN) Genocide Convention. Framing the crimes as genocide (or not) was not the only analytical hazard. When I set out to do fieldwork, the at times imaginary boundaries between the sufferer and the wrongdoer, and people’s corresponding judgments about perpetrator’s actions and empathy with the victim’s experiences, were still ingenuously and comfortably sharp. It is almost redundant to say that real life is much messier. Well-established legal categories of violence and accountability become slippery terminologies in the field, sometimes even untrustworthy. The tribunals in Argentina had set the boundaries of who could be considered a perpetrator and who not. But soon I understood that loyal officers of the same generation who were not being prosecuted (and thus not officially recognized as perpetrators) belonged to a wider community, including friends and kin, that had been involved in the perpetration and cover-up of the state crimes. Crimes against humanity are often a collective undertaking, as is keeping them secret.5 I decided not to ignore but to include their stories and experiences, as it further complicated narratives, motivations, justifications, and memories about perpetration and accountability in Argentina. Getting close to several indicted and loyal military officers and their kin on a daily basis in court, prison, and at their homes enabled me to look beyond monolithic assumptions about the preponderant absence of remorse at the courts as a strategic practice to deny accountability and blame.6 Silence about atrocities was more than a tactic to deny accountability. The indicted and loyal military officers in Argentina judged remorse and confession mainly in terms of disloyalty and betrayal. This is not to say that they were untroubled by the atrocities. By getting close and exploring the absence of a feeling, I gained fundamental insights into sociomilitary dynamics that are often ignored in the study of perpetrators. Field procedures that allow an ethnographer to get closer to the people he or she tries to understand are crucial to the ethnographic practice. Successful ethnography in large measure is determined by the ethnographer’s ability to establish trust and good rapport, and one of the main ways cultural anthropologists have established such relations is by the development of friendships

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with particular individuals.7 Beyond a doubt, my intimate and recurrent engagements with the military officers helped me gain nuanced insights into their local moral world. Becoming a kind of friend was inevitable. Cultural understanding on violence and accountability arose mainly from casual conversations with the military officers about many things, the crimes being the exception, as well as from participatory observations during typical convivial prison visits that included Argentinian food, laughter, smokes, and drinks. This everyday empathy with “evil” has not been without consequences in regard to my professional and personal relations with the victims.8 One becomes part of an eerie withdrawal from the atrocities. Despite the moral and practical complexities of conducting ethnographic fieldwork among victims and perpetrators of the same violent conflict, I believe this simultaneous practice is vital for a comprehensive anthropological inquiry into violence. We should look not only into suffering but also into “dark matter” to better comprehend how genocide and atrocity take shape and transform societies, as noted in the introduction to this volume. However, not everyone in my professional and private life agreed on this prerequisite to engage with genocidas for the sake of better understanding. There is a thin line between comprehension and exemption. I will return to this dilemma in the conclusion. Getting In and Becoming Silent For seven years, a civil-military regime brutally repressed the armed revolutionary struggle of a left-wing guerrilla movement. The violent state actions belonged to the so-called Process of National Reorganization that aimed to exterminate an internal Communist threat and protect a way of life grounded in Catholic and conservative values.9 During this dark period, thousands of Argentinians were illegally detained in numerous detention centers throughout the country, where they were severely tortured and murdered or deliberately made to disappear. When political power was handed over to a democratic regime in 1983, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, CONADEP) was implemented to document and eventually prosecute the crimes. The nine military junta leaders were put on trial in the so-called junta trial. Five generals were convicted and four were acquitted. Two amnesty laws barred subsequent prosecution for lower rank and file: the Full Stop Law and the Due Obedience Law. In 1989 the subsequent government pardoned the five convicted junta leaders. Ever since, the transitional justice trajectory in Argentina has been an altering process between impunity and accountability.10

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After more than twenty-five years of official impunity and a remarkable struggle for truth and justice, in 2005 the Argentinian Supreme Court annulled the amnesty laws that protected members of the police and armed forces from prosecution. Argentinian domestic courts have now been prosecuting the inalienable crimes since 2006. More than 3,100 people have been accused, mainly members of the armed forces. The court issued 201 sentences, in which 864 people were convicted of crimes against humanity and 109 were acquitted.11 In 2009, during my first visit to Buenos Aires, a former guerrilla member I had interviewed had put me in contact via an acquaintance in the military with an ex-major called Aldo Domínguez. Aldo himself had also been an active soldier during the regime, but he was not held responsible for any crimes. He became my gatekeeper to many indicted and loyal officers, including his brother. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ignacio Domínguez had been indicted for crimes against humanity and had recently been incarcerated in pretrial custody at a military prison. Of all the indicted officers I had met in prison, I got most close to Ignacio and his family. His brother had made my prison visits even possible. Instead of months of bureaucratic procedures to get in, in a few minutes my entrance was arranged as a friend of the family. In the beginning, most indicted officers and their wives were hostile about my visits to prison. Being aware of their hostility, Aldo introduced me to the indicted officers as the Dutch anthropologist who was interested in the “political prisoners.” I did not openly resist this introduction and soon many officers came to see me as a vehicle with which to voice their stories about a increasingly degraded position in Argentina.12 My nonjudgmental approach was fundamental at this initial stage of fieldwork. After a while, various indicted officers started sharing stories. They mostly tried to convince me, the “Dutch anthropologist,” that they actually were very decent military men instead of genocidas who committed atrocious crimes. They all said that they had fought a “just war,” and they all believed that they were being incarcerated illegally and unfairly. To substantiate their innocence, officers showed me copies of their allegations, or showed pictures of happy family events. Although I managed to establish rapport, many officers and their wives remained hesitant about sharing their stories, as if they always expected sudden condemnatory questions or blame. Avoidance, withdrawal, silence, and reluctance to talk characterized my time among military officers and their relatives to a great extent. I also maintained my own silences and evasions. Instead of discussing the crimes of which the military officers were accused, we talked about their military codes, their families, contemporary political scandals, and rising levels of insecurity and poverty in Argentina. They were often openly concerned with my well-being: a young, foreign woman in a large and

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unsafe Latin American capital. We rarely talked about the specific crimes for which they were indicted; somehow, we always managed to circumvent the topic. I say “we” on purpose here because this avoidance of talking about torture, death flights, appropriation, rape, and killing was an intersubjective matter. I almost never directly asked about their involvement in the human rights crimes. Only once did an indicted military officer openly speak about an accusation that he had tortured a detainee for more than twelve hours, which had given him a reputation in the local media as one of the cruelest torturers of the regime. He reasoned that it was all complete nonsense. I remember that instead of probing any further about his involvement in the torture, I asked him why he thought that his superiors had not given any official statements during the court hearings. I easily circumvented the violence in our talk, again becoming silent about the atrocities. These field processes can be quite uncomfortable because often by not addressing the crimes, one becomes part of an obscure “circle of silence.”13 Instead of discussing his involvement in torture and assassination, Ignacio kept questioning the legitimacy of civilian law for crimes committed under military jurisdiction. Multiple times he confided that military warfare and war crimes followed a different logic of liability. Ignacio always said that he was not guilty of the crimes. Visiting him in prison, besides discussing the trial’s proceedings and his innocence, we also talked about grandchildren, about memories of his time as an active officer before the military regime, and about his present life in prison with his fellow inmates, which resembled his former life in the military barracks. Ignacio often also made fun of his circumstances and we laughed.14 One afternoon, again talking about nothing in particular, Ignacio told me that he had cried because a military band had played a beloved military march just outside the wire fence. His story surprised me, even more than the realization that this normally emotionally reserved man eagerly wanted to share it with me. His tears seemed almost unbecoming. I have to admit that I was touched by his openness. I asked him why he had gotten so emotional. Did he feel guilty for what he did? Ignacio replied that listening to military marches instead was encouraging; in particular, the San Lorenzo march had always kept up his morale. The marches always made them feel really proud. “Imagine listening to them in here!” The sounds brought back nostalgic memories of soldiering and military comradery. Ignacio’s tears were not an expression of remorse or regret, evidence that he was a decent soldier. Instead of rejecting his attempt to present a likeable image as an irrelevant and immoral strategy in my analyses, and to be a “moral researcher,” I cross-examined Ignacio’s tears and explanation by discussing them with other officers and their relatives and also by reading military handbooks

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and military justice codes. After a while, to some extent, I could understand and empathize with his nostalgic tears. Sociologist Kathleen Blee found similar dynamics in her fieldwork with women in the Ku Klux Klan, where she states that although it might be comforting if there were no commonality of thought and experience when conducting fieldwork among people you despise, interviews and fieldnotes often suggest a more complicated and a more disturbing reality.15 Perpetrators may have considered opinions, may love their families, and can be generous to neighbors and friends—and also to an ethnographer. People whom you (or society) consider evil can be likeable at certain moments. Inappropriate Confessions After several months of allegations and testimonies, Ignacio declared for the last time during the final hearing that he never felt responsible for or guilty of the crimes of which he was accused. He stated that for him the boundaries between loyalty and complicity were very clear.16 Another indicted officer addressed his final words directly to the victims who had criticized their preponderant lack of remorse by explaining that expressing remorse was impossible; atonement would be synonymous with accepting culpability.17 Ex-general Jorge Rafael Videla, the former head of the junta, also justified the repressive methods of the armed forces between 1976 and 1983 on more general terms that day. He acknowledged that there had been irregularities and mistakes in “this imprecise war” that were difficult to justify, but they had been the result of subversive, unconventional warfare. Before his closing words on God’s justice, harmony, and reconciliation, Videla congratulated his subordinates who were currently being prosecuted for their loyalty, except one sergeant: “Sergeant Molinos is an inoperante [incompetent].”18 Videla’s last words on the imprecise warfare were newsworthy in Argentina.19 The local dailies wrote at length about his renewed justification of the violence perpetrated and his palpable lack of remorse.20 Also intrigued by Videla’s last words, I examined the online archives of the same dailies to discover what Molinos had done. One short article in the popular daily Clarín described how the sergeant had asked for forgiveness for his involvement in the killing of an illegal detainee at a detention center during a previous court hearing.21 Very few indicted military officers have shown remorse in Argentina. Putting war criminals on trial undoubtedly engenders this lack of remorse to avoid self-incrimination, but legal jeopardy fails to explain why Videla condemned Sergeant Molinos. Why had Videla called him incompetent? Had Molinos

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somehow betrayed his fellow men through his public act of remorse? Remorse (and lack thereof ) among the indicted military officers became an important trope in my fieldwork. Why and how were many of them incapable of feeling remorse? Other anthropologists have studied the cultural differences in the experience of remorse. Victims of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, for instance, considered perpetrators’ responses on due obedience and remorselessness extremely unsatisfactory.22 Nancy Scheper-Hughes offers an interesting overview about remorse and lack thereof, comparing Colin Turnbell’s ethnographic account of the atonement of a hunter’s excessive greed in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]) and her own analysis of how white South Africans also make sense of black and colored suffering without feeling remorse.23 Renato Rosaldo’s exploration of headhunter’s rage among the Ilongots in the Philippines also uncovers an absence of remorse after violent death.24 These analyses of remorse (and lack thereof ) provide important insights into how perpetrators experience and interpret the violence in which they actively participate. The Argentinian officers typically understood the guerrilla violence of the 1970s and the military counterinsurgency quite differently than civilians. They believed that they had protected their fatherland from a severe Communist threat that would have brought their country into permanent chaos and disorder. This made the state’s crimes inevitable and justifiable. There is little room for remorse in such shared righteousness of the atrocities. Instead they repeatedly articulated unforgiving opinions about the few public military confessions in Argentina. Aldo, for instance, often disapproved of the loose-lipped and, in his opinion, “hypocritical” officers who expressed regrets. He once said, “A good soldier always obeys, and cannot feel guilty for innocent lives that have been lost.”25 Asking if he thought it was really impossible that an officer would be remorseful and ask for forgiveness regarding his actions on duty, Aldo reasoned that it was “unmilitary” to atone. Besides economic benefits, according to Aldo, the military officers had only confessed for political reasons and personal convenience. For Aldo, human beings were always full of interests that a good military man should suppress: “Although things could have been done better [in war], I know of no real military that really atones.”26 Aldo was surprisingly confident that he would never break down like these few officers did before the local media or the courts. He said that if he had done something “barbaric” during “the war” that deserved remorse, he would never repent. Many officers perceived the military actions against the guerrilla warfare as manifestations of loyalty, obedience, and professionalism, which were endorsed and redeemed by members of the Catholic Church.27 Argentinian commanders even elevated their counterinsurgency war to a spiritual level, which had

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transformed their troops into God’s army on Earth, and truly believed that they had the constitutional right to defend Argentina’s cultural heritage.28 In the case of the indicted and loyal military officers I spoke with during fieldwork, this cultural construction of a “just war” and spiritual crusade, however, only partially explained their relationship with the violence. There were other coexisting moral attitudes that rejected remorse for the violence perpetrated, particularly among lower military ranks. Corporate loyalty and due obedience also seemed to rule out possibilities to atone. A classical essay on military honor, state violence, and moral consciousness in Argentina shows that abandonment of institutional loyalty is a true disgrace for military men.29 Sociologist José Enrique Miguens’s central idea is that the military in Argentina is not primarily guided by individual moral codes or shared societal values but by military norms and corporate values. Its honor and disgrace are thus mutual. From this perspective, remorse is not an individual feeling but a collective act of disloyalty embedded in a corporate military structure (esprit de corps). Many officers spoke about the Argentinian equivalent, espíritu de cuerpo, and the corresponding chain of command to explain and justify their actions. Together with his son Eduardo, who is an active captain in a tank division, Aldo once contemplated responsibility, remorse, and military morals in more detail.30 Espíritu de cuerpo was the true cohesion that existed within a group; all its members had to identify with the group in the same way. I could sense that this military unity was important to them, but I was unaware of its greater meaning. Noticing my incomprehension, Aldo compared espíritu de cuerpo with a family or an operating room, where everyone executes different duties but with the same objective. Successes and failures were always collective undertakings. A working espíritu de cuerpo followed a rigid chain of command. They explained that in the heat of battle when bullets fly around, officers and soldiers could not argue with their superiors about whether they should or should not fire their guns. They simply followed orders. Their handbooks and justice codes also condemned deliberate obstruction of authority as betrayal that would be punished with imprisonment or even death.31 I must admit that the due obedience argument of many Argentinian officers (and among other military perpetrators elsewhere) sounded suddenly uncomfortably convincing. After some beers, cigarettes, and a whiskey, our conversation became more casual and I felt an opening to question them about remorse and accountability. Probing them about guilt and remorse, Eduardo replied that guilt emerged only when one executed something wrongly: “In the moment of executing an order, your thoughts and actions are for a common good. . . . I will only feel guilty if I did something that did not accord with me.”32

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According to their regulations, the commanders-in-chief were fully responsible for what was done and what was not done. Eduardo further reasoned that he received orders from his superior: “I do not know the end of [an order], but it is ordered to me, so I execute it for the good of service and in fulfillment of the laws and the military regulations.”33 Still trying to counteract the due obedience rationale, I asked in response: “What happens if you receive an immoral order? Does an officer enter into a crisis of consciousness?” Aldo responded immediately that he would simply not execute such an order and added angrily, “That makes General Balza a hypocrite and a coward!”34 There are multiple explanations for a torturer to come forward: remorse was only one of them, and heroic justification and economic reasons in forms of exchange payment may also have triggered military officers in Argentina to confess.35 While talking about remorse with military officers, the iconic stories of General Martín Balza and Captain Adolfo Scilingo often arose. Captain Scilingo’s testimony and Balza’s mea culpa in the mid-nineties provoked strong reactions in Argentinian society and the national armed forces. Scilingo’s story was a personal confession of how he had thrown people alive from airplanes over the South Atlantic, crimes that continued to trouble him at night. This was first public confession related to these “death flights.” General Balza confessed in more general terms about the grave crimes committed by the armed forces. Studies of these military confessions have mainly focused on the political, institutional, and societal consequences of these public acts of remorse and accountability.36 In particular, members of the armed forces bitterly disapproved of General Balza’s mea culpa: army officers were not supposed to take a public stance without clearance as a matter of discipline.37 Former President Carlos Menem even accused Scilingo of being a criminal and warned other former torturers and assassins to confess to a priest.38 I was more interested in how military officers judged these confessions themselves. They also gave multiple reasons ranging from post-traumatic stress, political convenience, power, and greed. Whatever the reason may have been for Balza and Scilingo, for Aldo and Ignacio they were the antiheros of the armed forces. These loose-lipped officers had betrayed them. Their stories of forgiveness were actions of disloyalty and disclosed a general disapproval of public confessions about military involvement in the crimes of the last dictatorship.39 Proliferating Silence Retired colonel Alfonso Palacios had also been an active military officer between 1976 and 1983, and like Aldo he had not been held responsible

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for crimes against humanity. One late afternoon we sat in his study. Asking Alfonso if we could talk about military ethics and military education, he gave me a shabby dark-blue book he had used at military school more than thirty years earlier. Alfonso said that during his years as an army cadet, his teachers and superiors always indirectly or directly referred to this book. Although our conversations hardly ever became very personal, I noticed that the book had special value for Alfonso. He got rid of most of his schoolbooks, but he kept this little handbook and said that the book contained the origin of what it meant to be part of the military. “This is like revealing the psyche of a military. . . . It shows that command is not a mere authoritarian act but that it has an entire system behind it.”40 The military origin myth mostly elaborated on the military chain of command. True command was the action that the superior executed to his subordinates with the object to direct, persuade, and influence in such a way as to obtain their voluntary obedience, confidence, respect, loyalty, and active cooperation in the performance and the fulfillment of the mission.41 Another Argentinian handbook on military chain of command and a military justice code also mentioned this naturalness of duty, a superior’s responsibility, and obedience.42 One book even stated, “If a soldier withdraws from corporate loyalty, he places himself outside the army.”43 In other words, disloyalty unmakes the soldier. The handbooks and codes echoed Aldo and Eduardo’s interpretation of espíritu de cuerpo and the betrayal of confession. It reasoned that espíritu de cuerpo was the mental and emotional state of a military organization, which could only be achieved when individuals fully identified with the corporate values, interests, and objectives and had adopted them as their own. This unity would make them feel proud and satisfied with shared successes and depressed with shared failures.44 All these readings on the chain of command were a bit repetitive; I was more struck by an explicit list of feelings and physical sensations of which officers firmly disapproved, such as pain, hunger, fatigue, and fear. Another list instead stated that trust, faith, discipline, and honor enhanced positive human behavior and military spirit. Remorse and guilt were not specified in the entire handbook, as if they literally did not exist.45 Without suggesting that these military officers are incapable of experiencing remorse, institutional silence about the atrocities affects how these men endorse military actions. Military loyalty continues to be a powerful myth about military bonds that is intimately tied to the notion of military loyalty.46 Without claiming a totalizing view, besides strategic performances to avoid self-incrimination, military culture definitely shapes emotional inclinations toward remorse. I started to understand that the recurrent demand for remorse

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and truth at the courts by victims would remain largely unanswered. While remorse was not what these men felt, I did notice that they were less convinced about the “unconventional methods” they had employed during the last dictatorship. Alfonso Palacios and I had another long talk in his study at his home.47 It was again an alluring conversation about a just war, military codes, and the unconstitutionalities of the current trials in which Alfonso did most of the talking and I was carried away in his seductive reasoning. Almost wrapping up, Alfonso emphasized once more that in each war there were disappearances: “Here in Argentina, they really exploited this figure of the disappeared, you know. It somehow has become a death impossible to transcend or recover from. . . . The mothers of soldiers of the [torpedoed] cruiser General Belgrano were never able to bury their sons. . . . After an assault on a bar, neither could mothers bury their sons and daughters. These youngsters were simply left in pieces of flesh and at that moment there was no such thing as DNA identifications.”48 It was not the first time that afternoon that the disappearances emerged; only at the end did I feel an opening to ask Alfonso—cautiously—about the deliberate practice of disappearances in Argentina. Alfonso stumbled in response, “Well . . . what do I know . . . I do not know . . . I should think this over . . .”49 After this short silence—it was not more than a few seconds and a few stumbling words—Alfonso quickly returned to the political and economic interests of the figure of the disappeared in Argentina. Again, he justified their military actions with the unconventional methods of guerrilla warfare, which created an irregular war zone that did not respect military law. Alfonso’s words were persuasive, but his silence had articulated something else. The silence did not look like deliberate amnesia: Alfonso had somehow communicated, without words, a certain discomfort about their military actions. Although I agree with sociologist Leigh Payne in her work on military confessions that military officers in Argentina never openly admitted their involvements in the crimes committed, their silences do not always turn the violent past into a “non-event.”50 Alfonso’s stumbling words were not a strategic gap in public discourse either.51 Instead of amnesia or remorse, the unforeseen silence was a moment of “conflicting feelings.”52 There had been something wrong with the functioning of the military institutions since los aquellos años de plomo (these years of lead). However, to atone would have suggested guilt, and guilt implied that he did something wrong, but that was not exactly what Alfonso felt. With the experience of shame, something was wrong with them. Although it is not the individual self that was “under attack”—military personhood clearly transcends

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the boundaries of modern, civilian individuality—the conceptual difference between “wrong doing” and “wrong being” is helpful to disclose the complex workings of motivations, justifications, and memories about perpetration and accountability. Within the corporate structure of the armed forces and its frames of fraternity, blame and accountability were hardly ever assumed in person, yet the malfunctioning during the last dictatorship had damaged their entire military institution. This collective malfunctioning directly affected the officer’s sense of self. This institutional collapse interacted dynamically with the officers’ own feelings. Through such experiences of shame, one recognizes falling short of one’s moral standards of being.53 In other words, the experience of shame puts the self in question. Shame then, is a matter of existential foundations that are being brought into question rather than having done something wrong. Rather than facing wrong being, reinterpretation, self-splitting, forgetting, denial, and a desire to distance oneself from the entire situation can easily arise.54 Historian Graham Dawson’s notion of “subjective composure” discusses similar dynamics among British soldiers.55 The stories soldiers tell do not only construct favorable formal and coherent narratives; these stories also “compose” a version of the self that can be lived with in relative psychic comfort. Ethnographers interested in perpetrators are not free from helping interviewees construct a comfortable sense of self. Sometimes I even actively participated in constructing favorable narratives that presented not only an acceptable version of the perpetrator but also an acceptable version of the researcher (me). Subjective composure does not tell the entire story, though. To comprehend genocide and war crimes, we must delve into the unspoken to be able to convey more complex meanings of how people live with executing violence in their every day. This must include not only the silences of those we try to understand but also researchers’ own silences while getting close to perpetrators. Military officers in Argentina live in transformative social contexts, in which their military performances have become more and more criticized and now are even prosecuted by civilian criminal law.56 According to new paradigms on the employment of violence and changing conceptions of history in Argentinian society, military officers have been pressured to rethink their lives and actions.57 Alfonso’s silence mostly resembled this pressure to rethink. Without framing it into psychiatric diagnostics, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychic discomfort continues to prowl. I believe that it is in the cracks of “subjective composure” (or the silences, for that matter) that we can see that violent comfortable selves are not permanent compositions. Psychic comfort and discomfort alternate.

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Coded Stories of Shame In 2010 retired captain Rafael Araballeda and I met a few times at his home. He was also not indicted like some of his fellow navy officers. During a conversation, the topic of the Malvinas War, which was fought against the British in 1982, arose. For Rafael it was really the fatal blow. He shouted, “It was a true disgrace!”58 Rafael continued that the war against subversion was also fought wrongly, but the Malvinas had brought another difficulty, which had further aggravated the social decline of the armed forces. Rafael thought there still remained a certain amount of blame for not having executed both wars soundly. He explained that soldiers should be experts in the management of violence. They must always employ the minimum of violence possible to reach the objective. Noticing a small opening that afternoon, I asked Rafael about the death flights. He considered them terrible. In the same self-assured voice, Rafael continued that the disappearances were one of the biggest mistakes of the military. He reflected, “It shows an enormous lack of responsibility and is deeply shameful.”59 He quickly added that if he had been ordered to do such a thing, he would have refused firmly, and he judged his superiors: “There is a great amount of naivete or arrogance, thinking that people who committed [these crimes] would escape punishment; it is of dishonorable arrogance!”60 Other military officers had been less open about their critique. Rafael’s straightforward answers on the shamefulness of their actions were quite unusual. In 2012 Rafael and I met again. Asking his opinion about sudden public interest for commemorating the Malvinas/Falklands War and its veterans in Argentina, Rafael again shouted, “It is a military shame!”61 He was not referring to the current commemoration. Rafael explained that the Malvinas War had been an ill-equipped and disorganized military operation that had ended in a brutal defeat by the British. This time I could ask Rafael more straightforwardly, “What about the practices of disappearing ‘subversives,’ the death flights, and the illegal adoption of babies? Is this shameful in military sense as well?” Rafael first refuted firmly the idea of a systematic plan of stealing babies, but he agreed that these interventions were badly executed and a vergüenza (shame) to the armed forces. He asked me rhetorically, “How could [the junta members] think that these wrongs would not end up becoming apparent?”62 In 2012 the Argentinian journalist Ceferino Reato published the book Dispoción final: La confesión de Videla sobre los desaparecidos (Final disposal: Videla’s confession about the Disappeared). Reato describes how Videla had experienced the disappearances during the last dictatorship as a “bad aftertaste,” and he had

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chosen to leave a revised version of this past for history.63 According to Reato, Videla had finally tried to reverse the trouble that was bothering his soul. Videla’s contribution to history was acknowledging his responsibility in such a way that society could understand what had happened. In the book, he admits four errors: the coup itself, the resistance against a political opening, the disappearances, and the institutional failure to have delegitimized the systematic plan of child kidnapping.64 Videla also wanted to alleviate the situation of lower ranking officers who were now being prosecuted. They had not been capable of refusing to obey orders because of the broad military culture of due obedience.65 Videla’s objectives of raising public understanding and alleviate his subordinates’ position did not produce the desired effects among the general public or the military institutions in Argentina. Yet time will tell. Two years earlier, Videla and I also had a conversation in prison. He did not allow me, however, to record the conversation, or to make notes, and so I only listened. I was in no position to challenge his demand.66 Videla mainly wanted to tell me that it had been a democratically elected government that had issued the decree to hand over power to the armed forces. He still seemed very confident about his intervention and he considered “Operation Independence” and the subsequent military coup legitimate actions. He added determinedly, “They knew it would be war . . . big mistakes are made in each war.”67 Videla distinguished between military and political interventions: they had won the military cause, but they had lost the political one. He said that he took full responsibility for all that had happened. Yet Videla insisted that he never gave orders to implement a systematic plan to steal babies: it just happened, and his men had to do something. Afterward they had officially decided to give them away for adoption. He said that during the junta trial in 1985, there had been many accusations of torture, murder, and kidnapping; these “adoptions,” however, had not been a real issue. Videla reflected that years later the illegal adoption of political subversives’ babies became part of a systematic plan. He finished by saying that Argentinian society as a whole was guilty. Again, I did not probe his direct involvement in the appropriation of the children or the death flights. That would have been inappropriate and most probably immediately end the conversation. One quickly learns to walk the fine line of what can be discussed and what should be left unsaid. Instead I asked if he thought that the armed forces were currently being scapegoated at court. Videla nodded reservedly in agreement. By then I had started to concentrate on coded expressions of military disgrace. Other military officers, although never exposing their identities, also reluctantly talked about their malfunctioning during the dictatorship. Aldo Domínguez, for example, said: “There have been things that we could have

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executed better. This is what the Americans call ‘review after action,’ the Marxists call it ‘auto critique,’ and others call it a ‘consciousness exam’; such things are always [practiced].”68 Other officers in prison and at the courts used similar euphemisms, like “excesses of war” that should have been punished at a military tribunal, like robberies. There were moral differences between these euphemistic “excesses of war.” The crimes of the disappearances, the death flights, and the appropriation of newborn infants were inexplicable for many military officers too; crimes like excessive torture, rape, theft, and corruption belonged to the more understandable yet deeply immoral category of excesses of war. “Traditional” gender norms and family values regarding women and children, and also institutionalized Catholic moral standards regarding greed, lust, and deceit, intersected with officers’ institutional moral standards. Although some acts of violence were moral and other forms of violence were not, officers were silent about both. When Aldo once brought up rape, I was stunned to have a conversation about it. A recent legal recognition of rape as a crime against humanity at a trial was the immediate cause of an uncomfortable conversation.69 For Aldo, rape at the detention centers was not a systematic crime; officers’ military codes and Catholic faith prohibited this firmly, he said. Theft and appropriation of houses were also deeply immoral actions according to their codes; these crimes had to be punished in a military tribunal. Aldo said that they were never ordered to do so, but he admitted that rape happened anyway. He tried to explain it from his viewpoint. He clarified that they had never imagined a female enemy. He said, “You always constructed an ugly enemy in your mind, but suddenly we were confronted with attractive young women.”70 To reinforce his explanation, Aldo used the example of me being his enemy at an ambush. This unexpected personal twist in the conversation was awkward and uncomfortable. We quickly changed to the more general topic of the gray areas in the illegal detention centers where rape had definitely happened. Again, I had actively participated in silencing discussion of these crimes. Aldo further reasoned in generic terms that some women had offered their bodies in return for freedom; other women constructed sustainable relationships with military officers after their detention. Still, Aldo admitted reluctantly that terrible sex crimes had been committed, but according to him, they were not systematic, meaning that they were not ordered from above. These officers’ decisive tones (spoken and written) and their interpretations of wrong can be easily interpreted as justification for the crimes. Through active engagement and personal involvement at their homes, prisons, and the courts, knowledge from their viewpoint of these wrongs arose. Officers’ reluctant acceptance of the “mistakes” of the last dictatorship was not only about

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the so-called euphemistic rotten apples. Leaving aside whether they were directly involved in the crimes or not, these officers were reluctantly telling me that institutional moral collapse had touched them personally. Compromised Knowledge? By analyzing the atrocities from a military viewpoint, coexisting moralities of the crimes against humanity arose that ruled out confession and remorse. Local logics of just war, espíritu de cuerpo, due obedience, moral socialization processes of feelings, and coded stories of shame simultaneously affected how military officers in Argentina experience perpetration and accountability. By approaching officers’ values and intimacies without exposed judgment, I was able to perceive how and why they admitted certain wrongdoings. I believe that this alternative understanding about perpetration could only have emerged by getting close to the military officers and their relatives. Collaboration would have been difficult, most probably even impossible, if I had approached the military officers openly as “perpetrators.” Working with perpetrators was only possible through acknowledging and reproducing implicit rules of behavior, which was first of all never composing them as the “perpetrator” and never asking directly about the atrocities and their involvement. Silence was required. Often I just listened, and I did not ask many confrontational questions. I talked about my family and my studies, and I probed only a little, leaving many critical topics unmentioned. I quickly learned the kind of behavior that was considered appropriate for a young foreign woman: not having strong political opinions and geopolitical knowledge and instead showing interests in family matters, health, and education. The latter were themes that military wives and daughters also talked about. Becoming nonpolitical and slightly ignorant about the atrocities was appropriate. Questions that were too critical about illegitimate warfare and officers’ direct involvements in the prosecuted crimes would have been clear tokens of my moral position and would have definitely closed off the opportunity to further engage with the perpetrators. By following their implicit rules of decency and silence, based on family values, gender, their military codes, and Catholic faith, a certain “professional friendship” emerged. What are the consequences of approaching perpetrators in a context of crimes against humanity without openly judging them in order to understand how people experience their lives under the conditions in which they find themselves? What does this kind of “professional friendship” with perpetrators imply

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for knowledge productions on violence? It was often easy to succumb to military avoidance of talking about serious matters. By not openly addressing and never condemning the crimes, I became part of military officers’ “circle of silence” and therefore partially responsible for the social neglect that surrounded their crimes. My convivial field encounters with military officers and their kin also reinforced their efforts to present themselves as decent men. Moreover, writing prison stories and publishing them for a wider audience may reproduce the likeable images of the now-convicted military officers in Argentina. This complicity with perpetration may look unethical but in my view reflects to a great extent how perpetrators and their families in Argentina live with crimes against humanity, thereby increasing our knowledge and understanding about the afterlife of human rights crimes and genocide. I like to argue that this understanding of perpetrators does not involve justification, but not everyone in Argentina shares this opinion. Friends and colleagues understood (and some continue to do so) that this increased understanding and empathy with the military may not only lend itself to justifying the atrocities. It also carries the danger of further obfuscating the boundaries between friend and foe in this postconflict society. For many Argentinians, empathic understanding is not a temporal collapse of self and other but an irreversible process that transforms ideas, feelings, and judgments about, in this case, the atrocities.71 I believe that those interested in getting close to perpetration must continuously reflect on this continuum of understanding and justification, or comprehension and exoneration from responsibility. How other people interpret and judge the stories of the perpetrators in Argentina varies greatly. The social implications of ethnographies on perpetrators perhaps carry even a greater responsibility. The line between knowledge and ignorance is thin and flexible and, obviously, depends on its audience. This is why some Argentinian friends and colleagues think it is better to leave certain people and topics, such as perpetrators and perpetration, un(der)studied.

Notes 1. See, for example, Eyal Ben Ari, Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit (New York: Berghahn, 1998); Andrew Bickford, Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Edna Lomsky-Feder, “Life Stories, War, and Veterans: On the Social Distribution of Memories,” Ethos 32, no. 1 (2004): 82–109; Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina

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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Nikkie Wiegink, “Why Did the Soldiers Not Go Home? Demobilized Combatants, Family Life and Witchcraft in Postwar Mozambique,” Anthropological Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2013): 107–13. 2. Besides conducting unstructured interviews with the victims, the federal judges, human rights lawyers, and mental health practitioners working with victims, I also frequently met with the indicted military officers and their relatives. 3. See, for example, Ari Gandsman,“Retributive Justice, Public Intimacies and the Micropolitics of the Restitution of Kidnapped Children of the Disappeared in Argentina,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012): 423–43; Michael Lazzarra, “Kidnapped Memories: Argentina’s Stolen Children Tell Their Stories,” Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 3 (2013): 319–32. 4. Daniel Feierstein, “Sobre conceptos, memorias e identidades: Guerra, genocidio y/o terrorismo de estado en Argentina,” Política y Sociedad 48, no. 3 (2011): 571–86; Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 5. Ram Natarajan, “The Knowledge of People Disappeared during Argentina’s Military Rule,” Human Studies 41 (2018): 293–311. 6. David Bloomfield, Teresa Barnes, and Luc Huyse, Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: A Handbook (Stockholm: International IDEA, 2003), 104; Leigh Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. 7. Jeffrey Sluka, “Fieldwork Relations and Rapport,” in Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Jeffrey Sluka (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 121. 8. Eva van Roekel, “On the Dangers of Empathy with the Military in Argentina,” Ethnos (2019), https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1687549. 9. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. 10. Van Roekel, “On the Dangers of Empathy with the Military in Argentina.” 11. “Proceso de justicia estadísticas,” CELS, accessed May 28, 2019, https://www .cels.org.ar/web/estadisticas-delitos-de-lesa-humanidad/. 12. Eva van Roekel and Valentina Salvi, “Unbecoming Veteranship: Convicted Military Officers in Post-Authoritarian Argentina,” Conflict and Society 5, no. 1 (2019): 115–31. 13. Other anthropological studies have shown similar reciprocal field processes between an anthropologist and military officers, which profoundly shaped the research relationship. See, for example, Bickford, Fallen Elites; and Antonius C. G. M. Robben, “Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina,” Ethos 24, no. 1 (1996): 71–106. 14. Eva van Roekel, “Accessing Emotions through Humour in the Contemporary Argentinean Transitional Justice Trajectory,” The Unfamiliar 3, no. 1 (2013): 24–33. 15. Kathleen Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993): 605. 16. Field notes, December 22, 2010.

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17. Field notes, December 22, 2010. 18. Field notes, December 22, 2010. 19. It was not the first time ex-general Videla confronted punishment. He had been prosecuted and sentenced for the disappearances at the junta trial in 1985; nevertheless, a few years later, the amnesties and general pardons undid the verdict and obstructed further prosecutions until 2005. The Full Stop and Due Obedience laws did not cover court cases linked to illegal appropriation of children. As a result, military officers, including ex-general Videla, have been prosecuted for crimes committed as a result of abducting children and altering their identities. See Rebecca Lichtenfeld, “Accountability in Argentina: 20 Years Later, Transitional Justice Maintains Momentum,” Case Study Series of the International Center for Transitional Justice, 2013, http:// ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Argentina-Accountability-Case-2005-English.pdf. 20. See newspaper clippings: “En su alegato final, Videla reivindicó la represión y justificó sus métodos,” Clarín, December 22, 2010; “Videla fue condenado a prisión perpetua e irá a una cárcel común,” La Nación, December 22, 2010; “El dictador volvió a reivindicar sus crímenes,” Página 12, December 21, 2010. 21. See newspaper clipping, untitled, Clarín, November 10, 2010. 22. Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, 277. 23. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Violence and the Politics of Remorse: Lessons from South Africa,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, ed. João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University California Press, 2007), 179–82. 24. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989). 25. Aldo Domínguez, interview with author, June 22, 2010, Buenos Aires. 26. Domínguez, interview. 27. Máximo Badaró, Militares o ciudadanos: La formación de los oficiales del Ejército Argentino (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2009), 78; Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina, 180. 28. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina, 179–85. 29. José Enrique Miguens, Honor militar, conciencia moral y violencia terrorista (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana/Planeta, 1986), 17. 30. Aldo Domínguez and Eduardo Domínguez, interview with author, March 23, 2012, Buenos Aires. 31. Article 667 in the Military Justice Code states, for instance, that ostensible resistance or refusing a service order that was communicated by a superior will be punished by imprisonment, or in front of the enemy with the death penalty or indefinite imprisonment. “Código de Justicia Militar,” Official Gazette, Buenos Aires, August 6, 1951 [July 4, 1951]. 32. Domínguez and Domínguez, interview. 33. Domínguez and Domínguez, interview. 34. Domínguez and Domínguez, interview. 35. Leigh Payne, “Confession of Torturers: Reflections from Argentina,” paper presented at the History Workshop and CSVR conference “The TRC: Commissioning the Past,” Johannesburg, June 11–14, 1999.

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36. For detailed descriptions and analyses of these officers’ confessions, see Eric Hershberg and Felipe Agüero, Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: Visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005), 20–21; Badaró, Militares o ciudadanos, 311; Aldo Marchesi, “Vencedores vencidos: Las respuestas militares frente a los informes ‘Nunca Más’ en el Cono Sur,” in Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: Visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia, ed. Eric Hershberg and Felipe Agüero (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005), 202–4; Patrice McSherry, Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1997), 263–66; Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina, 351– 52; and Valentina Salvi, “Sobre ‘memorias parciales’ y ‘Memoria Completa’: Prácticas conmemorativas y narrativas cívico-militares sobre el pasado reciente en Argentina,” in Topografías conflictivas: Memorias, espacios y ciudades en disputa, ed. Anne Huffschmid and Valeria Durán (Buenos Aires: Nueva Trilce, 2012), 274. 37. McSherry, Incomplete Transition, 265–66; Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina, 419n31. 38. McSherry, Incomplete Transition, 263. 39. In the case of Argentinian military officers who were on active duty between 1976 and 1983, this lack of experiencing remorse must be further located in a sociomilitary organization. An anthropological study on new army cadets in Argentina has also shown how a “moral socialization of emotions” during the first year of military training at the Military School of the Nation in Argentina interacted with the cadets’ emotions. Badaró, Militares o ciudadanos, 127–37. While some feelings are cultivated during these years of training, others are neglected or actively modified. Remorse and guilt are also those reworked feelings. 40. Alfonso Palacios, interview with author, March 30, 2012, Buenos Aires. 41. Ejército Argentino, Ejercicio de Mando (Buenos Aires: Instituto Geográfico Militar, 1968), 2. 42. Article 514 of the Argentinian military justice code, in force between 1976 and 1983, states: when a crime is committed because of execution of a service order, the superior who gave the order will be the only person responsible, the inferior will only be considered accomplice if he exceeded in its execution. “Código de Justicia Militar.” 43. See André Gavet, Rivera Brito, and César Córdoba Narváez, El Arte de Mandar (Quito: Centro de Estudios Históricos del Ejército, 1996), 72–84. This is a book of a French officer from the Napoleonic army, which is frequently consulted by the Argentinian army. Badaró, Militares o ciudadanos, 224, n78. 44. Ejército Argentino, Ejercicio de Mando, 6. 45. Ejército Argentino, Ejercicio de Mando, 14–15. 46. James Connor, “Military Loyalty: A Functional Vice?,” Criminal Justice Ethics 29, no. 3 (2010): 279–82. 47. Alfonso Palacios, interview with author, October 22, 2010, Buenos Aires. 48. Palacios, interview. 49. Palacios, interview.

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50. Payne, Unsettling Accounts, 194. 51. Lee Ann Fujii, “Shades of Truth and Lies: Interpreting Testimonies of War and Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 2 (2010): 239; Amal Treacher, “Postcolonial Subjectivity, Masculinity, Shame and Memory,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 291. 52. Robin Sheriff, “Exposing Silence as Cultural Censorship: A Brazilian Case,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (2000): 117. 53. Steven Tudor, Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 186. 54. The experience of shame is an overall attack on the self, and people often handle it with reinterpretation, self-splitting, or forgetting, and it provokes denial and a desire to distance oneself from the entire situation rather than face it. See, for example, Michael Lewis, “Self-Conscious Emotions: Embarrassment, Pride, Shame, and Guilt,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (New York: Guilford, 2008), 628–29; and Brian Lickel, Toni Schmader, and Marchelle Barquissau, “The Evocation of Moral Emotions in Intergroup Contexts: The Distinction between Collective Guilt and Collective Shame,” in Collective Guilt: International Perspectives, ed. Nyla Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52. 55. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 22. 56. Eva van Roekel and Valentina Salvi, “Unbecoming Veteranship: Convicted Military Officers in Post-Authoritarian Argentina,” Conflict and Society 5, no. 1 (2019): 115–31. 57. See, for example, Bickford, Fallen Elites, 94. 58. Rafael Arabellada, interview with author, October 18, 2010, Buenos Aires. 59. Arabellada, interview. 60. Arabellada, interview. 61. During my third fieldwork period, in 2012, there were many commemorations of the Malvinas War, marking thirty years since the start of the conflict. It was a kind of renewed interest after long social and official neglect. Rosana Guber, “The Malvinas Executions: (Im)plausible Memories of a Clean War,” Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 5 (2008): 124. See newspaper clipping, “Malvinas, herida abierta,” La Nación, April 1, 2012. 62. Field notes, April 13, 2012. 63. Ceferino Reato, Disposición final: La confesión de Videla sobre los desaparecidos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2012), 28–32. 64. Reato, Disposición final, 205. 65. Reato, Disposición final, 34–36. 66. Covert research and covert recordings are considered unethical in anthropology (see Code of Ethics AAA 2009). My military interlocutors informed me in 2018 that Reato secretly taped his interviews with Videla, which in my view further complicates the ethical dilemmas of working with perpetrators. Working with perpetrators

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and abiding by professional ethics of informed consent may clash with personal ethics in revealing information about crimes. 67. Field notes, October 7, 2009. 68. Domínguez, interview. 69. The Argentinian sociolegal organization Center for Legal and Social Studies (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, CELS) also dedicated several pages in its annual report of 2012 that the inclusion of gender-related crimes in international law—as crimes against humanity—had favored several victims to reveal sex crimes during court hearings, which has produced important advantages in the judicialization of sex-related crimes committed during the last dictatorship in Argentina. CELS, Derechos humanos en Argentina: Informe 2012 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2012), 70–71. 70. Aldo, interview. 71. Eva van Roekel, Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020).

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

As s a d ’s P a ra m i l i ta ri e s Sh a b b i h a P er p e t r ator s i n the Sy r i a n C i vi l Wa r uĞuR ÜmIt ÜNgÖR

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n Thursday, August 6, 2015, the nineteen-year-old Suleiman al-Assad, a first cousin once removed of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and a member of the pro-Assad paramilitary National Defense Forces (‫)قوات الدفاع الوطني‬, was driving through the coastal city of Latakia.1 According to eyewitnesses, Suleiman was driving his Hummer when another car overtook him in a traffic jam. Suleiman followed him to an intersection, swerved his car around, got out with an AK-47, and shot the driver dead with seven bullets to the chest. He then got back into his car and fled the murder scene, disappearing off the radar for a while. Amid a brutal civil war that claims the lives of dozens of people every day, a murder such as this one would hardly have been a surprise. However, the incident took an unexpected turn when the victim was identified as Hassan al-Sheikh, a prominent colonel in the Syrian Air Force. ProAssad loyalists, headed by the al-Sheikh family and the army milieu, organized demonstrations in Latakia city demanding the arrest and execution of Suleiman, who had fled the city. The murder and its aftermath exacerbated tensions between the Syrian army and the National Defense Forces, nearly culminating in clashes. There was public outcry when at first the police were perceived to be lax in not arresting young Suleiman, but he was arrested a few days later near his village of Qardaha. On Thursday, January 21, 2016, the municipal court in Latakia city sentenced him to twenty years in prison for murder.2 The public

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expectation was that he would sit out his sentence in the relative comfort of house arrest or at a hotel, but at the time of writing, he had not appeared in the most recent court session and was most probably in hiding. This event, in a microcosm, encapsulates a range of issues and problems relating to conflict, civil war, and the perpetration of atrocities during periods of mass violence. This chapter examines how and why paramilitaries have been involved in the perpetration of mass violence against civilians in Syria. It discusses the Syrian example within an implicit and explicit context of other cases, focusing on their similarities and differences, rationale and logic. The chapter analyzes perpetration by focusing on the relationship between the perpetrators and the state, both central and local government authorities. A thorough understanding of these dynamics can clarify the direction and intensity that state-orchestrated violence can take in a civil war. I approach the problem through a historical and sociological lens, using close analysis of both primary documents and interviews I conducted during fieldwork across Europe and the Middle East as follows: in Homs, Syria, in 2006; across Lebanon in 2009; and in Turkey and Germany between 2012 and 2018. The documentation consists of nongovernmental (NGO) reports, newspaper articles, social media posts, and leaked files. I also used open and semistructured interviews to analyze the actions of pro-Assad paramilitaries and map their structures and embeddings in the state. Interviews with former stakeholders about past or present conflicts is a challenging endeavor, but other experts’ findings confirm that through intermediaries, interviews can yield a unique and rich body of information on attitudes, values, and norms of the respondents.3 The combination of these particular disciplinary perspectives is useful for studying perpetrators, as perpetration is a process that leaves traces across different locales, bureaucracies, and families and deserves a flexible and multifaceted methodological approach. The chapter begins by tracing the historical roots of postwar paramilitarism and placing it in a global context. It then moves on to two important sections: one on the emergence of Syrian paramilitaries, and another a focused discussion of one tribe that mobilized as paramilitaries. The Syrian uprising and ensuing civil war have seen an unprecedented proliferation of visual material. We can safely argue that Syria is the first conflict ever that is broadcast online in real time through social media. These materials range from news reports, formal declarations, profiles, descriptions, short memoirs, and photos to countless short and long video clips. For this chapter, the most useful materials are, first, video clips of and by paramilitaries, which show acts of violence such as dispersing demonstrations, torture, and killings of defenseless human beings. Second, there are pro-Assad social network materials, which offer details on the sociological context of the militiamen: their world views, private lives, and

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networks. These materials are of fundamental importance for studying the role of these perpetrators in the civil war. One institution in particular has consistently preserved and documented these types of materials since the beginning of the uprising. The Syrian Archive, based in Berlin, is a meta-archive that collects, preserves, and catalogs online and offline collections created by Syrian partner organizations. It guards data, identifies personal and spatial details, generates metadata, and offers an online platform to examine these videos. I developed close contacts and trust with this NGO and have secured research access to their vast databases.4 Whereas gathering material on Shabbiha paramilitaries—a catchall category for irregular paramilitaries dressed in civilian gear and linked organically to the regime—was relatively easy from the perspectives of survivors (who were generally eager to speak), any research on this phenomenon grapples with several ethical and methodological challenges. First and foremost, access was and remains a major obstacle, since fieldwork inside Syria is impossible, not only owing to the strict censorship, government control, and omnipresent surveillance of the Mukhabarat (the Syrian secret services) but also because of the unpredictability of the Shabbiha’s own violence. Even if I had been issued a visa by the Syrian government, and the Mukhabarat would have agreed to it, fieldwork among these militias would have undoubtedly brought severe threat to life and limb because of their capriciousness. Therefore, interviews were best carried out over Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, which allows for audio and/or video connections. The video interviews were negatively impacted by problems with the internet connection or video quality, which limited nonverbal communication and visual cues and my inability to get a feel of the space in which interviewees were living. However, the advantages include increased privacy and security, as the interviewees’ social environment was virtually unaware of the interviews being conducted. This is especially important in the claustrophobic atmosphere of wartime Syrian society, where denunciations are ubiquitous, and having a non-Syrian researcher like myself walk into a village and interview a fighter would have threatened both interviewer and interviewee. Future research should probe deeper into the impacts of video and audio interviewing for perpetrator studies. Perpetrators and Perpetration In focusing on perpetrators, this chapter approaches the violence they commit from the perspective of perpetration rather than merely perpetrators. Whereas the latter term refers to the agency of the individuals who

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have perpetrated forms of mass violence against civilians, the former refers to the process of collective commission of mass violence. The advantage of taking a processual view is that it enables us to cater to the complexity of the processes of perpetration: different layers of authority, different motives of involvement, different rules of engagement, and, most importantly, the inescapable changes in these factors over time. Perpetration is a complex process through and through. First, it can be approached from several analytical perspectives: top-level architects, mid-level organizers, and low-level killers. The top level represents the core power relations of a regime that is involved in perpetrating mass murder of civilians. This level includes the intellectuals who articulate an ideology and offer the masses an image of the Other and a strong impulse to collective hatred. Furthermore, it also includes the leaders who give the orders, issue the fiats, lay the legal frameworks, and prepare a state bureaucracy for the systematic violence.5 The mid level consists of all practical organizational developments relevant to the violence: the complex decisionmaking processes, the necessity and logic of a division of labor, the selection and training of men as future perpetrators, and any mass mobilization for the segregation and destruction of the victim group. At this level, technocratic institutions, organizations, and agencies in a given state and society collaborate in genocide. City administrations are taken over and steered toward genocidal destruction.6 The low level, then, is about the individuals who become involved in the genocidal process as actual killers. These are the people we generally call “perpetrators,” but they are only the very bottom of the pyramid, those whose acts make the perpetration process visible. However, we also have families that make decisions, conduct business, and comport themselves through the crisis; coexisting villages and neighborhoods turn on each other; and individuals become involved in massacres.7 Much research on civil wars, massacres, and genocides, implicitly or explicitly, has taken these complexities seriously. Historians and social scientists have clarified the relationship between central decision-making processes and the implementation of mass murder at the local level. In-depth research on how violent processes evolve at the provincial, district, city, or even village level has taught us a great deal about how local power shifts influence the course and intensity of these processes, as most civil wars and genocides are regionally varied. Viewed in its coherence, these three contextual layers are not simply piled on top of each other, but the largest contexts are often preconditioning for the smallest ones. In other words, beyond the complexity of each level in itself, we must bear in mind the relevant connections between the three levels. Without the top context of orchestration, there generally cannot be a mid-level

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activation of the practical organizers; and without that move, the violence against the victims is not set in motion by countless individual low-level perpetrators.8 But the disaggregation of the perpetration process into these levels of analysis does not only find expression in territorial segmentation or topdown decision-making. It is closely related to the morphology of the organization, coordination, and implementation of the violence. This holds true for civil wars, but recent studies have convincingly argued that even genocides do not have unipolar pyramidal structures. Rather, they are often a multipolar process: radicalization of the violence often comes from within and without and emanates from different perpetrating clusters, such as civil and military organizations, the ruling elite itself, and local notables and families. Competition and conflict among these sectors significantly shape the violence.9 Another factor is the competition between perpetrator groups for political and economic power as a structural factor easily manipulated by political elites for their own ends. Whomever then takes a proactive and instrumental role in the campaign of violence that the center deems most salient then emerges victorious in this competition. Paramilitaries are one type of perpetrators in civil wars, rebellions, campaigns of repression, counterinsurgencies, and genocides. Paramilitarism refers to state-orchestrated, clandestine, irregular armed organizations that carry out illegal acts of violence against clearly defined civilian individuals or groups. It has immense importance for understanding the processes of violence that are played out during ethnic conflicts, which often see the formation of paramilitary units that conduct counterinsurgency operations, including high levels of violence against civilians.10 In fact, many studies of massacres have convincingly demonstrated the vital role of paramilitaries in the perpetration of the killings.11 States embroiled in war are thought to spawn paramilitary units as a covert augmentation of state power for special purposes such as mass murder.12 Indeed, the recent historiography on the civil wars of the post–Cold War era has argued that wars have since been fought not necessarily between states’ standing armies but between paramilitaries and militias, and especially against civilians. This has arguably blurred the distinctions between war, organized crime, and large-scale violations of human rights, such as genocide.13 This chapter examines paramilitarism through the prism of the changing sovereignty and authority of the state. It historicizes the development of paramilitary groups in the second half of the twentieth century as they emerged, functioned, and disappeared. It thereby aims to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on violent conflicts by explaining why different states have formed paramilitary units.14

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Assad’s Perpetrators: A Kaleidoscope of Violence The war in Syria is a series of conflicts that coexist, contradict, overlap, and compound each other and have the potential to confuse the casual observer. Therefore, two critical distinctions need to be made: the segmentation of the country by four distinct armed groups and the relatively clear line demarcating warfare between combatants and mass violence against civilians. First, the country was long split into four distinct political and territorial segments controlled by the Assad regime, the rebels, the Kurds, and the Islamic State (ISIS), respectively, and which engaged in warfare against each other. At the same time, these four groups have committed violence against civilians throughout the conflict. The quantity and quality of this violence differs significantly, but most definitions and observations converge on the notion that the Assad regime has been responsible for most violence against civilians. This chapter will therefore focus on the Assad regime, which has committed a kaleidoscope of atrocities against Syrian civilians, including aerial bombings, torture, massacres, sniping, executions, sexual violence, and much more.15 The perpetrators of this violence are a varied group of men that include Air Force pilots, Mukhabarat torturers, Syrian Arab Army soldiers, designated snipers, members of the various special forces (Fourth Armored Brigade, Special Forces, and Republican Guard), and the paramilitary Shabbiha (later the National Defense Forces, or NDF). The Syrian NGO Pro-Justice has compiled a list of regime perpetrators of various crimes against civilians, most of whom are the personnel of the army or the special forces. The list is headed by Bashar al-Assad himself and includes top military leaders such as General Zuhair Tawfiq al-Assad and General Talal Makhlouf and intelligence bosses such as Air Force Intelligence Director Jamil al-Hassan and General Intelligence Director Ali Mamlouk. Beyond the Syrian Army and the Mukhabarat, several special forces leaders are on the list as well, such as the de facto head of the Fourth Armored Brigade, Maher al-Assad; Brigadier General Fayez Baddour of the Special Units; and Major General Muhammad Mahla of the Republican Guard. Pro-Justice has done an admirable job in scoping out the range of Assad regime perpetrators, mostly at the organizing level but also some rank-and-file killers such as criminalturned-militiaman Ali al-Shilli. The site does not explain the intricate relationships between these regime agencies, nor does it provide much detail on particular massacres. It does, however, establish beyond a reasonable doubt the listed individuals’ responsibility for and involvement in a range of violence: killing demonstrators, storming neighborhoods, and massacring civilians as well

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as kidnapping for ransom, forced disappearances, and property crimes. Hence, all these men are subsumed under the rubric of “perpetrators.”16 In many ways, these men are the “usual suspects” of the Assad regime. There are other, more informal, low-profile but high-impact perpetrators as organizers of violence against civilians, a cast of characters that is largely uncharted territory. One such example that can be mentioned here out of a large pool of men is an Alawite shaikh. The beginning of the uprising split the Alawite community in Syria, as it did the religious shaikhs of the community. Whereas very few (if any) shaikhs joined opposition movements, many turned inward and took recourse to quietism, while a few others threw their weight behind the regime. One of these latter men was Ali Khizam (1966–2012), a colonel in the Republican Guard as well as an Alawite shaikh from Qardaha, the Assads’ ancestral village in Latakia province. Khizam was involved in the repression of demonstrations in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta in 2011 as well as the storming of the beleaguered Homs neighborhoods of Baba Amr and the Old City in 2012—all of which ended in massacres. Khizam used his connections to Maher al-Assad and his charismatic public image to merge sectarian mobilization and religious justification of the regime’s murderous repressions. He can be seen in online videos trampling on the bodies of his victims, drinking araq, singing traditional songs called ataaba (‫ )عتابا‬from Latakia, and using pro-Alawite alarmist discourse while speaking to young men who are assembled around him in admiration. Social media is rife with fan pages, hagiographic elegies, and even poetry glorifying Khizam.17 Men like Khizam are the dark horses among Syrian perpetrators and have received relatively little attention, even though their violence has fundamentally affected the conflict. Paramilitaries as Perpetrators From across the spectrum of perpetrators, this chapter will focus on the Shabbiha, the Assad regime’s irregular paramilitary groups that became increasingly formalized and regimented through the conflict. Three reasons stand out for focusing on these paramilitaries: relevance, access, and theory. First, they were responsible for a great deal of violence against civilians, especially in the first two years of the conflict. Even as the uprising became an armed conflict and a civil war, the Shabbiha remained mostly involved in perpetrating violence against civilians. Second, researching Syrian perpetrators poses the insurmountable obstacle of access to the Syrian army and especially the Mukhabarat. In the entire Syrian conflict, the two actors that were and are

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flat-out unresearchable because of their inaccessibility were ISIS and the Syrian Mukhabarat. From my interactions with the Shabbiha, I learned that they were more accessible and talkative than most other Syrian perpetrators. Third, the Shabbiha’s conduct and violence in the Syrian conflict can enrich the literature on perpetration by teaching us about perpetrators’ motives and emotions but also collective identities, the relevance of a state legitimizing violence, and the interactions among perpetrating agencies. Syrian paramilitarism is in no way unique. Paramilitarism is a sociopolitical process that has become synonymous with Latin America, much like “organized crime” has left an indelible impression on Sicily and “sectarianism” has become the stereotypical characterization of Lebanon. Throughout the twentieth century, paramilitary and para-police forces have been involved in a series of regional conflicts that have wrought major changes to politics, society, and culture. Therefore, any analysis of the concept should begin with a brief discussion of the main issues relating to Latin American paramilitarism. Both comparative syntheses on the region and detailed case studies of particular countries converge on what has driven authoritarian regimes and political elites to employ paramilitaries. Three important motives stand out. First, the use of paramilitaries increased the number of armed men in a counterinsurgency to establish a numerical upper hand. This could be significant: for example, out of a total population of 9 million, the Guatemalan army enlisted 900,000 men in paramilitary units during the civil war. Second, paramilitaries institutionalized and consolidated a self-sustaining system.18 The pro-government Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), for example, became a veritable state within a state in Colombia, controlling the economy in the regions they invigilated and even infiltrating high politics— a process called parapolítica in Spanish.19 Third, paramilitarism in Latin America also assisted certain development plans, services, and infrastructure. Paramilitarism is seen as an “emergency strategy” of regimes allied with the US government and engaged in a civil war. In a 1996 report, Human Rights Watch called it “a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry, and official silence by the United States, that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it.”20 Indeed, international cover by the US government was pivotal in setting up and adapting this system throughout its functioning.21 The system caused a profound disruption of societies by permanently rupturing social ties between perpetrator groups and victim groups, spreading terror and trauma in victim communities, promoting insecurity caused by impunity, and causing local economic damage through mass displacement and the criminalization of societies.22 Another important finding

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that appears in the literature is the notion that a state maintaining a paramilitary structure is a state that is potentially genocidal, because the type of violence that paramilitaries are tasked to carry out often exclusively targets civilians. Comparative research on cases of massacre and genocide in Latin America has convincingly demonstrated the central role of paramilitary units in the mass killings. This may not have been the case in all instances of state repression like in Argentina or Chile, but certainly so in ethnicity- and class-based genocides, such as Guatemala.23 Whereas paramilitary activity has certainly distinguished the different conflicts in Latin American countries, the phenomenon is not limited to the continent. In fact, although Latin American paramilitarism in the 1970s to the 1990s operated in a different international political and ideological context than the European civil wars of the 1990s, there are still some important similarities. It is no longer an anecdotal claim that pro-state paramilitary units appeared in several European ethnic conflicts in the 1990s and committed widespread violations of human rights. Several studies have clarified their involvement in conflicts as diverse as in Basque country, Northern Ireland, and Chechnya. These other cases of paramilitarism obviously each have their own specificities that can help us understand the phenomenon in general but also contribute to a focused research agenda on the Syrian case. After all, we cannot fully understand paramilitarism in Syria unless we have some appreciation of how it functioned in analogous cases. Therefore, this chapter now turns to Syria and examine the role of Shabbiha perpetrators from top to bottom. First, it provides an introduction to Syrian paramilitarism, including its emergence and leading organizers. Then it descends to the meso- and micro-levels to examine how it functioned in the city of Aleppo. And finally, it focuses on one of the perpetrators I interviewed at length over eighteen months. Shabbiha: National and Local Scripts From the outbreak of the uprising in March 2011 on, the Syrian government’s violent response to the mass protests became more extensive and intensive. Within four years, a civil war had devastated economic and civic life, killed 250,000 people, reached military and political stalemate, and fragmented Syrian territory.24 The key aspect of the Assad regime’s repression against the population was its use of paramilitary forces, the “Popular Committees,” or so-called Shabbiha. From March 2011 on, their acts were well documented in video clips, leaks, confessions, defections, and victim testimonies. The Shabbiha carried out storming of neighborhoods and dispersion of

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demonstrations as well as property crimes, torture, kidnapping, assassination, and massacre.25 Whereas the Shabbiha seem to have appeared out of the blue, they had a clear prehistory: these networks had been engaging in illegal activities, such as protection rackets, smuggling, and gambling, prior to 2011, including during the Lebanese civil war. The Assad regime maintained them “on retainer” through its elaborate patronage system.26 However, we still need a better understanding of how these networks were embedded in the Syrian state when the conflict erupted and how and why they were recruited. The rank and file of the perpetrator militias is often said to be drawn largely from young unemployed men from particular sections of Syrian society: minorities, especially Alawites, are likely to join Shabbiha units.27 The Shabbiha are groups of irregular paramilitaries often dressed in civilian or quasi-military gear. They are often recruited by leading members of the Assad family, such as Hafez Makhlouf, Hilal al-Assad, Ghandi al-Assad, and Nimr al-Assad. The rank and file of the Shabbiha is drawn largely from young, rural, Alawite men from the coastal areas with few other job possibilities. The foot soldiers carry out dirty work for what they call their “maternal uncles” (khaal ) or “boss” (muallem), and in turn, senior officials act as their patrons, bankrolling and protecting them. At the core of these forces seems to be a group of seasoned professional or habitual criminals with long-standing prior careers in the “regular,” nonpolitical violence of the criminal underworld. An unknown number of foot soldiers have been in and out of the prison system, while others are young enthusiasts trying to prove themselves in battle. Many of these soldiers are drawn in for private reasons—the generous daily compensation the regime offers, ethnic hatred, a thirst for revenge, and/or kinship ties are all draws.28 Private motives seem to be prominent among the rank and file of the Shabbiha, as is often the case for paramilitary groups. One captured militiaman said: “My friends were joining the Shabiha [sic], and they encouraged me to come with them. I hesitated, and men in the local Air Force base beat me up until I agreed.” He was not particularly interested in defending President Assad’s regime, he said, nor the Syrian leader’s minority Alawite sect, from which most Shabbiha are drawn. “It wasn’t for Bashar. I didn’t care about Bashar al-Assad. All I cared about was that I got the power.”29 From the first days of the Syrian crisis, their perpetration of mass violence against civilians was well documented in YouTube clips, leaks, confessions, defections, and interrogations. The roots of the Shabbiha can be traced back to the organized crime structures that sprang from Hafez al-Assad’s brothers, Jamil and Rifaat. Both men held powerful positions in the Syrian government: Rifaat ran the elite Defense Brigades until he was ousted; and Jamil headed the

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National Security Committee in parliament. As the Assad family is descended from their ancestral village of Qardaha, their children became major players in Latakia and the wider Syrian coast. Jamil’s sons Munzir and Fawwaz grew up smuggling goods along the coast. Growing up as Assad royalty, Fawwaz al-Assad quickly understood he was above the law and began behaving as such: wearing intimidating outfits, driving around in Latakia in his huge Mercedes with blinded windows (a vehicle known as the “Ghost,” al-Shabah), racketeering, and terrorizing citizens. An avid football fan, Fawwaz became president of Tishreen football club, bullying referees, bribing players, gambling, and fixing matches. By the late 1980s, he was the most powerful man in Latakia.30 The behavior of the likes of Fawwaz led to a proliferation of thuggish masculinity in and around the Syrian coast. Shabbiha gangs began running protection rackets, smuggling weapons, drugs, and food, and engaging in other criminal enterprises. Most importantly, they felt they were above the law since none of them were ever held legally accountable for their actions. On the contrary, they enjoyed the connivance and patronage of the state. The Assad regime maintained these networks “on retainer” through its patronage system. It used this mobilizational power to suppress dissent well before the uprising developed in the spring of 2011.31 The phenomenon of Shabbiha is a complex story, involving a huge cast of paramilitary actors operating within a multifarious and murderous civil war. First, the catchall category of “Shabbiha” does not cover the different formations that are often subsumed under it. Among these different groups with different names, we need to distinguish at least two autochthonous paramilitary groups, leaving out of consideration foreign fighters such as Iraqi, Iranian, and Afghan Shi’ite militias: (1) the Ba’ath Brigades (‫)كتائب البعث‬, named after the ruling Baath party, headed by Hilal Hilal, and numbering roughly ten thousand men in Aleppo, Damascus, and other major cities and towns; and (2) irregular militias officially called Popular Committees (‫ )لجان شعبيه‬but widely named Shabbiha, consisting of civilians who were armed by the regime to suppress and disperse demonstrations and to defend their own neighborhoods.32 It is this last group that is most relevant for our discussion. In the summer of 2012, the Assad regime reorganized the then loosely organized Popular Committees into the NDF. This transformation of paramilitary forces introduced a formalization of their structures, a devolution of state power, and thereby a localization of the violence.33 Second, the Shabbiha differ per region in their ethno-religious backgrounds. Whereas in the western cities of the country (Latakia, Tartous, Homs, Hama, Damascus) they are largely from minority groups such as Alawites, Druze, and Christians, in the major city of Aleppo

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as well as in the hinterland (Qamishli, Hasakeh, Raqqa, Der ez-Zor) they are drawn from the Sunni milieu. Therefore, we need detailed studies of how the phenomenon emerged and developed in different cities. Aleppo: Tribalization and Minor Differences The city of Aleppo is an interesting case for examining how the national script of Shabbiha was translated at the local level. Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and economic powerhouse, was, in Ottoman times, the capital of a vast eponymous province that extended into contemporary southern Turkey. The Syrian uprising reached Aleppo with a delay and with violence: when the protests began in southern Dera’a and spread northward, Aleppo was affected relatively late as the business establishment did not have much interest in an uprising against the regime. Apart from a few opposition neighborhoods and the Aleppo University campus, there were no mass demonstrations in the city. The regime deployed Shabbiha in Aleppo to control the city center and to storm and suppress the demonstrations in opposition areas, such as Salahaddin, Masaken Hanano, and the university campus. In the summer of 2012, the Free Syrian Army decided to “liberate” the city by entering the eastern neighborhoods as part of its strategy to oust Assad through military means.34 Clashes erupted, spread, and escalated, and the regime quickly launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign against those neighborhoods. Since 2013 the battle of Aleppo has developed into a trench war of attrition through two sieges that look like the yin-and-yang signs on maps, and much of the city lays destroyed. The story of the Shabbiha in Aleppo is a rather atypical story. Not only were they mostly composed of Sunni Arabs (rather than Alawites in most other places in Syria); their leadership was also quite effectively eliminated (whereas in most other places in Syria they expanded their power base). Especially on the Mediterranean coast, with its heavily Alawite demographic presence in towns such as Latakia and Tartous, the Shabbiha were and are composed of very powerful Alawite groups. My interviews with Syrians from Aleppo render a complex picture of mobilization for Shabbiha in that city. I conducted fieldwork in Istanbul, Gaziantep, and Berlin to interview Aleppines from different backgrounds, neighborhoods, and political persuasions. Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey is an especially important hub for researching Aleppo, owing to its proximity. Many of my interviewees had been visiting Aleppo since the uprising, until ISIS checkpoints made the journey too dangerous. Whereas most interviewees were relatively young and well-educated opposition activists, some were fence-sitters,

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and others were solidly pro-Assad. Most interviewees were born and raised in Aleppo, while others were from small towns or villages in the countryside and had migrated to the city as children. What is relevant is that all of them had known one or more Shabbiha personally: either they grew up with them, went to school with them, knew them as neighbors, or even had family members in the Shabbiha, including, in one case, a deceased brother. I conducted the interviews in English and Arabic, and upon the interviewees’ requests did not tape them but took notes instead. I respected all requests of confidentiality and anonymity. From these interviews, which I then supplemented with social media articles and materials, a complex picture emerges of pro-Assad paramilitarism. All interviewees agreed that the foremost Shabbiha in Aleppo were drawn from the large Al-Berri extended family. Well before the 2011 uprising, this Sunni Arab tribe was known to control the organized crime scene in Aleppo, including drug trafficking, prostitution rings, contraband smuggling, and protection racketeering. In the years before the revolution, they had fought a feud with the al-Hamida family for supremacy in the Aleppo underground and came out on top.35 The head of the tribe was originally Abdulmalik al-Berri, but his son Ali Zeyno al-Berri became the most important political player and regime enforcer in the city when he was “elected” to parliament. The al-Berri clan originally hails from the rural southeast of Aleppo province but moved to the neighborhood of Bab al-Nayreb during the great urbanization trek of the late 1970s. According to most Aleppo interviewees, the Assad regime cut a deal with the al-Berri clan when the uprising broke out. Clan members who were in prison for private crimes were offered amnesty and weapons in return for loyalty and mobilization against the opposition. This impunity provided by the regime put hundreds of young men under the informal command of Ali Zeyno and his lieutenants.36 All respondents from Aleppo confirmed that the al-Berri clan was responsible for the suppression of the demonstrations in the city, both in its districts and on the university campus. One young man, A. A., was a physics student when the protests broke out on March 18, 2011, at the Omayyad Mosque. He was two hundred meters away from the mosque when he heard people running in the souq. When he walked up, the police were everywhere, but the place was quickly stormed by several four-wheel-drives, with men with beards and sticks yelling, “With our souls, our blood, we sacrifice for you, Bashar!” These were the men from the al-Berri clan. In other words, the regime was well prepared and sent in these Shabbiha as soon as there was the faintest sign of protests. A. A. did not recognize any of them personally, but he was used to them patrolling the city.37 The Berri Shabbiha were subsequently

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present at almost every protest. At the demonstrations at the Amneh Mosque on April 15, 2011, the Shabbiha wielded knives, and even swords, as they waited on corners for the protesters. That day, they hacked to death a man in the mosque and stabbed two other people.38 After each protest, the Shabbiha would return to their neighborhoods to rest, recuperate, and remobilize for the next demonstration. The endgame of the al-Berri clan in Aleppo was bitter. With violence escalating in 2011, especially from the regime, options for nonviolent conflict resolution became slim. When the Free Syrian Army (FSA) entered Aleppo in the summer of 2012, there was an initial implicit understanding between them and the Shabbiha, in particular between the moderate Islamist faction, Liwa Tawheed, and the Berri family. The former would not enter the Bab al-Nayreb neighborhood, and the latter would refrain from fighting the FSA. But when a Berri Shabbiha killed the renowned media activist Husameddin al-Manazil at a checkpoint, Liwa Tawheed ran out of patience and stormed the Berri mansion and guesthouse.39 The Berris resisted for a few hours but ultimately lost the firefight, whereupon the FSA arrested the entire family, put Ali Zeyno on “trial,” and beat and executed him and five others publicly on July 31, 2012. The execution was a spectacular event: Berri and the others were placed on the ground in front of a wall while dozens of armed men stood around screaming, “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great). Then, without command, an outburst of deafening gunfire erupted as bullets rained on Berri.40 The rest of the family, including women and children, was allowed to move on to regime-held areas where they still live. After the executions, the remaining Shabbiha feared the wrath of the FSA and refused to storm opposition areas without massive military backing. Later, many of them joined the NDF. The Shabbiha were and are quite capable with their propaganda campaign. In one cartoon image, an aggressive pro-regime bully says: “I’m from Bab al-Nayreb, buster,” whereupon the frightened pro-revolution boy answers: “Absolutely sir!”41 On the one hand, such cartoons depict aggrandizement of and “respect” for the Bab al-Nayreb neighborhood and its residents. At the same time, the national ideological script is overlaid with the local, urban conflict script. Exploiting existing friction between neighborhoods and youth groups was an effective way of mobilizing young men against opposition areas. When an Aleppo neighborhood like al-Shaar rose in protest, the regime reached out to its historical rivals in adjacent neighborhoods. The national script of Shabbiha was bolted onto a local script that consisted of often unemployed young men who identified mostly with their neighborhood as a source of identity, “honor,” and economic and political activity. The deployment of pro-Assad paramilitaries in Aleppo then was an exploitation and mobilization of these neighborhood

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identities and class differences. The regime brokered the interdependence as each Shabbiha group worked with and reported to one security branch, under the tutelage and command of an officer. It proved exceptionally difficult to interview members of the al-Berri tribe, but one of them was willing to consent to interviews. Hashem al-Berri, a moody man in his early forties, was a landlord and businessman before the conflict, and during the uprising he joined the Ali Zein al-Abidin Brigade, a Shi’ite militia led by the al-Berri tribe. Hashem’s Facebook posts mostly showed photos of Assad family members and pro-regime memes, but after 2017, he increasingly began posting pro-Shiite messages. In the interview, he did not admit to converting to Shiism, but the presence and power of Shiite militias in Aleppo has undoubtedly increased the necessity of paying lip service to the sect.42 Likewise, Hashem did not deny taking part in repressions of 2011 and 2012, though with his group, he most likely participated in beatings and killings on Aleppo University campus, the central mosques, and in rebellious neighborhoods. His group consists of brothers, cousins, and close friends, all of whom are tagged in his Facebook posts and who had similar pro-regime profiles. As of 2018, Hashem himself did not bear arms any longer, but he can be clearly characterized as a leader and organizer rather than a low-level perpetrator. The main reasons he gave for Shabbiha mobilization were classic conservative arguments such as pride for his family, loyalty to the state, aversion to change, fear of an uncertain future, and contentment with the “normality” of life in Syria before 2011. But the interview with Hashem offered two additional revelations about the motives of Shabbiha perpetrators. First, paradoxically, Hashem pointed out that the al-Berri tribe served in the Shabbiha not because they were powerful but because of their relative powerlessness as a tribal Sunni Arab group. In Syria’s complex societal hierarchy, a Sunni Arab family from rural eastern Aleppo generally does not rank as high as an Alawite clan from the coast, especially since 2011, when the regime drew swift and sharp lines through Syrian society by demanding armed mobilization. As a result, the Assad regime held the Berri clan to higher standards than some of their Alawite “brethren” on the coast, and the Berris had to overcompensate for their relative position in that social hierarchy. A second insight was that beyond neighborhood and class, contrasts between city and countryside were also influential in motivating and mobilizing Shabbiha in Aleppo. In Hashem’s social imagination, the peaceful, prosperous, and loyal city of Aleppo was rudely disturbed and potentially polluted by unworthy outsiders: “The opposition was mostly from the countryside, the dirty and disgusting rural populations, who sold their own wives for money.”43 For someone with a Sunni Arab background to speak like this about other Sunni Arabs unmistakably reminds us that the narcissism

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of minor differences can trigger emotions that lay the foundation for profoundly impactful mobilization. Conclusion How and why did the Assad regime employ the Shabbiha? There are at least two explanations for this pattern: plausible deniability and spreading complicity. First, the Syrian state benefits from the paramilitaries because they provide the regime with plausible deniability for the violence. The regime can simply disavow any linkage with these shadowy organizations by claiming they operated on their own volition and for their own motives. An Alawite woman, whose cousins are Shabbiha, explained that if the thugs wear civilian clothes, “then the television can say that these are just civilians who love Bashar.”44 A second explanation is that the regime is spreading complicity and, by doing so, they are irreversibly tying certain groups in society to the regime. By committing such atrocities as rape, torture, and massacre, the Shabbiha burn their bridges with the affected communities and prove their loyalty to the regime. By their complicity in guilt, they also pledge themselves to mutually assured silence and forge the intimate bonds that arise from complicity in crimes. The interviews with survivors and perpetrators from Aleppo demonstrate that in 2011, the Assad regime expected its loyalists to step up and make good on their commitments. The Berri tribe did so, and the fact that they felt they had to “overcompensate” accounts for the nature, dynamic, and direction of the violence. Paramilitary groups leave no visible indication that they exercise legitimate use of force that is traceable up the hierarchy of a state-sanctioned chain of command. Since the monopoly of legitimate violence is a vital pillar of statehood, by resorting to paramilitarism, states potentially compromise that monopoly and undermine their legitimacy. In other words, states do benefit from relying on these groups and individuals as it provides them with plausible deniability— they can disavow any linkage with these shadowy organizations by claiming they were private groups committing violence on their own volition. Deniability is considered necessary not only for domestic reasons but also for international reasons, including the threat of foreign intervention, monitoring by NGOs, the International Criminal Court, the European Union, and “sanctionbusting” to circumvent embargos. But at the same time, states compromise their integrity by devolving power to paramilitaries like the Shabbiha. The Syrian case also demonstrates that perpetration through paramilitaries demonstrates the state’s ability to outsource and subcontract illegal and illegitimate

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violence against civilians. In Aleppo, none of the Shabbiha had been officially authorized by the state as security forces, but nevertheless they had superior powers to bear arms, repress demonstrations, and kill with impunity. This chapter has followed the logic that since the Shabbiha are paramilitaries, and paramilitaries are most often perpetrators, the Shabbiha are an important cohort of twenty-first-century perpetrators. It departed from the vital distinction between the fighters on the front of the civil war who were engaged in combat and the perpetrators of crimes and atrocities who were involved in committing violence against civilians—even if the lines between these are blurred in some instances and the former have committed war crimes. As the Shabbiha fit squarely in the latter category, they constitute some of the main perpetrator groups in the Syrian conflict. This chapter has focused on the Shabbiha of Aleppo city, whose involvement in the violence demonstrates that neither particularistic explanations of Syrian sectarianism nor generic ones of “ordinary men” is sufficient in explaining their involvement and violence. My examination of the Berri clan shows that they mobilized and killed for Assad out of a broadly held perception of relative deprivation, a sense of resentment (allegedly) against being misunderstood. It was their claim of not being Alawites and not having privileges that brought them to mobilize, besides insecurities about their upstart status as a tribal group of arrivistes from rural Aleppo. Perpetration was a way out of their perceived low social status as well as a way of gaining favor with a government that was hell-bent on making their supporters kill on its behalf. Notes 1. Suleiman’s father, Hilal al-Assad, first cousin of President Bashar al-Assad, headed the National Defense Forces in Latakia before he died in March 2014 in clashes with rebels. 2. Anas al-Homsi, “Tawqeef Suleiman al-Assad yareeh al-Ladhiqiyah,” Al-Akhbar, October 7, 2013; “Bashar al-Assad’s Cousin Arrested over ‘Road Rage Killing,’” Telegraph, August 10, 2015. 3. Antonius C. G. M. Robben, “Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina,” Ethos 24, no. 1 (1996): 71–106. 4. See “Syrian Archive,” accessed September 23, 2015, http://www.syrianarchive .org. 5. A classic study of political elites can be found in Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 199–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

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6. For a recent study focusing on this level, see Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 7. For an overview of the literature, see Paul Roth, “Hearts of Darkness: ‘Perpetrator History’ and Why There Is No Why,” History of the Human Sciences 17, nos. 2–3 (2004): 211–51. 8. Donald Bloxham, “The Organisation of Genocide: Perpetration in Comparative Perspective,” in Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives, ed. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 185–200. 9. Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Explaining Regional Variations in the Armenian Genocide,” in World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, and Maurus Reinkowski (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 240–61. 10. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tim Wilson, “State Terrorism: An Historical Overview,” in State Terrorism and Human Rights: International Responses since the End of the Cold War, ed. Gillian Duncan, Orla Lynch, Gilbert Ramsay, and Alison Watson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 14–31. 11. One recent study is Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 12. Alex Alvarez, “Militias and Genocide,” War Crimes, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity 2 (2006): 1–33. 13. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Herfried Münkler, Die neuen Kriege (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002); John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 14. For a full discussion, see Uğur Ümit Üngör, Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 15. “Toll of Civilian Victims Killed in Syria from March 2011 to January 2019,” Syrian Network for Human Rights, accessed July 25, 2019, http://sn4hr.org/syria-map -snhr/. 16. “Blacklist,” Pro Justice, accessed July 25, 2019, http://blacklist.pro-justice.org/. 17. Ali Khizam Facebook page, accessed July 1, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/ asadbabaamro/. 18. Dirk Kruijt, “Exercises in State Terrorism: The Counter-Insurgency Campaigns in Guatemala and Peru,” in Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America, ed. Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (London: Zed, 1999), 50. 19. León Valencia, ed., Parapolítica: La ruta de la expansión paramilitar y los acuerdos políticos (Bogotá: Intermedio, 2007). 20. Human Rights Watch, Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996), 96.

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21. Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 192. 22. Julie Mazzei, Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces? How Paramilitary Groups Emerge and Threaten Democracy in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 23. Marcia Esparza, Daniel Feierstein, and Henry Huttenbach, eds., State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years (London: Routledge, 2009). 24. David Lesch, Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 25. Stephen Starr, “Shabiha Militias and the Destruction of Syria,” CTC Sentinel 5 (2012): 11–12. 26. Middle East Watch, Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 27. Aziz Nakkash, The Alawite Dilemma in Homs: Survival, Solidarity and the Making of a Community (Beirut: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2013). 28. Ruth Sherlock, “Confessions of an Assad ‘Shabiha’ Loyalist: How I Raped and Killed for £300 a Month,” Telegraph, July 14, 2012. 29. Sherlock, “Confessions of an Assad ‘Shabiha’ Loyalist.” 30. Mohammad D., “The Original Shabiha,” Syria Comment, August 17, 2012, http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/the-original-shabiha-by-mohammad-d/. 31. Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 181–87. 32. For a full overview of the Assad regime’s paramilitary infrastructure, see Carter Center, Syria: Pro-Government Paramilitary Forces (Atlanta: Carter Center, 2013). 33. Aron Lund, “Chasing Ghosts: The Shabiha Phenomenon,” in The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant, ed. Michael Kerr and Craig Larkin (London: Hurst, 2015), 207–24. 34. “Aleppo,” Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, accessed March 15, 2006, http://www.creativememory.org/?page_id=80976. 35. Faris al-Rifa’i, “Ailet Berri fi Haleb: Tarikh aswad min al-mashaniq ila al-qasr al-riyasi,” Zaman al-Wasl, July 25, 2013. 36. al-Rifa’i, “Ailet Berri fi Haleb”; A. H., interview with author, January 4, 2016, Gaziantep; M. A., interview with author, January 8, 2016, Gaziantep; Y. H., interview with author, March 20, 2016, Amsterdam. 37. A. A., interview with author, February 16, 2016, Gaziantep. 38. A. H., interview. 39. A. H., interview. 40. The trial, beatings, and execution were filmed and the videos uploaded to YouTube. For the “trial,” see “2012731 ‫( ”لواء التوحيد—القبض على الشبيح الكبير زينو بري‬The Tawheed Brigade—Arrest of the Great Shabbiha Zeyno Berri), uploaded July 14, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1_mcUM8v88. For the beating, see “‫زين العابدين بري‬ ‫( ”علي‬Ali Zeyn al-Abidin Berri), uploaded August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/

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watch?v=R-w4l-EBuf0. For the execution, see “2012 8 1 ‫على أيدي الثوار ميدانيا هو وبعض معاونيه‬ ‫( ”إعدام زينو بري أكبر شبيح في حلب‬Field execution of Zeyno Berri, the biggest Shabbiha in Aleppo and some of his associates, by the revolutionaries), uploaded July 31, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxgBfHSii4E. 41. “Pro-regime page from Aleppo,” Facebook, 2013, https://www.facebook .com/%D8%AD%D9%84%D8%A8-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84 %D9%86%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A8566690536698603/. 42. See the Facebook profile of Hashem Ezzo Berri, https://www.facebook.com/ profile.php?id=100010809254624. 43. Hashem Izzaddin al-Berri, interview with author, November 16, 2018. 44. Harriet Alexander and Ruth Sherlock, “The Shabiha: Inside Assad’s Death Squads,” Telegraph, June 2, 2012.

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

Fr o m Mu r d e r s to Vict im s Di le mma s o f Do i ng Per p etr ator R e s e a r c h i n a n Il l i ber al S tate A N D RE A PE tŐ

R

arely does a researcher have the luck to research a war criminal with an uncommon surname that one can look up easily in an online phone directory. This was the case with my research project on women perpetrators during World War II in Hungary. The question is whether this really can be considered as luck. On the basis of this research, which was informed by my best feminist intentions, I have written a bestselling book on women perpetrators in Hungary during World War II.1 Yet this book has actually ended up supporting the arguments of revisionist historians in an illiberal state who seek to highlight the unjust nature of post– World War II political justice. Indeed, more broadly and paradoxically, much of the research being undertaken in the field of perpetrator studies risks being used to support revisionist histories in former Communist countries.2 In this chapter, I analyze the different forms of forgetting and critically investigate how my feminist intervention inadvertently contributed to historical revisionism in Hungary. I argue that the intersection of different “forgettings” engenders a silence that not only makes research of women perpetrators during World War II impossible but also prevents critical examination of the war crimes committed by Hungarians in Hungary against citizens of Hungary. Finally, I identify connections between the ways that memories of a Hungarian

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war criminal with a rare family name—Szamocseta—were formed by his descendants within the broader culture of forgetting that exists in Hungary. The Story and Its Context I have spent many years in the Hungarian archives researching the People’s Tribunals, which investigated war crimes committed in Hungary between 1945 and 1949.3 As in other European countries, Hungary regarded the pursuit of justice after the war as an urgent task, and its unfolding was determined by political processes. For my book on women perpetrators, I was looking for female war criminals among the People’s Tribunals’ trial documents as well as in the contemporary press.4 At that time, I was interested in the processes that had turned “ordinary women” into perpetrators during World War II, but Piroska Dely—the most notorious woman in Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party, which collaborated with Nazi Germany—soon became an ineluctable person in my life and work. Since starting work on this project in the mid-2000s, I have faced new political challenges to writing this history. The Hungarian government—together with other countries that were under German and Soviet occupation during World War II—canonized the narrative of “double occupation” and relegated all responsibility for war crimes to the occupying forces. It is not simple to place the dark patches of the past into the ethnocentric memory politics, especially when there are competing remembrances. The illiberal populist turn in historiography has changed the way that history is written in Hungary. First, the government funded parallel research institutes, and museums were created without any transparency or quality assurance. Second, the historians appointed to work in these institutions started to write popular books, filling in the void left by professional historians, who published only for their narrow academic circle. Third, public interest in history, especially related to World War II, has never been greater. Given these circumstances, I decided to write a book that focused on the story of Piroska Dely for a popular audience.5 This was a strategic theoretical and methodological decision informed by the recent attack on gender studies that has forced my institution, Hungary’s Central European University (CEU), into political exile in Vienna. My response was to approach this very thorny topic of women perpetrators in an accessible way. However, a consequence of my attempt, with the best intention, to fit my research into this changing frame of remembrance is that I risk silencing survivors, rendering invisible Hungarian

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collaboration in war crimes and contributing to historical revisionism related to World War II in Hungary. Piroska Dely was sentenced to death and executed for her role in nineteen murders that she helped perpetrate on Csengery Street in Budapest on October 15, 1944. Her case is truly symbolic, and there are a plethora of sources related to the massacre: People’s Tribunals’ materials, newspaper articles, survivor recollections, and a plaque set up at the massacre’s location. At the time, it was an atypical massacre in Budapest, as it was not acceptable to murder people in their homes. Before the German occupation of March 19, 1944, the Hungarian state exported its killings of civilians. On June 16, 1944, the mayor of Budapest had issued a decree forcing Jews to move into approximately two thousand houses that had been marked with yellow stars and designated to house the Jewish population of Budapest ahead of planned deportations. After the German occupation, the state assisted the deportation of five hundred thousand citizens to concentration and death camps. It was only after October 15, 1944, however, that the Arrow Cross Party took over, at which point massacres in homes and hospitals became a common practice. Dely—a divorced mother of two and a war nurse—arrived on the day of the Arrow Cross takeover at a house marked with a yellow star on Csengery Street, close to the Arrow Cross headquarters, with uniformed male companions.6 Dely and her companions shot nineteen Jewish civilians on the spot and drove the others away with the intention of deporting them to Germany, a deportation that never occurred owing to the chaotic war situation. Dely was then arrested in February 1945 in Budapest when fights were still occurring in western Hungary and in Buda. She was executed on March 23, 1946. During Dely’s trial, it was discussed whether the Szamocseta family—a janitor’s family who, at the time, were Csengery Street’s sole Christian residents— had any connection to the massacre. Their house had been marked with a yellow star in the summer of 1944, but they had remained. They took advantage of their position of power by blackmailing and stealing from Jewish residents of the house. The Szamocseta family was arrested during the spring of 1946, convicted, and sentenced to multiple years in prison. However, it remained unclear during their trials what role the Szamocsetas had played in inviting the Arrow Cross to their house. Recent studies of the Holocaust focus on the victims and perpetrators, but unless they are high profile, politicians are typically overlooked. A similar tendency has emerged in development of perpetrator research—inspired by German and Austrian scholarship with a twenty-year delay—as far as research on family members of executed war criminals are concerned. In Hungary, it is

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mostly literary works that focus on “ordinary” Hungarian perpetrators. Thus, I decided to map the topography of memory of one perpetrator family—the Szamocsetas. To inform this project, I interviewed survivors, but I also wanted to introduce the perpetrators’ perspectives. This focus prompted the first of many ethical questions: How can I present the view of perpetrators in a country that is spearheading historical revisionism of the Holocaust and World War II? Could the focus on this research take attention from survivors whose memories are already under attack in Hungary? As early as 1945, the People’s Tribunals had no success in locating Dely’s family, so I was certain I would have no chance of finding them nearly sixty years later. However, Szamocseta is a very rare name, and so I found them easily in the phone book and arranged to speak with them about their memories of 1944 and 1945. A second ethical question emerged here: Can I share my uncertainty about what happened during Dely’s trial? This concern turned out to be important, as reviews of my book pointed out that it proves that it is difficult to decide who committed the massacre, though it demonstrates that Dely, the woman who was hanged for it, was definitely not responsible.7 I have previously written about the Dely-Szamocseta case and its relevance for Hungarian memory of the Shoah.8 Post-1945 Hungarian history could be best summed up with the terms “forgetting” and “silencing”—in terms of both victims and perpetrators.9 Case in point: the Csengery Street massacre has retained certain secrets despite all the years I have invested in archival research and into reconstructing the case at the house. I walked around in the house following the transcripts from different court testimonies and interviews I conducted with survivors, but the complex story of the massacre did not add up. It is still unknown who was killed, who was deported, and the whereabouts of the victims’ graves. What we know is that survivors of deportations felt that they had not received due attention from the authorities, and so on October 15, 1945—a year after the massacre and deportation—they created their own memorial plaque. The preservation of this unauthorized plaque took too much energy under Communism, and after 1989, the building’s inhabitants started to worry that it meant the house would become a target for far-right extremists. In the meantime, the perpetrators talked about their deeds among family without taking responsibility. The two parallel memory cultures have not intersected in seventy years. As a result, this research also raises the ethical question of whether research into the questions asked during interviews about the massacre might serve as a catalyst for bringing different memory cultures into conversation.

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Perpetrator Research and Holocaust Typologies: From Invisible to Visible Women perpetrators’ relative historiographic invisibility reflects the trajectory of perpetrator research, more broadly. Holocaust-related perpetrator research started in the second half of the 1990s and for a long time solely focused on men. Following the logic of the Nazi state’s activities, this early research represented perpetrators either as psychopaths or as banal bureaucrats.10 Primarily because of the debate that surrounded Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which had argued for nuanced scientific inquiry devoid of stereotypes, research has finally turned toward the issue of ideological commitment and, therefore, toward the intellectual elites who established the Holocaust’s ideological foundation.11 Perpetrator research gained further relevance as the children of famous Nazis began publishing their books.12 But a significant step in the right direction occurred when researchers began studying how “everyday” people could become perpetrators and how the individual memories of perpetrators evolve. Throughout its intellectual journey, perpetrator research has confronted several taboos.13 The existing typologies of perpetrators were based on intentions and behavioral explanations; thus, they potentially offer easy explanations, which could prepare the grounds for forgiveness and the avoidance of punishment.14 Other explanations simply name opportunism as the cause, which could be manifested in career aspirations, ambitions, or the hope of material wealth. Most projects have examined perpetrators’ social and psychological conditions (though the latter is progressively considered analytically inappropriate) and set up typologies of perpetrators that fail to take gender into consideration.15 One of the first typologies of perpetrators was created by sociologist Michael Mann on the basis of the analysis of fifteen hundred male perpetrators’ biographies.16 He differentiated five types: (1) the ideologically motivated murderer; (2) the confused murderer who turns into a murderer because of personal frustrations; (3) the “common people” who, according to Mann, turn into murderers under the following circumstances: they are at the right time and place to possibly commit murder, they are members of an organization that commits murders, and they cannot resist because of social expectations; (4) people who become perpetrators in response to the pressures of institutional routine, such as the German bureaucrats who became instrumental in the Holocaust; and (5) materialistic murderers who participated in these crimes for material or professional advantages.17 In sum, there are ideological, confused, bigoted, scared, conformist-bureaucratic and/or materialistic or careerist perpetrators.

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This was soon followed by James Waller’s Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, in which he distinguished between three psychological factors that determined participation in mass atrocities: avoidance of accountability, depersonalization, and conformism.18 A third typology was put together by historians Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallman. It identifies five types of perpetrators on the basis of the socialization patterns apparent in their biographies: opportunistic, ideological, the one who could commit a crime without direct order, the bureaucrat, and the ideological hardcore united with the bureaucrat.19 None of these typologies mention women perpetrators.20 Hungary and especially women perpetrators are also largely ignored in the particular realm of perpetrator research.21 The dividing lines of contemporary Hungarian society can be explained according to Anton Pelinka’s study of Austria, where the deprioritization of justice and truth for the sake of social equilibrium may have facilitated reconciliation in the short run but were detrimental in the long run.22 The Hungarian case differed from the Austrian one only insofar as the dominant post-1945 rhetoric emphasized the necessity of holding war criminals accountable in vain. Social reconciliation was therefore impossible—even if the crimes were out in the open—as accountability occurred in a very selective way. There is no point in comparing this case with the growing literature about women perpetrators in Germany for several reasons. The first is because the German people had faced and are continuously facing their past, and there is consensus in mainstream historiography. Second, feminist research and gender studies are largely accepted in German academia and also in history. Third, there are jobs in Germany for researchers who are doing critical work. All these necessary preconditions for writing about perpetrators are currently missing in Hungary, though previously I was using my privileged but tenuous position at CEU to do research on women perpetrators. However, this turn of events makes the critical examination of availability of narrative spaces even more relevant. What can we learn about the microprocesses that determined the narrative spaces available for perpetrators in Hungary from an interview with a perpetrator’s family? Story Recounted, Reconciliation Delayed In his seminal paper on the issue of German war crimes, Jürgen Habermas describes the case of a Jewish emigrant who was fired from his university in 1933, then after the end of World War II returned to West Germany from the US and became the rector of the same university. He had to work

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again with the same colleagues, who accepted the unfolding of events—then and now as well—quietly and opportunistically. Habermas describes their responses as “communicative silencing,” as “a situation in which a tacitly acknowledged moral asymmetry between offender and victim is kept tactfully hidden beneath the surface of proceedings that pretend to business as usual.”23 In Hungary’s case, the processes through which “communicative silencing” have evolved and the sectioning that Habermas deploys to compare the processes of postwar jurisdiction in East and West Germany all happened within one country. With Soviet occupation, a dominant antifascist rhetoric was imported, which was widely disliked by Hungarians and thus hindered Hungarians’ confrontation of their role in the war.24 Additionally, Hungarian immigrants from 1945 and 1956 contributed to the strengthening of antiCommunist rhetoric after 1989, unlike the immigrant social democrat and leftist intellectuals who returned to West and East Germany after 1945.25 “Communicative silencing” is therefore an applicable concept that announces the future polarization of Hungarian society concerning Hungarian war crimes during World War II. The Szamocsetas lived for over a year in that house on Csengery Street, where they were the arbiters of life and death. They witnessed the Jewish tenants’ deportation, and then later some of those who returned lived in the same building with them until the family was arrested in 1946. As a result of the People’s Tribunals’ judgments, Hungarian war crimes became polarizing and a constitutive element of historical right-wing identity politics, resulting in the solidification of the differences between historical remembrances.26 This explains why in the People’s Tribunals’ archives it is so difficult to determine exactly what happened on October 15, 1944, on Csengery Street. There are two points of view in the debate about the social impact of the court trials that followed World War II. One relates to Hannah Arendt, who argued that the sole task of the trials was to discover the truth about individual crimes.27 On the other hand, legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, whose position I share, calls these court trials “didactic trials” that were meant to prove the normative operation of law, which is never independent from the social context in which the trial occurs. According to Douglas, the “didactic trials” not only provided space for the victims and survivors to share their memories through their testimonies but also acted as history lectures.28 Transparent debates about the past served the building of a strong democratic culture. The survivors had the right to know after the trial who committed what crimes, and in what way, against them. In the Dely-Szamocseta case, this happened in a controversial fashion because the People’s Tribunal did not provide this information. I read the bulky

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People’s Tribunals’ records, but from those documents it is not apparent who committed which crimes or when on October 15, 1944. This clearly did not bother the tribunal. The lack of information in itself would not have been a problem had there been a dialogue about it. However, no such dialogue occurred, and thus democratic practices and processes could not evolve. The complete silencing of rival memory cultures cannot be successful, no matter how hard Hungarian people’s democracy tried to push forward antifascist rhetoric. Only a dialogue could have brought forth a shift toward social solidarity. Such trials can achieve only a limited scope. Legal narratives are only effective if they are socially accepted. If legal narratives fail, they fail socially.29 Dely’s legal narrative is thus a failed narrative. On the one hand, the “simple” legal decision did not satisfy the survivors’ craving for truth. Simultaneously, the interviews I conducted demonstrated that the perpetrators felt that they were unduly punished given that, according to them, they committed no crime. Collective memory, an otherwise troublesome analytical category, could be of important service for one thing: for understanding the ways in which a country confronts its past.30 If we take the example of West Germany, built from a victim position, we can see that the concept of “sinner victim” is an oxymoron, as it aims to obscure previous crimes. The justice mechanism heaped blame for all Nazi crimes onto one small group of criminals—the Nazi party elites—and because of the Cold War there was little further investigation. The war “became an accident, a tragic fate, a natural catastrophe.”31 Memory is necessary to build community: people tell their stories and through those create a common identity. The West German identity was built on the idea and practice of Lastenausgleich as a common sacrifice.32 In the collective memory, individuals were represented as innocent, which helped establish a morally acceptable community with a shared sense of belonging. Therefore, despite the initial disadvantage of the Stunde Null (Zero Hour) myth, which argues that the collapse of the Nazi regime created a clean slate for Germany, it created the possibility for democratization in the long run and for Germany to slowly face its past. Hungary followed a different route. During the People’s Tribunals, the Arrow Cross as a group was identified and punished for their crimes. However, because of the systemic mistakes made by the People’s Tribunal, and because of Soviet occupation, this did not seem like “justice”—not for the victims and especially not for the perpetrators. Hungarian society was just as divided after the justice process ended as beforehand, with new conflicts added to previously existing ones, such as Hungarian collaboration with the Soviets.33 My interview with a descendant of the perpetrators’ family proved that, independently from the hegemonic Communist memory politics, for forty-five years the subculture of perpetrators remained untouched.

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Family Stories and Recollections of War Crimes The process of remembering can be painful and difficult and is shaped by various power relations. When cultural codes are uncertain, remembrance becomes even more troublesome. If the previous political frameworks lose their strength, or they completely disappear, the earlier systems of reference can become seemingly senseless. In politically oppressive environments, the family remains that framework of remembrance, which represents some kind of an independent stability among changing power systems. In the case of the Csengery Street massacre, “private memories” remained the only available forms of remembrance. The People’s Tribunals were slow and imprecise. The Jewish congregation did not care about assimilated Jewish victims but collaborated with the Communist party to highlight only observant Jewish victims. Journalists, meanwhile, were uninterested and their coverage, superficial. The historians who have studied the People’s Tribunal have largely strived for easy explanations, at least until I found the perpetrators’ relatives in the phone book and wrote a book that explored it in greater detail. Similar German research has discovered important tendencies of intergenerational memory formation. One common theme is that younger generations of Germans interpret their parents’ and grandparents’ lives during the Third Reich within the framework of resistance and suffering.34 Hungarian remembrance follows a similar route. Hungarian Jews were silent after 1945 because there was no space for them in antifascist discourse, while the perpetrators were convinced—as the Szamocseta interview demonstrates—that they were victims of Stalinist injustice. It was only after the 1989 collapse of Communism that the competition of antagonistically opposed interpretations of local perpetrators’ crimes during the Holocaust was able to begin. From the point of view of the Szamocseta family, the events unfolded entirely differently than is presented in the People’s Tribunal documents or in survivors’ recollections.35 In most contexts, it is primarily victims who search for a metaphysical truth, but sometimes the collaborating society does so too. This truth-seeking attitude aims to separate participation, accountability, and crime. Both sides demand to contribute to the shaping of remembrance, leading to an escalating memory war.36 One sign of this is the increased media presence of prominent perpetrators’ children.37 In Germany, talk shows discussed how Amon Göth, the notoriously cruel leader of the Cracow-Plaszow concentration camp portrayed in the film Schindler’s List, was a lovable father.38 Similarly, in Hungary, Ágota Varga made a film about the family of László Endre, the state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, who was responsible

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for the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944, although the latter reached far smaller audiences.39 The way the memory of ordinary (which does not mean less important) perpetrators was formed within their own families is different from that of more prominent perpetrators. In Austria, perpetrators’ children sought psychologically plausible excuses to explain why their fathers could not have been Nazis. These excuses followed a similar pattern as the aforementioned typologies of perpetrators. “He was set up.” “He was too young.” “He was too idealistic.” “He was merely a clerk following orders.” Conversely, in Hungary there were two factors that provided excuses for not confronting the past: the Communist regime and the People’s Tribunal’s poor operational practices. The memories of the perpetrators’ children are even more problematic than the memories of victims. Hungary in this case, yet again, proceeds on a different track than Austria. While in Austria only perpetrators’ children lacked institutions through which they could reconstruct their parents’ life stories during the Nazi period, in Hungary—especially in the case of such an atypical Holocaust crime as the Csengery Street massacre—even the victims had no forum to turn to, as my interview demonstrates. Although the need to gather “objective information” had emerged in the Hungarian case, there has not been, nor is there currently, a supporting institution for such an endeavor. The antagonism between the perpetrators’ children’s emotional needs and the available information creates a strong bond with the father, which can profoundly influence the younger generations’ lives. The Story of the Szamocsetas as Told by Themselves For my book about women perpetrators, I conducted an interview with Nándor Szamocseta’s son.40 His grandfather was instrumental in harassing and financially exploiting the Jewish tenants in his house in Csengery Street, and his father, Nándor, also participated. When I called him, he immediately accepted my invitation to be interviewed about his family. However, his sister refused to talk to me, saying that the past should not be disturbed. He came to see me in my university office and agreed to be recorded. Indeed, he wanted to make sure that his point of view was being recorded. Interestingly, he was dismissive of the People’s Tribunal materials as he assumed they were Communist lies and felt he had a better sense of the truth of what happened based on his family stories. This kind of selective interpretation of the past is foundational to memory politics in illiberal states.41

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Certainly, this narrative could be interpreted with social psychologist Harald Welzer’s or historian Margit Reiter’s frameworks—each of whom built upon sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal’s methods for unpacking stories that at first sight have nothing to do with the Nazis.42 Rosenthal concluded that those Germans who were not persecuted had a tendency to talk at length about their memories of World War II.43 This is not true for Hungarians, because in Hungary silence resulted from its rapidly changing political climate, and only after the end of Communism did space open up for revisiting wartime crimes. When it comes to the perpetrators, a “pact of silence” was in effect, which neither encouraged nor allowed them to ask questions about the past.44 This interview is not suitable for examining the memory structures of various generations, but it is appropriate for delineating tendencies regarding how perpetrator families’ remember the history of World War II.45 It provides a rare human face for three generations of suffering under Communism and underlines the perceived injustices of post–World War II political justice. Complexity is part of memory. For instance, in the narrative, the members of the Szamocseta family appear not only as victims of Communism but as members of the antifascist resistance as well, who helped Jewish civilians when necessary.46 The People’s Tribunals established that they helped select Jews for deportation in exchange for money, though the Szamocseta family was structurally in a position where they could not avoid committing crimes given the chaos of wartime circumstances. In the memorialization process, members of the family, which was a very typical perpetrator family, were portrayed as noble victims and heroes. As Nándor Szamocseta’s son said in the interview: “My grandfather was a tailor and he only worked for famous people. The family owned a business but that was nationalized. He was arrested and was beaten up in Andrássy street. He got home and he died soon afterward. This happened around 1945–46. I do not know when he died. My grandfather was beaten up heavily, that is why he died. My grandmother told me that he was taken to Andrássy street, where he was beaten up and died because of that, possibly because of internal problems. He was released but died soon. I think his kidneys were beaten down.”47 This excerpt is fairly typical, as Nándor Szamocseta’s son does not allude to any sign of his family’s antisemitism, though they used the climate of political uncertainty for their own enrichment by exploiting those who were vulnerable and refused to take responsibility for their actions. Furthermore, his narrative employs the trope of Communist persecution: specifically, unjust imprisonment at the headquarters of the Secret Services on Andrássy Street that included beatings that eventually led to his grandfather’s death from kidney failure. Indeed, the whole narrative of Nándor Szamocseta’s son fails to

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mention Jews and the persecution of Jews, in favor of presenting his family as the primary victim of Communism. According to Rosenthal, in such narratives, suffering during Communism can serve as a convenient “cover story.” Conclusion This interview allowed me to identify two preliminary tendencies in the memories of family members of Hungarian perpetrators. The first is the unconditional admiration for the father and the grandfather, which is only partly an effect of their touched-up biographies.48 This admiration could also be interpreted from a psychological point of view: there was no need for distancing oneself from the father’s politics—unlike in the German or Austrian cases—because the father was more easily portrayed as a victim than was an active war criminal.49 The second tendency relates to the ultimate ineffectiveness of postwar punishments: not only because Szamocseta kept quiet about the ten years of imprisonment to which he was sentenced, even in front of his immediate family, but also because he depicted himself as the victim of a Communist political trial, which left a lasting mark on the family’s memory.50 The suffering the Szamocseta family endured under Communism became the “cover story” that concealed the necessity of confronting the crimes committed during World War II. Thus, the subject of the interview, Nándor Szamocseta’s son, is not a product of collective memory, but he is a producer and dispatcher of that memory. The victimization and rationalization narratives of perpetrators’ children have major impacts on collective memory in Hungary. Most studies on memories ignore their own audiences, as historian Wulf Kansteiner warned us several years ago.51 As stories matter, and memory can only be assigned by a certain social group to become a part of their memory, competing memory cultures necessarily exist. Kansteiner argued that collective memory is a result of complex processes of production and consumption that acknowledge different traditions, values, and interests. In that process, interviewing perpetrators’ families plays an important role, as they are appropriators of stories. Appropriation was used by scholar Michel de Certeau to highlight the realization that consumption is not a passive process. Producers of memory are building their own meanings and values into the consumption of culture, which is at the same time a revisitation of culture. In this process of revisitation, which is far from innocent, historians like myself are also playing an important role. The People’s Tribunal’s archives suggest that the Szamocseta family’s crimes were primarily motivated by material gains. They offered no evidence about

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the Szamocseta family’s pre-1944 antiemitic views or deeds, nor was evidence of this presented in the interview. Nonetheless, my interview with the son of an atypical perpetrator of a case that received significant publicity proves that perpetrator research should not focus solely on the perpetrators. Even if they have an uncommon name easily found.

Notes 1. Andrea Pető, Láthatatlan elkövetők: Nők a magyarországi nyilas mozgalomban [Invisible Perpetrators: Women in the Hungarian Arrow Cross Movement] (Budapest: Jaffa, 2019). See also Andrea Pető, Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Cham: Springer Nature, 2020). 2. Andrea Pető, “Revisionist Histories, ‘Future Memories’: Far Right Memorialization Practices in Hungary,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 18, no. 1 (2017): 41–51. 3. Ildikó Barna and Andrea Pető, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015); Andrea Pető, “Historicizing Hate: Testimonies and Photos about the Holocaust Trauma during the Hungarian Post-WWII Trials,” in Tapestry of Memory: Evidence and Testimony in Life Story Narratives, ed. Nanci Adler and Selma Leydesdorff (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2013), 3–19. 4. Andrea Pető, “Gendered Exclusions and Inclusions in Hungary’s Right-Radical Arrow Cross Party (1939–1945): A Case Study of Three Female Party Members,” Hungarian Studies Review 41, nos. 1–2 (2014): 107–31. 5. Andrea Pető, Forgotten Massacre in Budapest in 1944 (Berlin: DeGruyter, forthcoming). 6. For the history of the massacre, see Andrea Pető, “Privatised Memory? The Story of Erecting the First Holocaust Memorial in Budapest,” in Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity, ed. Nanci Adler, Selma Leydersdorff, Mary Chamberlain, and Leyla Neyzi (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 157–75. 7. Tibor Pethő, “Ki lőttek a zsidók,” Magyar Hang, June 28, 2019, 21. 8. Pető, “Privatised Memory?” 9. Andrea Pető, “‘Non-Remembering’ the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 31 (2019): 471–80. 10. For the Nazi state’s activities, see Anette Kretzer, NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht: Der erste britische Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/4 in Hamburg (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2009); Claudia Taake, Angeklagt: SS-Frauen vor Gericht (Oldenburg: Universität Oldenburg, 1998); Gudrun Schwarz, “Verdrängte Täterinnen: Frauen im Apparat der SS (1939– 1945),” in Nach Osten: Verdeckte Spuren nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, ed. Theresa Wobbe (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1992), 197–227. For a summary of early research, see Gerhard Paul, “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ‘ganz

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gewöhnlichen’ Deutschen: Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung,” in Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 13–90; and Jan Gross, “Themes for Social History of War Experience and Collaboration,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. Deák István, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15–35. 11. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1996); Devin Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 196–1965: Genocide, History and the Limits of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 294. 12. See, for example, Martin Bormann, Leben gegen Schatten: Gelebte Zeit, geschenkte Zeit (Paderborn, Germany: Bonifatius, 2000); Margret Nissen, Sind Sie die Tochter Speer? (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005), Richard Schirach, Der Schatten meines Vaters (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005); and Niklas Frank, Meine deutsche Mutter (Munich: Goldmann, 2005). 13. In Poland, see Gabriel Finder and Alexander Prusin, “Jewish Collaborators on Trial in Poland, 1944–1956,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (2008): 123–48. 14. See Timothy Williams, “Thinking beyond Perpetrators, Bystanders, Heroes: A Typology of Action in Genocide,” in Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Dynamics, Motivations and Concepts, ed. Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 17–35. 15. For a typology of women perpetrators, see Alette Smeulers, “Female Perpetrators: Ordinary or Extra-ordinary Women?,” International Criminal Law Review 15, no. 2 (2015): 207–53. 16. Michael Mann, “Were the Perpetrators of Genocide ‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Real Nazis’? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographies,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, no. 3 (2000): 333. 17. On “common people” who murder, see Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 2001); and Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 116–43. 18. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2–131. 19. Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004). 20. Pető, “Gendered Exclusions and Inclusions.” 21. Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel, eds., Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Action, Motivations and Dynamics (New York: Routledge, 2018). 22. Anton Pelinka, “Justice, Truth and Peace,” in Justice and Memory: Confronting Traumatic Pasts, ed. Ruth Wodak and Gertraud Auer Borea (Vienna: Passen, 2009): 49–65. 23. Jürgen Habermas, “On How Postwar Germany Has Faced Its Recent Past,” Common Knowledge 5, no. 2 (1996): 1–13.

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24. Andrea Pető, “Who Is Afraid of the ‘Ugly Women’? Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 4 (2009): 147–51. 25. Jolande Withuis, “Das Kriegstrauma in den Niederlanden,” in Europapolitik seit 1945: Die Niederlande und Deutschland im Vergleich, ed. Friso Wielenga and Loek Geereadts (Münster: Aschendorf, 2004), 153–61. 26. Ildikó Barna and Andrea Pető, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015). 27. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; repr., London: Penguin, 2006). 28. Lawrence Douglas, “The Didactic Trial: Filtering History and Memory in the Courtroom,” European Review 14, no. 4 (2006): 513–22. 29. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 301–2. 30. Natan Sznaider, “Suffering as a Universal Frame for Understanding Memory Politics,” in Clashes in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust, ed. Muriel Blaive, Christian Gerbel, and Thomas Lindenberger (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2011), 239–55. 31. Sabine Behrenbeck, cited in Michael Hughes, “‘Through No Fault of Our Own’: West Germans Remember Their War Losses,” German History 18, no. 2 (2000): 209. 32. Lastenausgleich references the practice of compensating Germans and ethnic Germans for the loss of their property during the conflict. 33. Andrea Pető and Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, “Populist Use of Memory and Constitutionalism: Two Comments,” German Law Journal 6, no. 2 (2005): 165–75. 34. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2002). 35. See Margit Reiter, Die Generation danach: Der Nationalsozialismus im Famielengedächtnis (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2006); and Dan Bar-on, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 36. Saul Friedländer, “History, Memory and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” New German Critique, no. 80 (2000): 9. 37. Bar-on, Legacy of Silence. 38. Monika Hertwig and Matthias Kessler, “Ich muß doch meinen Vater lieben, oder?,” Die Lebensgeschichte der Monika Göth—Tochter des KZ-Kommandanten aus “Schindlers Liste” (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2002). 39. See Leszármazottak (Offsprings), directed by Ágota Varga (2005). 40. I have withheld his name because he chose to remain anonymous. 41. Andrea Pető, “Roots of Illiberal Memory Politics: Remembering Women in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,” Baltic Worlds 10, no. 4 (2017): 42–58. 42. Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall, Opa war kein Nazi; Reiter, Die Generation danach; Gabriele Rosenthal, “German War Memories: Narrability and the Biographical

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and Social Functions of Remembering,” Oral History 19, no. 2 (1991): 34–41; Gabriele Rosenthal, Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte: Gestalt und Struktur biographischer Selbstbeschreibungen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1995); Gabriele Rosenthal, ed., “Als der Krieg kam, hatte ich mit Hitler nichts mehr zu tun”: Zur Gegenwärtigkeit des Dritten Reiches in erzählten Lebensgeschichten (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1990); Gabriele Rosenthal, ed., Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen: Familien von Überlebenden der Shoah und von Nazi-Tätern (Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag, 1997); Gabriele Rosenthal and Dan Bar-on, “A Biographical Case Study of a Victimizer’s Daughter,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 2, no. 2 (1992): 105–27. 43. Rosenthal, “German War Memories,” 34–41. 44. Reiter, Die Generation danach, 68. 45. See Hughes, “‘Through No Fault of Our Own.’” 46. On Austria, see Reiter, Die Generation danach, 49–51. 47. Nándor Szamocseta’s son, interview with author. The notorious headquarters of Hungary’s State Protection Authority (ÁVH) was located at 60 Andrássy Street. 48. On Italy, see Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia e fascismo (Rome: Laterza, 1984). 49. Reiter, Die Generation danach, 183. 50. Ruth Wodak, “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter”: Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990). 51. Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 179–97.

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

Fr o m a P e r pe tra to r s to a R e s p o n d e n ts A ppr o a c h A N e w Wa y t o Cons i der the Wo r d s o f t h e A ccus ed befor e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Cr i m i nal Cour ts m A R I E - S o PH I E D EVRE S S E AND D A m I E N S CA L I A

A

lthough much has been written about the causes of genocide and similar mass atrocities, there are still significant gaps in our knowledge of perpetrators.1 While a range of studies have emerged over the past few decades that examine perpetrators’ motives and actions as represented in legal transcripts or through the narratives of survivors, for example, there is a relative paucity of studies that emerge from firsthand qualitative fieldwork with perpetrators themselves.2 Until World War II and the Nuremberg Tribunal, research studies in international criminal law focused largely on the normative aspects or legitimacy of criminal law, or when scholars studied crimes and accused people, they focused on perpetrators and their actions. Scholars generally do not focus on the situation of accused people in the judicial context. But in recent years, many networks have built up around work dedicated to the authors of atrocity crimes. Concerning perpetrators of international crimes, research in social psychology, and to a lesser extent also anthropology, history, and criminology, has stressed the normative and sociopolitical conditions that have facilitated

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collective violence; the cultural and societal conditions that lead to collective violent behaviors; interpersonal or intergroup factors that facilitate the commission of crimes; historical factors that explain mass crimes; and to a lesser extent, women perpetrators.3 In these studies, there are two doctrines related to the analysis of perpetrator behaviors. On the one hand, researchers view perpetrators as ordinary people who find themselves engaged in problematic behaviors because of the context.4 On the other hand, many scholars view perpetrators of mass crimes as “different people” who lack moral values or are predisposed to commit crimes.5 Across these writings, few scholars consider the personal experience of internationally tried persons as litigants. When they do so, it is mainly to talk about the link to legal categories, the postconviction situation of the perpetrators, or the judgments of international criminal tribunals (ICTs).6 Additionally, some research focuses on the notion of legal defense and sheds light on litigants’ positions during the judicial process.7 It is very rare that the accused are given the floor to speak in their own words about something other than their crimes and the reasons that led them to commit atrocities.8 Most of the time, researchers are waiting for confessions (and their political uses) before criminal tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, or transitional mechanisms in other contexts, such as in South Africa or in interview situations.9 The lack of interest in the judicial system experience as lived by the accused is surprising, especially as numerous studies have been carried out on justice professionals, victims of international crimes, and populations who have experienced war to analyze ICTs or other mechanisms used to answer mass atrocities.10 As for transitional justice, studies have also been conducted on its impacts, with a focus on consequences suffered by persons, groups, and societies relating to selected mechanisms, such as the gacaca courts in Rwanda. Research about international justice has focused on communities, victims, or institutions, or emphasized social justice, but has left the defendant strangely silent.11 Therefore, while studies have been conducted with many actors facing international criminal justice, few have focused on criminals as defendants, and fewer still have considered perpetrators as vectors of knowledge about the criminal justice system itself. The purpose of this book is to analyze the personal, social, economic, political, and historical contexts through which people from a range of backgrounds become perpetrators and the theoretical insights that can be gained from engaging with perpetrators’ narratives. The editors have made a real and fundamental gamble: taking into account perpetrators not only for their behaviors and crimes but also as complex actors and human beings. This is a bold challenge for researchers. Thus, we propose to join the editors in advocating

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for this new approach, which considers perpetrators (people tried for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) as sources of knowledge about the criminal justice system in addition to their lives. This approach does not prioritize the crimes they have committed or their context but focuses on the functioning of criminal courts or the extracriminal mechanisms used to convict them. It is no longer a matter of considering them solely through their acts (and thus seeing them only as “perpetrators”) but seeing them as individuals struggling within the judicial system. We call this perspective the “respondents approach.” It considers the actor’s reflexivity to better understand institutional reactions to mass crimes, such as criminal tribunals or truth and reconciliation commissions, in a constructionist framework. On the basis of empirical data collected and analyzed with scientific tools, this approach considers “respondents” as key actors within these processes. The polysemy of the term “respondent” allows us to consider our interlocutors in a pluralistic way. From an ethical point of view, this posture thus avoids reducing people to their actions, considering only the dark side of their being, and avoids ignoring the complexity that characterizes every individual. Criminal justice asks the defendants to respond to certain acts and to be accountable for their actions. Seeing them as “respondents” is therefore consistent with their position in the criminal trial. Additionally, meeting people, inviting them to talk, and conducting interviews also leads them to be, in the context of qualitative research, “respondents.” This is all the more true because they are not used to being allowed to speak freely. Through this process, respondents can help clarify many questions and highlight issues that otherwise might not have been discussed or would have been discussed in a very different way. The research behind this chapter is based on this particular approach. We interviewed people who have been tried by international tribunals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. Our guiding questions were as follows: What was expected of defendants in the justice process? What place did they occupy in this matter? What importance was given to their points of view, to their words? How much agency did they have within the justice process? How were they prepared to publicly report on their behavior? What do they remember from the trial as a whole? What meaning do they give to the justice process? What are its strengths and its flaws? We analyzed empirical materials resulting from semistructured interviews with sixty persons who were tried and acquitted or convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). This revealed to us the interest—if not necessity—of opening up to the respondents approach to better understand international criminal justice. Therefore, this approach differs

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from perpetrator studies and, to a lesser extent, from studies based on judicial or historical documents.12 There is no question here of undermining the perpetrators approach. Rather, we try to show that another facet of international criminal justice remains unexplored to date and that it may be quite interesting to stand on the other side of the mirror, despite the reluctance that the idea of hearing accused war criminals may raise. This approach is obviously not exclusive, and we do not view it as isolated from other works on the subject. The most promising approach to international criminal justice may also come from the combination of perpetrator studies and “respondent studies.” Before presenting some results arising from this specific approach as an illustration of the perspective, we will first show the significance of considering “perpetrators” as knowledge carriers and reflexive actors, who are able to produce valid information on international justice processes. The Significance of the Respondents Approach Before presenting some of our results based on applying a respondents approach, we will first present the significance of considering “perpetrators” as reflexive knowledge carriers who produce valid information on the international justice process. There are a number of scientific works dedicated to persons who have been brought before international criminal justice. Beyond works on perpetrators and their criminal offenses, there are many studies on the functioning of international criminal justice, which often provide significant critical insight. Indeed, scientific literacy has accompanied international tribunals since their very beginning. However, research studies focused on criminal justice and research studies dedicated to authors of war crimes rarely come together. The scientific disciplines, as well as their research topics, are often very compartmentalized. Most studies of international criminal justice are carried out by lawyers, historians, and political scientists and are focused on their establishment, activities, and normative frameworks. At the same time, research on prosecuted or convicted people are conducted by psychologists or by criminologists primarily interested in perpetration. We will focus here on the work devoted to the accused and/or those convicted by international criminal tribunals. The very fact that these tribunals refer to the “perpetrators approach” is significant, as it reflects not only an interest in “crime” and those who commit it but also betrays a particular way of dealing with them. Thus, we hope to encourage a more complementary perspective by

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using instead the term “respondent.” So, let us first consider the reasons for the success of perpetrator studies, as well as the limitations, and the possible contributions of another way of thinking. The Criminological Analysis: Waiting for Critical Perspectives Two hypotheses can explain the success of perpetrator studies. The first refers to the low permeability of international criminal law to critical theory and, more specifically, to critical criminology. The second is rooted in international criminal justice itself and its notable quest for legitimacy. The focus on crime driven by the perpetrators approach can be first related to the position of the accused in the criminal trial and the terrible nature of the acts that brought them to justice.13 Throughout the criminal trial, they are deprived of their freedom, their word is limited, even confiscated (a lawyer speaks for them in many situations), and they are difficult to meet, at the same time separated from the world and protected. Moreover, they are often exhibited by the media as monsters who have totally lost their humanity. Their actions are almost inconceivable, unthinkable, and they are therefore the object of both rejection and fascination. Most of the time, scholars and professionals who approach perpetrators seek to maintain a certain distance, a moral gap, as if the accusations they face represent an impassable border. In this sense, limiting knowledge to facts and their context helps to keep the distance. Understanding the reasons for their actions suddenly makes it easier to comprehend the impossible. This focus may also be partly explained more scientifically by the fact that critical theory in criminology has not invested significantly in the field of international criminal justice. Actually, critical theory in criminology assumed for decades some “sympathy for the devil” and has operated an interesting shift in the way to consider crime.14 Criminology has contributed for decades to a better understanding of criminal issues and has long problematized the question of moral rejection, but the problem is that criminology focuses mainly on national criminal justice systems. If we look at The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, we realize the large place given over the years to the response to crime and, in particular, the formal reaction of institutionalized justice.15 But we do not see much about war crimes and international criminal justice. As criminologist Stephan Parmentier put it, the handbook includes very little analysis on this topic.16 Criminology is not really interested in international criminal justice. As a matter of fact,

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when this subject is discussed, it is by other disciplines that have no vocation to emphasize the criminal justice process and even less to question the place occupied in it by the accused. The dissimilarity of interests between national and international justice is significant, and the often-political criticisms of the international criminal justice system deserve to be renewed. For this reason, we believe that critical theory in criminology could help enlighten international criminal law and bring new ideas. The interdisciplinary dimension of criminology, its ability to integrate legal and procedural issues into an institutional analysis, as well as the achievements of a long tradition of research into justice processes can provide interesting practical and philosophical insights into many aspects of international criminal justice. However, the integration of the critical approach in criminology into the study of international law does not take place without difficulty. Critical reflection on crime at an international level lags behind anything that has been written on crime when it was only considered locally. Historically, those who have undertaken to investigate the notion of delinquency had no other choice than face up to the basic question, “What is crime?” Unsurprisingly, they found the answer to this question to be much more complex than common sense would suggest. And after a long search for the true nature of crime, two main approaches have come to dominate the study of crime. The first was initially the legalist approach, which defines a crime as “an act of breaking a moral rule defined in a criminal law.”17 This approach, inherited from the classical nineteenth-century philosopher and criminologist Cesare Beccaria and influenced by the utilitarianism of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, offers, as sociologist Stephan Pfohl points out, a “vision of human nature as a free and rationally calculated choice for pleasure and society as a consensual social contract.”18 This vision “permeates everything it has to say about deviance and social control.”19 It is a perspective that, to this day, infuses legal doctrine and underlies the modern criminal justice system. The contemporary applications of this perspective can be found, for instance, in the situational prevention policies, supplied by rational choice theory, whose specificity is to focus on the crime event.20 The second approach, which emerged in the nineteenth century from positivism, focuses on deviant behavior. It aims to explain conduct with independent variables and to identify the characteristics of those who commit deviant acts. This approach tends to find causal explanations to crime and to give specific motives—psychological, social, neurobiological, environmental, and so on—to offenses committed by individuals. It also supports, in some cases, criminal profiling.

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These two ways of defining crime have long been prevalent, and they permeate most academic works that deal with crime today. Penal politics are still shaped by these conceptions although other innovative concepts have complemented them or even questioned their relevance. Their strength is so powerful that it is difficult to imagine that crime could be defined otherwise. They have therefore become prominent in the international criminal justice literature without really being debated. While both approaches do clearly differ on many issues, particularly on the notions of “actor” and “free will,” what is interesting here is their common feature: the defining of crime by its reduction to an act committed by someone. However, this definition of crime, reconsidered by critical theory in criminology, has experienced a remarkable evolution over the past fifty years, and it seems that research in international criminal law is struggling to open itself to contemporary epistemological developments. One particularly interesting contribution of this evolution comes from the “societal reaction perspective” that radically shifts from a focus originally placed on behavior to an interest in political and social policies. This perspective emerged during the 1960s (mainly with labeling and social construction theories of deviance); it argues that the act is no longer the center of the model. The new concern is the process that leads some acts to be defined as crimes, along with the reaction they provoke and their ripple effect. This opens, from a constructionist angle, a window to the analysis of the processes of criminalization and penalization. This shift is not trivial. Without denying the acts, it leads to considering them in a dynamic way, to study how they take place in a complex process, keeping in mind that the concept of crime is the “product of a legal and social designation strongly marked by normative challenges related to policing and repression of marginal behavior.”21 It is therefore conceivable to deal with crime as a nonsubstantive concept, and some scholars, such as criminologist Michael Gottfredson, even promote a “crime-free criminology.” This kind of criminology does not deny the existence of problematic facts but examines the reaction to these facts and their social significance. This approach “reduc[es] the focus on delinquency and crime as a special or specially motivated behavior [and] offers greater insights into the consequences of the criminal law itself.”22 Despite its success, this (more or less) recent theorization did not fundamentally permeate research on international criminal justice. From our experience, we know that it appears more difficult in this field to assume a complex definition like sociologist Howard Becker’s when he writes that it is “not a quality of the act the person commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’” and that “the deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior

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that people so label.”23 Through this perspective, we focus on the historical construction of deviant labels rather than on conduct; the hypothesis of a crime “by nature” or a “natural law” is rejected. For behaviors such as homosexuality, long defined as a crime and then decriminalized in most Western countries, or cannabis use, legalized in some US states, the analysis of changes or variability of what is defined as a crime is generally recognized. But what happens when we talk about genocide, war crimes, or other mass atrocities? What about the political and social embeddedness of moral rules and justice when we face a claim to universality? The Impossibility of a “Social Reaction Theory” in International Criminal Justice? We have briefly highlighted societal reaction theory and the critical perspectives a respondents approach may pose for international criminal justice. There is therefore a challenge in introducing the concepts of critical theory into this field. Certainly, several impediments must be overcome. Some refer to the very foundations of the international criminal justice system, namely the preeminence and universality accorded to the system’s protected values. Others concern its resilience in the face of criticism, especially in a fragile international sociopolitical context. Finally, the very idea of conceptual deconstruction comes up against legal and ideological limits, which place the researcher in an uncomfortable position, where relativity is said to undermine the worthy goal of building the international criminal justice system. International Crimes as Fundamental Violations

While there is no reason to limit critique about the definition of crime on a local level, when it comes to international criminal law, it is more difficult to adopt a constructionist stance without taking significant risks. The first risk is to deeply shock the reader. The declaration of the “fundamental” character given to the rights protected against these crimes (whether in international conventions or national laws) has gradually contributed to an essentialist perspective and a social consensus for these values, thereby marking perpetrators of acts that attack these values with a special stigma. Overcoming colliding moral values is probably crucial for the survival of a community, but placing behaviors “out of category” implies that they cannot suffer any form of relativism. We return implicitly to the concept of natural crime yet strongly criticized. Moreover, a relativistic attitude could be exploited for political purposes, especially by those

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responsible for human rights violations in the conflict. Maintaining a critical point of view based on empirical observations is therefore particularly complicated. From this perspective, it is easy to understand how it may seem inappropriate to give perpetrators a voice to learn about their experience of the criminal justice system itself. From an analysis of the functioning of criminal justice, which seeks to remove institutional legal categories, the debate then systematically turns into a philosophical discussion on the “essence of natural justice,” and it can quickly become a dialogue of the deaf. A Fragile Justice That Impedes Criticism

It can be assumed that international criminal justice, more than any other field, remains quite resistant to any revelation of the hidden face of its functioning, particularly because of its international and politically concerted nature.24 International criminal law, which has recently been implemented and is still under construction, is trying to position itself as a “special” field and different from national criminal law, a separate area that cannot withstand criticism and needs to be positively enforced instead. Critical considerations based on the deconstruction of the concepts underlying this institution weaken the foundation of this unfinished building. Although this assumption of fragility has not yet been convincingly demonstrated, we believe it remains promising, especially in the light of the work of Frédéric Mégret. This scholar has highlighted how the “demarcation process” of international criminal law differs from other fields—and, in particular, national criminal law—and how it aims, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve a consolidation purpose.25 Hence, the challenges of revealing the other side of this institution through new approaches are huge. In the face of such powerful institutional self-protection, it seems almost subversive to take into consideration, as we do in our research, the views of those who directly experience this justice as defendants (and who are not professionals or political supporters) to study not their criminal behaviors or their motives but the institution that has full power over them. Critical Perspective and Penalization

Another important point is that the definitions of criminal offenses and their status are, in themselves, subject to protection: to express any doubts about this point may constitute a criminal offense. We are thinking in particular of national laws that punish with a fine or imprisonment the denial, minimization, or justification of genocide or crimes against humanity.26 These texts are mainly adopted for the recognition of a protected historical truth (even if it

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raises debates, especially on a political level) and contribute to the mingling of concepts with criminal categories.27 As a result, they can hardly be discussed, even for intellectual purposes. Quite logically, historians were the first to dare to question this criminalization, suggesting that it could affect critical historical research.28 This difficulty is rarely experienced by those who work on the legal standard or on deviant behavior, but it leads the researcher who wants to keep a distance from these issues and who aims to break out of the established categories to work very carefully. Throughout our research, we have frequently had to be very clear and assertive about our recognition of the existence of conflicts, extremely violent events, and of the suffering of victims.29 Although we always positioned ourselves in that way without hesitation, the suspicion of denial we have experienced on several occasions has always seemed particularly violent from a personal point of view. Some people, much to our great displeasure, saw in our critical positioning a form of negationism. This mechanism of mistrust may help us understand why people who are brought to trial before international criminal justice are mainly seen as “perpetrators,” as people defined by their criminal actions, placed at the heart of analysis, regardless of all the processes that have brought them as such before criminal courts. It is as if, in this matter, the research object is defined beforehand and imposed on the researcher. There is, however, an interest in opening up to the experience of convicts. While the perpetrators approach provides information about their situation during the war and their role in the conflict, the respondents approach helps highlight how their position in the criminal justice system influences the institutional shaping of this conflict. The uncovering that occurs at that time, however, is not always well understood and accepted. Criminal Law under Analysis: With or Without the Accused? Some researchers have a point of view that sheds another light on these issues through political analyses inherited from conflict theory.30 This theory challenges the consensual view of the social world that underlies the construction of an international law whose purpose is to embody universally shared values. Whether through Marxist theory or research in relation to the colonial legacy of international law, many researchers have questioned the reproduction, in court proceedings, of power relations.31 They also expressed concerns about the possible political exploitation of such a judicial project.32 This

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stance, although courageous, seems less risky than criminological criticism, partly because political analysis is rarely based on the words of the defendants. The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss this perspective, but we propose here to bypass the imposition of categories and to go beyond the framework defined by international criminal justice. The exclusion of the accused from the analysis of the functioning of criminal justice raises many questions. On our side, we attempt to problematize their views, to give them a place in knowledge. We want to show that the defendant is not only a perpetrator but also someone who interacts with other actors in the criminal justice system and who is one of its central components. We work to have a better understanding of the mechanisms of justice by considering their personal experiences. While the criminal procedure, as conceived before international tribunals, formats or conceals elements that critical theory cannot ignore—for example, notions of responsibility, sovereignty, the politicization of conflicts, the violence of the police hunt and the trial—the defendant can bring them back to the forefront. The Person on Trial: As a Vector of Knowledge At this stage of our argumentation, an epistemological clarification appears crucial. The relevance of the narrative of a person accused of committing grave crimes must be established first. Consideration for “Profane Expertise”

The point of view and experience of social actors have not always been accepted in the development of scientific knowledge, and their validity is still controversial in some circles. However, they came to prominence in the 1920s, alongside quantitative studies with an objectivist vocation (that had hitherto dominated the field of sociology), when qualitative research emerged and gave place to actors through new methods, such as observation and interviews. Following the renowned work at the beginning of the twentieth century of social psychologists such as George Herbert Mead or Herbert Blumer, precursors of symbolic interactionism, and sociologists such as William Isaac Thomas or Harold Garfinkel, research began to extend knowledge with “the point of view of actors, their experience, the sense that they give to their behavior, the manner in which they apprehend their environment, the way in which they occupy the institutions which support or manage them.”33 In this sense, subjectivity and partiality are no longer a bias in research but signify instead substantial

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data to take into account. That material, when treated by rigorous analysis and adequate methods, informs us reliably on society and its structure and provides good knowledge about institutions and the way they operate. This epistemological question is fundamental. However, this issue is not understood or discussed in the same way in all scientific disciplines, and this often led to misunderstandings or even theoretical conflicts. In this sense, a new paradigm developed in social science does not protect against the misinterpretation of another researcher who does not share the same epistemological and methodological frame. For example, everything related to critical theory most often divides lawyers and criminologists. Indeed, the critical perspective rarely meets the rational-legal model that is, most of the time, embedded within legally constituted categories. In this respect, as noted earlier, the conception of the defendant differs. The lawyer considers them as accused, condemned, guilty, innocent, or genocidal, a mute person embedded in their trial, whereas the critical criminologist simply sees them as “somebody brought to justice” who, by this experience, has something to say about justice itself. No longer the passive object of a positivist research, the defendant plays an active role in knowledge production regarding the construction of social reality. We propose then an analytical model based on interrogating substantial conceptions of social reality by defending the idea, like sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, that this social reality is “the product of a permanent construct to which the researcher participates in the same capacity as the other actors.”34 In other words, this means that researchers contribute, for example, to the making of “perpetrator” by taking this category as a given. The quest for the legitimacy of the accused’s speech is not only an epistemological debate. Proximity is certainly at the heart of our knowledge project, but it is also assumed as an ethical intention. In this ethic, there is no question of reproducing the rhetoric of the enemy, of distancing the accused, of accepting the idea of monstrosity. This position also seeks to reject the monopoly of expertise and considers that it is possible to engage with actors in interpretative sharing even if they are the most socially rejected. Consideration for Prosecuted Individuals

However, if this view has gained ground and is now accepted, we have found that there is sometimes a discrepancy in the way words of different types of actors are considered in scientific research. While there is no problem for an analysis to now take into account what a judge, a prosecutor, an attorney, or a victim has to say, to meet someone brought before an international criminal court and to listen to their appraisal of the judicial process is rarely accepted.35

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“Perpetrators” are always seen as liars or manipulators—they are not regarded as capable of imparting credible perspectives on the criminal justice system. Becker criticized this position, observing that “credibility and the right to be heard are differentially distributed through the rank of the system.”36 Criminal justice is not beyond a pyramidal distribution of power, so in most societies the person accused of a crime stands obviously at the bottom of the “hierarchy of credibility,” and the one charged with “genocide” is located even lower, whether they were previously a powerful person or not.37 Once again, this refers to the ways that offenders are considered. If not seen as being essentially different, the individual is interesting only because of their conduct and qualification, and that, in any case, is viewed as independent of the criminal process. But if the situation is considered from the point of view of the person on trial, the situation appears different and particularly interesting. It highlights an experience that crosses all instances of criminal justice, from police arrest to incarceration (when it is pronounced) through the high point of a trial. The convict is almost the only actor to have experienced the entire process and to have information on all its components. They are the one who makes the link between the various instances of the criminal justice system, which often operate independently of each other. The Notion of the Respondent As previously stated, the terminology of “respondent” we have chosen reflects a desire to move away from legal categories and to avoid the status of “mute criminals.” Beyond that, the various meanings of the term “respondent” offer a particularly interesting and multidimensional approach. The Defendant Is Responding to Justice

Contrary to what one might think, the defendant appears rather active in the justice process. Thus, by their attitude, the litigant contributes to shaping the procedure in which they are involved. Justice is not administered in the same way when the defendant cooperates or when they stay in the background, when they’re heard or when their word is not allowed, when a dialogue is or is not opened with the judge, the victim, or the prosecutor. It is also interesting to analyze the ways in which the person has been treated at each stage of their progress inside the criminal justice system: from police intervention to incarceration. The defendant must see, hear, speak, and find a personal positioning. Beyond that, during the trial, they are expected to answer for their actions, are asked

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for details and explanations. Ideally, this process should lead to accountability and to the awakening of responsibility, in the legal sense but also in a moral sense. Of course, the person must respond verbally before judges and victims and has to appear in court, but they also have to shoulder responsibilities and to live with a terrible accusation throughout the entire process and then after. Furthermore, from a procedural point of view, individual responsibility is particularly valued in the field of international justice, for international criminal tribunals and courts try only people, not states or legal entities. The Interviewee Is “Responding” to Researchers

By hearing the words of the accused and/or convicted, researchers agree to establish a singular relationship, to consider their point of view, to recognize their reflexive ability. But from the other side, by agreeing to meet a researcher and to answer their questions, defendants assume, literally, the position of a respondent. They respond to a request, agree to a solicitation, and answer to specific interrogations. In our interview method, they are not required exclusively to reply to questions, but they are free to develop any subject. The freedom left to respondents leads them to answer “questions that are not asked” and perhaps opens a space for responsibility, then considered in a specific mode, as an “experienced responsibility,” that is, much more than criminal liability.38 Unlike the stages of investigation and trial, the research interview is a moment where respondents can express their perspectives freely, as their words cannot be used against them. That is probably what leads them to agree to meet us in an encounter in which “both parties behave as though they are of equal status for its duration, whether or not this is actually so.”39 During some conferences where we presented our research results, we have been told that our respondents will only lie to us, try to justify their acts, or speak negatively with respect to criminal justice. We were presented with an image of our respondents in which they could only act dishonestly and reproduce the strategic attitude they had to take during the trial. That is forgetting that speech does not exist independently of its context of production. Many of our critics completely overlooked the fact that the conditions of a research interview obviously have nothing to do with those of a criminal trial. Scientific research represents a very different space of personal expression than criminal justice can offer. Furthermore, in the constructionist approach, the researcher must be reflexive and assume the co-product nature of the situation, drawing conclusions from this interaction. Some philosophers, such as Françoise Digneffe, argue that the ways of perceiving and recognizing—or not—our own responsibility appear only in

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the context of a relatively “free” word, out of pressure and with no worries about possible implications or consequences.40 Therefore, we hypothesize that research interviews make possible speech in which the analysis of the justice process can be supported by a different conception of responsibility, closer to the reality experienced and wider than what is required by criminal justice. Results Obtained by the Respondents Approach We now briefly present some results of our research aimed at analyzing the rationality and functioning of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR). In the spirit of this book, this presentation aims more to illustrate the interest of the respondents approach than to develop in detail the achievements of our work. Our study is based on semistructured interviews with eighteen individuals who have been tried by the ICTY and thirty-seven individuals judged by the ICTR: nine were acquitted, and the others were convicted and sentenced to prison. Most sentenced respondents were interviewed in prison. Some participants held upper or midrange command positions within their respective militaries, and so they were implementing orders and transmitting them to their subordinates. Others were politicians, including ministers, bourgmestres, and préfets in Rwanda, while others were civilians. Some of them were perpetrators who physically committed crimes, and a few of them were condemned through joint criminal enterprise responsibility or command responsibility. People tried by the ICTY were from each region affected by the conflict, except Croatia. Concerning the ICTR, only ethnic Hutu were judged. Originally, we considered sampling our respondents with a strategy of maximum variation in order to select people with the most diverse profiles given our research issues. Nevertheless, as is often the case when working with criminalized or hidden populations, our final sample depended largely on opportunities to meet people and, above all, on their agreement. Thus, we ultimately used a snowball-sampling selection technique, relying on help from lawyers and convicted persons we met in the field. When the interviewees spoke neither English nor French, we worked with the help of an interpreter. All but three interviews were recorded, and the recorded interviews were then anonymized and a verbatim transcript created. We used grounded theory to analyze the resulting data.41 This means that we have cut and classified the contents of the interviews according to conceptual codes, and then we gathered them into meaningful categories, as recommended by this methodology, to anchor our hypotheses in the words and experiences of our respondents.

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The people we interviewed, surprisingly, had never had the opportunity to talk to anyone about their experiences of justice before they met us. No journalists, psychologists, nongovernmental organization workers, or biographers ever heard their story outside the courtroom, and they barely told their relatives about it. The research interview represented a first opportunity for them to talk about their journey through the judicial system but also about specific aspects of the war. The results obtained from our empirical study are numerous, but we will only mention a few of them here. First, tried people have an initially positive view of international tribunals, which then fades over the course of the procedure. They said that before their experience with international justice, they held the courts in high regard, even, for some of them, comparing international judges to “gods.”42 One respondent explained, “To be honest, when we were talking about international justice, I had an idea, how to say, positive, I was even going to say . . . idolatrous. You see, excuse me for the term, idolatrous. I had the idea that international justice is the best of justice, that’s what I thought.”43 Another respondent used similar words: “The creation of an international tribunal is not bad. One, these crimes have affected everyone, and therefore the international community as a whole. Secondly, a national court posed the problem of who should judge who, and the winners were not white enough for that and that is why we turned to international justice. But you can’t be judge and jury.”44 After their experience, however, the respondents expressed their disappointment and their feeling of being confronted with an “unfair” justice. One of the convicted explained, “It was not a very fair court, when it handled my case. . . . I found that very unfair from the Tribunal.”45 The same respondent recalled, “What I found very unfair from the Tribunal is that you had to wait for a year, a year and a half, and nothing happened, the trial did not begin.”46 Another respondent added: “It is a failure, and this failure is due to this biased injustice. If the ICTR had really sought to restore the truth, to administer reconciling justice, if I dare use the term. Yes, it could have been different.”47 Other respondents mentioned the “horror” of the judicial process, or used terms like “terrible,” “stressful,” and “frustrating.”48 This confirms research conducted at a local level, in particular the work of political scientist Jonathan Casper, and demonstrates that the difference between expectations and reality is fundamental to the perception of justice.49 Such a negative perception of justice, if not surprising, depends on elements highlighted in the interviews of people judged by the ad hoc tribunals: the weight of procedural justice, the comparisons between their cases and judgments of other convicted people, and the forms of responsibility attributed by

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the tribunals.50 For example, the heaviness of procedural justice is important in the description of the entire process and the sense of justice felt at its end. Condemned and acquitted individuals alike (and that is a significant point to stress) have a negative experience of the proceedings, from their arrest through their detention. Indeed, concerning the arrest, several respondents described it as unlawful or violent, both symbolically and physically. In terms of symbolic violence, the arrest warrant was a shock for many interviewees. One respondent explained that his arrest warrant “had no stamp or signature. I had the impression that the minister had forms that he filled out on the spot. At least for mine that’s what happened.”51 Another person remembered: “When I saw it, it was a few days after my arrival in The Hague, I was upset, shocked, I couldn’t believe that some people could be accused of such things, because I was the president of the municipality, I wasn’t in the army where I could give orders.”52 Regarding physical violence, another interviewee recalled: “The next day, we were given the hood and glasses, placed in a plane, it was probably, from the sound, I could recognize that it was a military plane and I don’t know where we landed. I suppose very close to The Hague, there is a military base. With all these hoods and glasses and all that. We had the caps removed when we got into the cell. I can’t say we were physically abused. But we’re wondering about it.”53 In this way, he stressed the fear of physical violence they suffered during their arrest and the intimidation tactics they had been subjected to by an oversized arrest apparatus. They also took a long time to describe the psychological violence endured by their relatives during their arrest and pretrial detention. In relation to the procedure, all respondents describe it as unfair, untruthful—specifically when discussing the prosecution—and inhuman.54 One of them explained: “I realized that the prosecution was not looking for the truth but was simply trying to prove her case. . . . After all, my impression is that the prosecutor has almost a task and they are doing everything they can just to prove that you are guilty. It doesn’t matter if they have arguments or anything to support it or not. And I must say that in this part, my impression is that they were great hypocrites.”55 They described how they had a great deal of difficulty setting themselves within the judicial framework—for example, “the strange choice” of pleading guilty or not—and talked at length about their perplexity before some witnesses or victims who made depositions to which they could not respond. One respondent remarked, “So for us, for the court, what I found, the prosecutor’s witnesses we do everything to make them credible and for the defense witnesses we do everything to look for the reasons why they are lying.”56

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Others highlighted the difficulty of preparing their defense in this type of trial, the stigmatization they were subjected to within the justice process. One respondent stated that “it’s a terrible, terrible burden to bear, but, for me it doesn’t, I say to myself, finally everything ends up . . . anyway no one will leave this living world, so . . .”57 Another person responded: So how did I come to terms with that? Uh . . . it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy to be accused of crimes like genocide . . . without really knowing what was going on. I had heard about the Jews in Hitler’s time, but I didn’t know much . . . in the magazines, in the press. Being accused of genocide, of having killed hundreds of people, is not easy to live with, especially when you know you are innocent, especially when the efforts I made when I was in government to resolve the crisis quickly. . . . It hurt me very badly.58

It should be noted that none of these people accepted the crimes of which they were accused. The terms “genocide” and “crime against humanity” were definitely unbearable for all the respondents. In the interviews, they expressed the need to rid themselves of this heavy stigma throughout the judicial process. Nothing in the criminal trial seems to have raised any consciousness of the gravity of the facts. On the contrary, the strength of the penal categories seems to produce right away a radical rejection and hostility. The perception that the trial “is about someone else” is a form of defense and a particularly important element that will affect the litigant’s experience and point of view. It creates an essential discontinuity with the idea that the court would seek to provide justice with the contribution of the accused. Actually, they are all completely “out of the game.” People tried by ad hoc tribunals also often reject two modes of criminal liability: the joint criminal enterprise—and especially Type 3 of the joint criminal enterprise—and the command responsibility used by international judges.59 They believe that these types of responsibility do not reflect the reality of battle and fail to take into account the context in which the crimes were committed. One of the respondents explained: “I am not directly guilty. I am guilty under the joint criminal enterprise.”60 Related to the command responsibility, another accused said that he was “not indicted on the basis of [his] personal responsibility, but it was the famous responsibility, that famous command responsibility.”61 This analysis of their international criminal trials demonstrates that they experienced a justice from “others,” a key element for understanding the discourse of those tried. This experience can be analyzed through two components: on the one hand, international justice is a justice rendered by “strangers”—

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people who are not from their countries or of their culture. On the other hand, they criticize a justice that uses legal concepts from “elsewhere” (as for example, the forms of responsibility).62 For instance, one participant remarked that they created the tribunal and they brought in foreign people. Foreigners who are not driven by this principle of justice, . . . foreigners who know nothing, nothing of the Rwandan psychology. When a Tutsi speaks to me, . . . if he tells me a story, and then tells it to you, do not be mistaken, you won’t perceive this story the same as I will, . . . and in the tribunal cases, us, Rwandan people, are judged by foreigners whom I call blind people who know nothing inherent to the context. . . . You might apply the rules, but you cannot understand.63

This element is in line with the studies made, particularly, by social psychologists Tomas Ståhl, Jan Willem Van Prooijen, and Riël Vermunt about outgroup justice.64 According to them, the outgroup authorities should make efforts to be more equitable and fair, because people dealing with outgroup authorities are more strongly affected by issues of procedural fairness.65 Furthermore, to be perceived as fair, it is better for an authority to represent a group that people can identify with.66 So, if one would like people to accept and obey outgroup authority, this authority should be fair, and especially, perceived as fair. Finally, they perceived international criminal justice as a politicized justice. The politicization of this justice is led, in the eyes of the accused, by their former enemies—those they consider to be the “winners” of the war—and by Western countries. Therefore, the analysis of their discourses highlights an oft-used scapegoat rhetoric.67 Interviewees presented themselves as victims of the international criminal system and thus of politics and international relations. The feeling of being a scapegoat is expressed in both convicted and acquitted people. Yet the justice process is not intended to be political. There is no question for the courts about moving in this direction, whereas our interviewees’ feedback is almost exclusively of this nature. Human rights, as the foundation of the International Criminal Court, refer to a functionalist conception of justice, a consensual conception that is the only conceivable option with regard to the functioning of international courts and tribunals. On the basis of the principle that fundamental values are unanimously shared, the judicial actors of international criminal courts are considered as “above the fray,” in the service of a legal system seen as neutral, endowed with objective legal authority, and oriented toward pacification and restoration of peace. This image is not

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the one that emerges from our research. The convicts report on a completely different justice system and show that what these courts are doing is rather a continuation of the war than a pacification process or a judicial action. It seems that it has nothing to do with what they know about justice. Far from denying their charges, they do not recognize themselves as litigants but agree to be seen as enemies or opponents. If there is an impact of international criminal law, it may not be the one initially expected. It seems clear that the individual, after their trial, does not regard themself as part of a larger symbolic human community in which they recognize the right to be judged. In this context, the recognition from the condemned person of a moral responsibility for their actions cannot take place as expected by the international community. Their demonstration of denial then highlights much more than a moral deficit. It also puts the emphasis on the inability of the international criminal courts to create a justice process that sets up the conditions for this recognition. At that point, denial can be understood as an adjustment to the role shaped by the trial and procedure itself and should not be referred only to individual characteristics. Conclusion Understanding mass crimes and their perpetrators by analyzing historical, social, and political context appears relevant in order to understand how these acts were committed and how such terrible behaviors are possible. It tells us what kind of response is best to avoid repeating these crimes and to promote social rehabilitation and political reconstruction. At the same time, we believe there is also a place for a parallel approach that takes into consideration tried people and the way they experience the criminal justice process. It could be another interesting way to analyze the institutional responses chosen in answer to mass atrocity crimes. Even if it is difficult to perceive them as actors who produce knowledge about an organization such as international justice and its operational framework, we believe it is crucial to go beyond the behavioral, moral, or even emotional issues that inevitably arise. Accepting that tried people are active in the justice process—even when they express little and seem to be passive—and have something valuable to say about this experience is fundamental to understanding the rationality and impact of such mechanisms. In addition to legal, sociological, or criminological approaches taking into account victims or judges, this chapter has introduced and promoted the respondents approach, a lateral way of thinking that could allow international criminal justice to be explored through a new prism.

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Notes 1. In this chapter, the terms used must be understood in their epicene sense, concerning men and women. 2. See the introduction of this book. 3. For normative and sociopolitical conditions that have facilitated collective violence, see Alette Smeulers and Wouter Werner, “The Banality of Evil on Trial,” in Future Perspectives on International Criminal Justice, ed. Carsten Stahn and Larissa van der Herik (The Hague: TMC Asser, 2010), 24; Alette Smeulers and Lotte Hoex, “Studying the Micro-Dynamics of the Rwandan Genocide,” British Journal of Criminology 50, no. 3 (2010): 435–54; Alette Smeulers, “Perpetrators of International Crimes: Towards a Typology,” in Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes, ed. Alette Smeulers and Roelof Haveman (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2008), 233–65; Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher, “Beyond the Banality of Evil: Three Dynamics of an Interactionist Social Psychology of Tyranny,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, no. 5 (2007): 615–22; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Mark Levine and Stephen Reicher, “Making Sense of Symptoms: Self-Categorization and the Meaning of Illness and Injury,” British Journal of Social Psychology 35 (June 1996): 245–56; Arthur Miller, “What Can the Milgram Obedience Experiments Tell Us about the Holocaust? Generalizing from the Social Psychology Laboratory,” in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil: Understanding Our Capacity for Kindness and Cruelty, ed. Arthur Miller (New York: Guilford, 2004), 193–239; and Arthur Miller, “Harming Other People: Perspectives on Evil and Violence,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1974): 176–78. For cultural and societal conditions leading to collective violence, see Ervin Staub, “Cultural-Societal Roots of Violence: The Examples of Genocidal Violence and of Contemporary Youth Violence in the United States,” American Psychologist 51, no. 2 (1996): 117–32; and Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For interpersonal or group factors, see Mina Rauschenbach, Christian Staerklé, and Damien Scalia, “Accused for Involvement in Collective Violence: The Discursive Reconstruction of Agency and Identity by Perpetrators of International Crimes,” Political Psychology 37, no. 2 (2016): 219–35; David Mandel, “Instigators of Genocide,” in Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, ed. Leonard Newman and Ralph Erber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 259–84; and Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). For historical factors, see Harald Welzer, Les exécuteurs: Des hommes normaux aux meurtriers de masse (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). For women perpetrators, see Erin Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More: Female Génocidaires in the Aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 1 (2015): 60–80; Carrie Sperling, “Mother of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–27; and Stephanie Wood, “A Woman Scorned for the Least Condemned War Crime: Precedent and Problems

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with Prosecuting Rape as a Serious War Crime in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 13, no. 2 (2004): 274–327. 4. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann, Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Donald Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacre and Extreme Violence: Why “Normal” People Come to Commit Atrocities (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007); Welzer, Les exécuteurs; Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider, 2007); Stanley Milgram, Soumission à l’autorité: Un point de vue experimental (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2004); Tzvetan Todorov, Face à l’extrême (Paris: Seuil, 1994); James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Knopf, 2000); Michael Mann, “Were the Perpetrators of Genocide ‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Real Nazis’? Results from Fifteen Biographies,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, no. 3 (2000): 331–66; James Waller, “Perpetrators of the Holocaust: Divided and Unitary Self-Conceptions of Evildoing,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 11–33; Daniel Goldhagen, Les bourreaux volontaires de Hitler: Les allemands ordinaires et l’Holocaust (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Fred Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Browning, Ordinary Men. 5. Abram De Swaan, Diviser pour tuer: Les regimes génocidaires et leurs hommes de main (Paris: Seuil, 2016). 6. For legal categories, see Isabelle Delpla, “Catégories juridiques et cartographies des jugements moraux: Le TPIY évalué par victimes, témoins et condamnés,” in Peines de guerre: La justice pénale internationale et l’ex-Yougoslavie, ed. Isabelle Delpla and Magali Bessone (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2009), 267–85. For perpetrators’ postconviction situation, see Barbora Holá and Joris van Wijk, “Life after Conviction at International Criminal Tribunals: Empirical Overview,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 12, no. 1 (2014): 109–32. See also the symposium published in the International Criminal Justice Review introduced by Barbora Holá and Olivera Simic, “ICTY Celebrities, War Criminals Coming Home,” International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (2018): 285–90. For the judgments of ICTs, see Pierre Thys, Criminels de guerre: Etude criminologique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). See also Holá and Simic, “ICTY Celebrities, War Criminals Coming Home.” 7. Anette Bringedal Houge, “Re-presentations of Defendant Perpetrators in Sexual War Violence Cases before International and Military Criminal Courts,” British Journal of Criminology 56, no. 3 (2016): 419–37; Frédéric Mégret, “Bring Forth the Accused! Defendant Attitudes and the Intimate Legitimacy of the International Criminal Trial,” SSRN, December 8, 2005, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2744905; Alexandra Natapoff, “Speechless: The Silencing of Criminal Defendants,” New York University Law Review 80 (2005): 1449–1504. 8. Robert Kraft, Violent Accounts (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Sara Liwerant, Crimes sans tabou: Les meurtres collectifs en jugement (Brussels: Bruylant, 2011).

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9. Leigh Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Kraft, Violent Accounts. 10. Guy Elcheroth and Dario Spini, “Public Support for the Prosecution of Human Rights Violations in the Former Yugoslavia,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 15, no. 2 (2009): 189–214; Sanja Kutnjak and John Hagan, “Victims’ Perceptions of the ICTY Justice” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, Montreal, Canada, May 27, 2008). 11. Valérie Rosoux, “Réconcilier: Ambition, et piège de la justice transitionnelle,” Droit et société 73, no. 3 (2009): 613–33; Hélène Dumas, “Histoire, justice et reconciliation: Les juridictions gacaca au Rwanda,” Mouvements 53 no. 1 (2008): 110–17; Françoise Digneffe and Jacques Fierens, Justice et Gacaca: L’expérience rwandaise et le genocide (Namur: Presse universitaire de Namur, 2003); Susan Opotow, “Reconciliation in Times of Impunity: Challenges for Social Justice,” Social Justice Research 14, no. 2 (2001): 149–70. 12. Houge, “Re-presentations of Defendant Perpetrators”; Mégret, “Bring Forth the Accused!”; Natapoff, “Speechless.” 13. Antoine Garapon, Bien juger: Essai sur le rituel judiciaire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010); Roger Grenier, Le rôle de l’accusé (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). 14. Marie-Sophie Devresse and Damien Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice: Sympathy for the Devil?,” International Criminal Law Review 16, no. 5 (2016): 796–825. 15. Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner, eds., Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16. Stephan Parmentier, “The Missing Link: Criminological Perspectives on Dealing with the Past and Transitional Justice,” in What Is Criminology?, ed. Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011), 383. 17. Per-Olof Wikström, “Individuals, Settings and Acts of Crime: Situational Mechanisms and the Explanation of Crime,” in The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanism and Development, ed. Per-Olof Wikström and Robert Sampson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63. 18. Stephen Pfohl, Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 63. 19. Pfohl, Images of Deviance and Social Control, 63. 20. Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life: Insight and Implications for Society (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge, 1994); Ronald Clarke and Marcus Felson, eds., Routine Activity and Rational Choice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993); Ronald Clarke, “Situational Crime Prevention: Its Theoretical Basis and Practical Scope,” Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research 4 (1983): 225–56; Patricia Mayhew, Ronald Clarke, Andrew Sturman, and J. Michaël Hough, Crime as Opportunity (London: Home Office Research Study no. 34, 1976). 21. Bastien Quirion, “Criminologie critique,” in Dictionnaire de criminologie en ligne, ed. Benoît Dupont and Stéphane Leman-Langlois, accessed February 17, 2016, http://www.criminologie.com/article/criminologie-critique.

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22. Michael Gottfredson, “Some Advantages of a Crime-Free Criminology,” in What Is Criminology?, ed. Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45. 23. Devresse and Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice”; Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963), 9. 24. Frédéric Mégret, “The Politics of International Criminal Justice,” European Journal of International Law 13, no. 5 (2002): 1261–84. 25. Frédéric Mégret, “International Criminal Justice as a Juridical Field,” Champ pénal / Penal Field 13 (2016), https://journals.openedition.org/champpenal/9284. 26. For example, in Switzerland, Art. 261 bis of the Penal Code covers penal sanctions (custodial or financial) for anyone who “denies, grossly minimizes or tries to justify genocide or other crimes against humanity.” The text does not include further details and the judge has to assess one by one each fact committed or each case of denial. In France, see also Loi no 90615 du 13 juillet 1990 tendant à réprimer tout acte raciste, antisémite ou xénophobe; in Belgium, Loi du 23 mars 2015 tendant à réprimer la négation, la minimisation, la justification ou l’approbation du génocide commis par le régime national-socialiste allemand pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. 27. This is shown, for example, by the complex debates in Belgium on the introduction to the House of Representatives of a resolution proposal recognizing the Armenian genocide. See Geoffrey Grandjean, “Le génocide arménien en débat,” Les territoires de la mémoire, 39 (2007): 1–6; and Geoffrey Grandjean, “La répression du négationnisme en Belgique: De la réussite législative au blocage politique,” Droit et Société 1, no. 77 (2011): 137–60. 28. Kenneth Bertrams and Pierre-Olivier De Broux, “Du négationnisme au devoir de mémoire: L’histoire est-elle prisonnière ou gardienne de la liberté d’expression?,” Revue de droit de l’ULB 35, no. 1 (2007): 100. 29. Devresse and Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice.” 30. See, for example, Sanja Kutnjak Ivković and John Hagan, “The Politics of Punishment and the Siege of Sarajevo: Toward a Conflict Theory of Perceived International (In)Justice,” Law and Society Review 40, no. 2 (2006): 369–410; Ali Hammoudi, “Re-constituting the Hegemony of Western Law in the Third World: A Postcolonial Critique of Twining’s ‘General Jurisprudence,’” Transnational Legal Theory 4, no. 4 (2013): 527–48; Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar, eds., Conflicts and Tensions (London: Sage, 2007); Bruce Arrigo and Thomas Bernard, “Postmodern Criminology in Relation to Radical and Conflict Criminology,” Critical Criminology 8, no. 2 (1997): 39–60. 31. Martin Gallié, “Introduction: Des analyses ‘tiers-mondistes’ aux ‘postcolonial studies’—Théories critiques du pouvoir et revendications politiques,” Revue québécoise de droit international 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–10. 32. Christine Schwöbel, Critical Approaches of International Criminal Law: An Introduction (Oxford: Routledge, 2014).

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33. Devresse and Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice,” 818. See, for example, Arthur E. Morris, review of Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, by George Herbert Mead, ed. Charles Morris, Journal of Philosophy 32, no. 6 (1935): 162–63; Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); William Isaac Thomas, The Child in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938); and Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 34. Devresse and Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice,” 825. See also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). 35. Devresse and Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice.” 36. Howard Becker, “Whose Side Are We On?,” Social Problems 14, no. 3 (1967): 241. 37. Howard Becker, Sociological Work: Method and Substance (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 127. This hierarchy is considered here from the point of view of those involved in the justice system or academics who comment on it. The local communities of the accused may perceive this hierarchy differently. 38. Françoise Digneffe, “Attribution de responsabilité et sentiment vécu de responsabilité: Réflexion sur les contours de la responsabilité pénale à propos du génocide au Rwanda,” in La responsabilité et la responsabilisation dans la justice pénale, ed. Françoise Digneffe and Thierry Moreau (Brussels: De Boeck et Larcier, 2006), 418. 39. Mark Benney and Everett Hugues, “Of Sociology and the Interview: Editorial Preface,” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1956): 142. 40. Digneffe, “Attribution de responsabilité,” 418. 41. Anne Laperrière, “La theorization ancrée: Demarche analytique et comparaison avec d’autres approches apparentées,” in La recherché qualitative: Enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques, ed. Jean Poupart (Montreal: Gallimard, 1997), 309–33; Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (London: AldineTransaction, 2006 [1967]). 42. ICTY I5, interview with authors, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2012. 43. ICTR I32, interview with authors, Mali, 2014. 44. ICTR I16, interview with authors, Tanzania, 2014. 45. ICTY I2, interview with authors, 2011. 46. ICTY I2, interview. 47. ICTR I32, interview. 48. ICTY I4, interview with authors, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2011; ICTR I23, interview with authors, Mali, 2014; ICTY I10, interview with authors, 2012; ICTR I36, interview with authors, Mali, 2014. 49. Jonathan Casper, “Having Their Day in Court: Defendant Evaluations of the Fairness of Their Treatment,” Law and Society Review 12 (1978): 237–51. 50. Damien Scalia, Mina Rauschenbach, and Christian Staerklé, “Paroles d’accusés sur la légitimité de la justice pénale internationale,” Revue de science criminelles et de droit compare 3 (2012): 727–46.

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51. ICTR I16, interview. 52. ICTY I10, interview. 53. ICTY I1, interview with authors, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2010. 54. This assessment, obvious to all appearances, may be, even so, the subject of diverging interpretations. See Devresse and Scalia, “Hearing Tried People in International Criminal Justice.” 55. ICTY I3, interview with authors, 2011. 56. ICTR I4, interview with authors, Benin, 2014. 57. ICTR I23, interview. 58. ICTR I17, interview with authors, Tanzania, 2017. 59. ICTY case law recognizes three types of joint criminal enterprise, all of which share common objective elements. The third type of joint criminal enterprise differs from the other two in the fact that where the crimes are committed by members of the group outside its common purpose, all members of the group are responsible if “(i) it was foreseeable that such a crime might be perpetrated by one or other members of the group and (ii) the accused willingly took that risk.” International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, “Tadić: Appeals Judgment,” IT-941-A, July 15, 1999, 150, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/tadic/acjug/en/tad-aj990715e.pdf. 60. ICTY I10, interview. 61. ICTY I1, interview. 62. Damien Scalia, “Expérience de justice internationale pénale: Perception de domination par d’anciens dominants,” Revue Québécoise de Droit International (2015): 15–33. 63. ICTR I35, interview with authors, Benin, 2014. 64. Tomas Ståhl, Jan-Willem Van Prooijen, and Riël Vermunt, “On the Psychology of Procedural Justice: Reactions to Procedures of Ingroup vs. Outgroup Authorities,” European Journal of Social Psychology 34, no. 2 (2004): 173–89. 65. Tom Tyler and E. Allan Lind, “A Relational Model of Authority in Groups,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 25 (1992): 115–91. 66. Yuen Huo, Heather Smith, Tom Tyler, and E. Allan Lind, “Superordinate Identification, Subgroup Identification, and Justice Concerns: Is Separatism the Problem; Is Assimilation the Answer?,” Psychological Science 7, no. 1 (1996): 40–45. 67. Christian-Nils Robert, L’impératif sacrificiel: Au-delà de l’innocence et de la culpabilité (Lausanne: Edition d’en Bas, 1986); René Girard, Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1982).

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

C o n c lu s io n To wa r d a C o de of Pr acti ce for Qu a li t a t i ve R e s e ar ch am ong Perpetrators E R I N j E S S E E A N D K j E LL AND E R S o N

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ith this book, the contributors have aimed to provide rich theoretical insights into perpetrators and perpetration while simultaneously exploring the varied ethical and methodological dilemmas that can emerge in perpetrator research. Indeed, our discussion of ethics and methods might be this volume’s greatest contribution: while there are many discipline-specific guidelines internationally for conducting qualitative research with human subjects, at present these are often inadequate for helping researchers anticipate and navigate the particular challenges that emerge when researching “unloved” participants, such as perpetrators, or when working in conflict-affected settings.1 Yet, although the chapters in this volume make substantial progress toward demystifying the processes through which perpetrators are labeled and often condemned, and the diverse research challenges that can result, it is clear that much more can and should be discussed. For this reason, we now amplify some of the key ethical and methodological questions and insights that emerged from this volume with the goal of providing readers with a “code of practice” that they can use—in tandem with existing discipline-specific methodological guidelines and qualitative research texts—as a starting point for anticipating and mitigating some of the challenges they might encounter in their research with perpetrators of genocide.

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In doing so, it is important to recognize that each research project comes with its own circumstances and challenges, and that not all the “best practices” suggested here will work for every project. As such, researchers are encouraged to adapt this code of practice as necessary in conversation with the people and communities with whom they work to ensure they are working in a culturally and politically appropriate manner and effectively minimizing harm for everyone involved in their research. To facilitate this, we have organized this chapter in terms of a number of questions that researchers should consider before, during, and after undertaking close-contact qualitative research with perpetrators of genocide. Research Design In preparing to conduct qualitative research among perpetrators of genocide, it is important for researchers to consider—at minimum—the following questions: 1. What does my research contribute to the existing literature? 2. Who are identified as perpetrators in the context in which I intend to work, and how might my biases and the biases of the people I intend to work with influence this research? 3. How accessible are these people, and what protocol will I need to follow to gain access to them? 4. How might my efforts to gain access to these people be received by the broader community in which they are embedded? 5. Does my research project require any form of ethics approval, and if so, what is the likely procedure and timeline for acquiring this, and what special ethical and methodological challenges will I need to consider? 6. What silences or taboos should I be aware of in conducting this research? 7. Which experts might I reach out to in order to vet my research design and get feedback based on up-to-date experience with the people, on the topics, or in the contexts where I plan to work?

Before embarking on any research project—whether on perpetrators or otherwise—it is essential to ask oneself whether one’s proposed research adds to existing knowledge in significant ways. This may be especially true for perpetrator research, in which the researcher is often dealing with themes that may be difficult for participants to discuss, regardless of their position relative to the conflict. Moreover, researchers may encounter “research fatigue” in contexts where much research has already been done and people are understandably

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resistant to participating in new projects without significant personal benefits. Only proceed where your research adds value to key empirical or theoretical questions and where the potential risks to participants and other parties to the project can be justified by the new knowledge or advances to be gained. In determining who might constitute a perpetrator in the context where you plan to work, it is important to recognize that the attribution of perpetrator status is often determined by the domestic and international political climate that surrounds the atrocities you plan to investigate. It is unheard of for all people who commit atrocities to be prosecuted or otherwise held formally accountable as perpetrators. Even in Rwanda, which Jessee notes attempted to pursue “universal accountability,” only genocide-related crimes perpetrated by Hutu Power extremists and their supporters against Tutsi civilians were prosecuted, leaving other kinds of atrocities—such as those perpetrated by RPA combatants against Hutu civilians—largely uninvestigated and unpunished. More commonly, societies only seek to hold accountable high-level officials and a handful of particularly zealous civilians as perpetrators, consistent with the international criminal law principle to focus on those who are “the most responsible.” And as discussed by Anderson, these individuals may be the subject of heightened social stigma and prejudices, some of which may have been internalized by the researcher as well, resulting in biases that could negatively impact the research that the researcher plans to conduct. For this reason, it is an essential part of research design to consider not only “Who is the perpetrator?” in a given context but also “Who is the perpetrator to me?” as the researcher or to anyone else who may play a significant role in the project. Only through being conscious of such “framing” issues can we hope to become aware of our own assumptions while also accounting for the challenges that social stigma presents in our research. The third essential question relates to the accessibility of research subjects. Research in highly politicized, postgenocide contexts must often overcome barriers related to access and recruitment, as Williams discusses in his chapter on Cambodia, or proceed with great sensitivity to avoid offending gatekeepers, as Jessee details in her chapter on postgenocide Rwanda.2 Even where access to the country is granted, access to perpetrators—particularly those who are serving prison sentences—may be heavily restricted and require meetings and formal written requests before access is granted. Such protocols can take months to navigate successfully and may require previsits to the place where the researcher wishes to work, adding further costs to the intended project. In the process, gatekeepers and other observers may seek to influence the research design, offering valuable insights in best-case scenarios or, in worst-case scenarios, introducing conditions or limitations that can negatively impact the

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project. When planning research on such potentially sensitive topics or with controversial actors, it is especially essential to incorporate space for institutional delays and adjusting to the specific context in which you will be working. Fourth, even where research is able to progress with minimal interference, the researcher may still encounter challenges from the broader community, which may impact recruitment and feasibility. Several factors can negatively influence the recruitment of participants in perpetrator research, from potential participants’ own fears or misgivings about being researched or speaking about taboo topics to their preference for presenting themselves as victims rather than perpetrators. As Maček found, their crimes may be subtle, making them vastly different from the “spectacular perpetrators” we anticipate working among. In such instances, adopting the respondents’ approach advocated by Devresse and Scalia may aid successful recruitment. But owing to the potential for delays and related complications, it is helpful to think about the accessibility of desired participants well in advance of starting research to ensure you allow yourself adequate time and funding and are prepared to cast a wide net in terms of the kinds of people who might be regarded as perpetrators on a theoretical—not just a legal—basis. Pragmatic considerations may also drive recruitment selection strategies—for example, Williams was forced to shift from his desired approach of respondent-driven sampling to a “convenience sample” when former Khmer Rouge cadres failed to identify peers for him to interview. In other instances, people may freely consent to participate in an interview, only to then use it as a space to narrate a version of events that asserts a vision of themselves—or alleged perpetrators in their family, in the case of Pető’s chapter—as victims. Such experiences can leave the researcher torn regarding whether it is ethical to perpetuate such narratives, given they are guaranteed to prove emotionally distressing to the atrocities’ “real” victims and survivors. This danger is especially prevalent where the researcher embraces the possibility that people can engage in “role shifting” or “role accumulation” during genocide, whereby individuals can simultaneously commit atrocities, be victimized themselves, and perhaps even occasionally rescue others, among other actions.3 Such historical revisionist narratives, or fears among gatekeepers and other powerful interlocutors that the researcher will end up perpetuating accounts that complicate or contradict the preferred official narrative, can result in the researcher falling victim to persecution, harassment, or intimidation, as discussed by Jessee. For this reason, it is important for researchers to consider an appropriate backup plan should they become “contaminated” by their research among perpetrators and their access be cut off. Similarly, other researchers may find that the outputs they produce, particularly where they present perpetrators or their experiences in a manner that proves to be

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socially or politically provocative, result in them being denied access for followup research or related projects. A fifth key question in research design relates to ethics review, in which the researcher should engage—whether formally or informally—regardless of whether research is conducted through a university, think tank, nongovernmental organization (NGO), courts, or other institutions. Because perpetrators are typically regarded as “unloved” participants by ethics committee members and members of the public alike, it is likely that reviewers will regard qualitative research with perpetrators as high risk, both ethically and methodologically. As such, acquiring ethics approval can be a lengthy process involving several revisions of the research design and special consideration of the potential for physical harm (for example, the possibility of illness, injury, or even death), psychological harm (for example, the possibility of emotional distress or retraumatization), economic harm (for example, the possibility of job loss or other economic costs related to participation in interviews), and social harm (for example, stigmatization by loved ones or community members) for everyone involved. Ideally, ethics processes should make our research more robust while also attuning it to the research context. However, because ethics committees are often multidisciplinary and composed of individuals who may not have experience doing research with perpetrators or in conflict-affected settings, researchers of perpetrators may have to put greater effort into explaining ethical and methodological considerations that apply to their research. However, it is important to note that the scholars who contributed to this volume do not regard qualitative research among perpetrators as inherently dangerous. Conversely, they consistently note that perpetrators and alleged perpetrators often appear “ordinary” and their crimes context specific. Thus, they recognize that while the possibility of physical danger and other forms of harm nonetheless remains—as it does in any human subject research—their research with perpetrators is not necessarily heightened in this regard.4 Repeated exposure to violent narratives may also cause some researchers emotional distress, while emotional entanglement with interview subjects and the emotional baggage that researchers inevitably bring with them in their research may also pose problems, as Anderson notes in his chapter. Moreover, given the political context, researchers may also face intimidation, surveillance, and other threats to their security that, over time, can have negative consequences for their well-being. Working in the field, more generally, may also prove isolating or emotionally difficult for some researchers. Even returning home after researching violence in situ may be difficult. This, too, is a theme that runs through several of the chapters in this volume but which is highlighted particularly effectively in the chapters by Maček and

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van Roekel. In “Perpetrators among Ourselves,” Maček notes that the negative health consequences of studying political violence can be heightened for researchers who specialize in studying perpetrators, because such research can seem “morally ambiguous” compared with research among survivor and victim groups—a point that merits further consideration across the field of perpetrator studies. Van Roekel deals with this theme in greater detail, reflecting on how— in order to establish a certain “professional friendship” with participants—she found herself adapting to their “implicit rules of decency and silence.” These adaptations came at a personal cost, however. Participants’ use of silences, emotional outbursts, and deferrals of responsibility, among other tactics—many of which she was then forced to reproduce in her analysis—left her feeling uneasy about the extent to which she was demonstrating “empathy with ‘evil’” and promoting “likeable images” of the officials among whom she conducted research. These negative sentiments persisted even as she recognized the value of her research for increasing academic and public understandings of the social life of war crimes and human rights violations in Argentina during the Dirty War. Researchers will thus undoubtedly benefit from a thorough reading of the literature on self-care and related topics prior to undertaking fieldwork to ensure they have a better chance of navigating these challenges successfully.5 As part of this, they may want to complete a risk assessment to help them think through the different sources and kinds of harm they may encounter, bearing in mind these can occur anywhere.6 Meanwhile, to mitigate potential harms, it is important that the researcher consider any potential vulnerabilities that they may have or could develop and put in place a plan to mitigate these—typically framed in the literature as self-care or planning for resilience—as much as it is within their power to do so.7 As part of this, if working in particularly insecure environments, researchers may want to consider taking basic first aid, selfdefense, and hazardous environment training, among other relevant courses. Regarding ethics approval and the potential for harm among research subjects, we highlight Fujii’s reminder that “to enter another’s world as a researcher is a privilege, not a right. Wrestling with ethical dilemmas is the price we pay for the privileges we enjoy. It is a responsibility, not a choice, and, when taken seriously, it may be one of the most important benefits we have to offer those who make our work possible.”8 This may be particularly true when working with perpetrators, who are often regarded as having reduced rights in postgenocide contexts. As noted by Jessee, perpetrators may be vulnerable to the same forms of emotional distress—including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—as victims and survivors, and as such may be negotiating mental health challenges that require careful consideration by the researcher and in contexts such as a prison, where they are unlikely to get appropriate health

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care to address this.9 Likewise, they may be vulnerable to renewed prosecution or heightened social stigma should they discuss their crimes openly and this information become known or suspected beyond the research project. The researcher must take the possibility of such additional vulnerabilities into consideration and identify plans to mitigate them—again, as much as it is within their power to do so. As part of this, the researcher may want to consider further additional training on trauma and other relevant mental health challenges, with an eye toward identifying symptoms or manifestations that are culturally specific to the contexts in which they work.10 The purpose of this is not to diagnose the people with whom they are working: researchers who lack formal training in psychology or psychiatry will not be qualified to do so. But such training can be useful for ensuring that the researcher recognizes the early warning signs in the event that someone is becoming emotionally overwhelmed; the researcher then can suggest pausing or discontinuing their work together until such a time as the participant feels they can continue, thereby minimizing the potential for retraumatizing them, for example. Where research subjects or collaborators are exhibiting signs of poor mental health as a result of their participation in a project, the researcher should be prepared to refer the person to an accessible mental health professional or other appropriate form of support, such as speaking to a friend or family member after an upsetting interview. Where appropriate, the contact information for local psychosocial services should be included on the participant information sheet or similar recruitment tool. Moreover, interviews where the interview subjects are facing legal proceedings or are serving sentences after being found criminally culpable can place the researcher in the unusual position of being drawn into judicial processes and asked to intercede by the defendant or even, in extreme cases, having their interviews being presented as forensic evidence. Generally speaking, neither scholars nor archives receive any privileges against subpoenas for restricted interviews, though they may seek to limit the scope of the information they provide on the grounds that it is overly broad or irrelevant.11 Few researchers are aware of the potential risks or their options in such instances. However, the interviewees are often well aware of the dangers of self-incrimination—both legally and morally speaking—and may tailor their narratives in ways that emphasize their lack of culpability. Many scholars also offer testimony in court, contributing to the inculpation or exculpation of the accused, although these tend to be experts on the broader historical or political context in which the alleged crimes were committed. Where scholarly interviews are introduced into trials, they usually constitute hearsay evidence and are only admissible where the researcher qualifies as an expert witness.12

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A sixth key question relates to the background research that underpins the researcher’s intended project. In addition to a thorough review of relevant literature—including work produced by academics, the media, and NGOs and community-based organizations, among other sources—researchers should read carefully for silences surrounding their topic or the region or community in which they plan to work. While silences may result from an area of study that no one has considered before, in highly politicized research settings or when working among “unloved” participants, such silences may equally indicate an area or topic around which research is exceptionally difficult, dangerous, or taboo. As part of this, many researchers and professionals are uncomfortable publicly acknowledging where their research projects or related activities have failed to make progress. In such instances, networking with people who have experience on the ground in the context where the researcher intends to work can be essential for facilitating the kinds of conversations in which such research concerns can be discussed more openly. Moreover, we must remember that silences may also represent data—telling us much about perpetrator self-identity and contemporaneous norms in the context where one is conducting research, for example. This relates to the final key question in research design, which prompts the researcher to identify experts they could approach to inform and vet their research design and provide up-to-date feedback. Because researchers and professionals are often able to speak much more openly off the record about the challenges they face in their work in highly politicized research settings, developing a broad network around your research interests and intended location of work is invaluable, as the resulting conversations can give you a much better understanding of current conditions on the ground and the potential challenges you may encounter, as well as some of the strategies that other researchers have relied on to navigate these. It is important to bear in mind, however, that because of concerns regarding online surveillance, some researchers and related experts may be reluctant to speak openly using online platforms without the guarantee of end-to-end encryption. Each of the foregoing considerations should ultimately shape our assessment of not only ethical methods but also the efficacy of various research approaches. For instance, there are advantages and disadvantages to doing group interviews versus individual interviews. Some individuals may feel encouraged to speak truthfully when speaking with their peers, while others may feel constrained by the presence of an audience. Moreover, we can consider whether research should be collaborative with colleagues who have better knowledge of the community or with the individual research subjects. Collaborative approaches may allow the researcher to access different sources of knowledge while acknowledging

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the contributions of others, but collaborative research with perpetrators may also heighten the risk of “ethnographic seduction” as well as increasing resistance from gatekeepers and other research stakeholders. During Fieldwork Once the researcher has addressed these preliminary issues and is prepared to begin fieldwork, different considerations related to the details of day-to-day research activities will likely take priority. At this point, it is again important for the researcher to address—at minimum—the following key questions: 1. Who am I reliant on in my fieldwork, and how can I build position rapport with them? 2. What specific vulnerabilities might the people I am working with be navigating and how best can I minimize harm for them? 3. How should I go about establishing informed consent with the people I intend to conduct research among, and what special conditions might need to apply? 4. What kinds of surveillance might I encounter and how can I protect myself and the people with whom I am working?

When doing fieldwork in unfamiliar contexts, whether at home or abroad, researchers are often very reliant on those with local knowledge, even when they are to some extent an “insider” themselves.13 In ideal circumstances, these individuals—whether they are gatekeepers, advisors, or research assistants— have rich contextual knowledge of appropriate approaches and protocols in a given context and are trusted by the community in which one is doing research. They are essential for mitigating potential risks, arranging access, overcoming language barriers, and navigating potential points of conflict or tension, as commented on in several chapters of this volume.14 Building rapport with such individuals is often a matter of gradually establishing trust in various ways and according to local standards and practices, as van Roekel discusses in her chapter.15 As mentioned by Jessee, professionalism and transparency—meaning the absence of deception—can also help in cultivating these relationships, as will ensuring appropriate preparation before embarking on research. In researching perpetrators, one must often establish an understanding that you approach the endeavor with appropriate professional standards as well as a desire to further knowledge rather than preparing, for instance, a hagiographic or purely exculpatory account of perpetrators.

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Second, researchers must consider how to mitigate risk for the people they study and with whom they work, as often these individuals may end up being more exposed in the course of fieldwork than the research and may be especially vulnerable to any problems that emerge, as Jessee notes. Local knowledge is once again key to such risk mitigation strategies, as is listening to members of your research team and to research subjects themselves. The risks posed to local research team members is often underaddressed in methodological literature. We must consider who to hire and the extent to which we can protect them during and after the research period. This process must also consider research assistants’ orientation toward the research project—what biases do they bring to the conversation, do they understand the research objectives and tools, and how will they be perceived by research subjects? There are pros and cons here of collaborating with “insiders,” who may be trusted by the community but who inevitably also approach research from a biased perspective. All researchers and related professionals involved in research projects must be appropriately trained to understand and execute research effectively. One can certainly also work alongside people who have contributed to similar research in the past, though it could pose challenges if they lead you to select the same group of research subjects. Moreover, within the general categories of “perpetrator” or “alleged perpetrator,” there may be subpopulations of research subjects with particular vulnerabilities, such as individuals with diminished autonomy—like children or those with mental illnesses or physical disabilities—which make it impossible for them to give informed consent without an appropriate guardian’s support. These populations must be approached with special caution, in terms of both informed consent and risk mitigation strategies. In such instances, the researcher should consult medical literature on qualitative research with people who have the specific mental or physical health problems they are likely to encounter, or among children, to effectively anticipate and mitigate the vulnerabilities with which these kinds of research participants may be living. Regarding the third question, informed consent procedures may pose a particular challenge in perpetrator research. Participation should always be fully contingent on informed consent. This process should normally include a briefing on project goals, participation processes, participation risks and benefits, intended outcomes, and other pertinent factors, and potential participants should be given plenty of time to reflect on this information and ask questions of the researcher to make sure they fully understand what is being asked of them and what will ultimately be done with the information they provide. Participants may give consent verbally, rather than in written form, but this consent still needs to be documented in field notes or recorded and revisited as

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part of a broader process of making sure that participants are informed within our research as it changes during fieldwork.16 As part of this, the perpetrator stigma demands that researchers ensure that participants have the option of anonymity or confidentiality within our research. There may be participants who refuse anonymity because they wish to be acknowledged by name for their ideas and contributions, as is their right, or the materials upon which we draw may already be available online and attributed to specific public figures by name, as in the case of some of the socialmedia-related data on which Üngör draws. However, the researcher must carefully consider the potential risks that may be posed to subjects who are being identified by name as perpetrators and make sure they discuss this with participants, wherever possible, so they can be sure that the participant is making an informed decision. Indeed, as demonstrated by most of the interview-based chapters in this book, most people who can be identified as perpetrators will opt to have their confidentiality maintained in research outcomes. Moreover, given the perpetrator stigma, the judicialized context in which perpetrator research sometimes takes place, and the reduced civil liberties that perpetrators may have by virtue of their crimes or imprisonment, researchers will need to pay particular attention to how power imbalances may affect the informed consent process. Researchers will need to ensure to the best of their ability that respondents are not being coerced by government or nongovernment gatekeepers and collaborators to participate or to deliver a particular narrative. Researchers should avoid sharing participants’ identities with gatekeepers, in accordance with the terms of individual participants’ consent, and only share data once the researcher is certain that any potentially identifying information has been removed from materials associated with participants who have requested anonymity within the project. Moreover, interviews should normally take place in settings where they will not be directly surveilled by anyone other than the researcher, research subject, and a research assistant, where relevant, and the researcher should be willing to take notes—rather than make an audio or video recording—as in the case of the chapters by Jessee, Devresse and Scalia, and Üngör. To this end, as suggested by the fourth question, we recognize that perpetrator research may take place in contexts of close surveillance. This can range from being assigned a government “minder” to regular check-ins with authorities. As part of arranging research permits, government gatekeepers may insist that researchers share their data, including a list of research participants’ names, transcripts, field notes, recordings, and other relevant materials. However, handing over these materials may also jeopardize the safety of members of the research team—particularly that of local researchers and research assistants—as well as

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the safety of the interview subjects, their families, and even their broader social network. Failure to adhere to these demands may also result in the researcher becoming unwelcome should they wish to continue their work in that community or country, or on that topic, in future, as Jessee touches on. Such pressures may escalate to the point that they become an unacceptable cost to pay for research access, and to continue to undertake fieldwork without adequate risk mitigation would be unethical. Broader surveillance procedures must be assessed on the basis of the risks they pose for interview subjects and collaborators, alongside risks of distorting data collection. Analysis and Dissemination Once fieldwork has concluded and the analysis and dissemination phases of the research project begin, the researcher’s focus will shift once again. In the process, the following key questions will likely merit special consideration: 1. What can I ethically do with the data that I produce? 2. How can I best manage unexpected results or “failures” in my fieldwork? 3. How honest should I be about the ethical and methodological challenges I have navigated in my fieldwork? 4. How can I best navigate potentially controversial findings that could create tensions with authorities or among the people or communities with whom I am working? 5. How can I keep track of potentially significant shifts in the political climate surrounding my fieldwork site in the event that I am leaving the field once this fieldwork is complete?

Once data collection has been completed, researchers must shift to considering appropriate long-term data management, dissemination, and research outputs—although this should also have been part of the initial project design. In some circumstances, the associated risks may have evolved since the data collection phase, particularly in volatile contexts. Researchers should err on the side of caution to ensure that, where appropriate, directly and indirectly identifying data is anonymized or coded and that outputs are not harmful to the research participants or community. These considerations underpin all the chapters in this volume to varying degrees, depending on the vulnerabilities and areas of risk the authors were navigating with the people on whom their research depended. Thus a key question for researchers to address is the ethical

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limits of how they can use the data they produce during their fieldwork, the response to which should be guided by the terms of people’s consent and possible changes in the broader political climate in which the people who contributed to the study are immersed. A second key question relates to cases where the researcher feels they have “failed” to achieve their intended research objectives or to collect ethically or methodologically sound data, for example. These failures may be derived from errors in judgment made by the researcher, but they are also often a result of external constraints and impositions related to the political or social climate in which they end up conducting research. If you are unable to access your research subjects, for instance, then you cannot conduct a study based on new interview material. Moreover, the randomness of your selection of subjects may give way to pragmatic concerns, for instance, where researchers are not able to access all perpetrators, or where snowball (chain referral) sampling is used. Needless to say, such adjustments do not necessarily damage research, so long as methodological transparency is practiced in publications and selection biases and other data shortcomings are born in mind. Indeed, several of the chapters in this book discuss ways in which the authors had to vary their methods or change the way they analyzed the information that people shared with them— the chapters by Jessee, Maček, and Williams being most forthcoming in this regard. To this end, we must remember that failure often also presents useful data in terms of methodological challenges as well as imposed silences from society or subject. Moreover, even well-devised research plans often do not survive the unpredictability of fieldwork and data collection. It may be that you need to reconsider your methods and theory in light of the data you actually have rather than the data you anticipated collecting. Once again, all the authors in this volume have practiced transparency regarding the ethical and methodological challenges they faced in their research in the hopes of inspiring further consideration of this among researchers—in accordance with the third key question for researchers to consider as part of analyzing their data and disseminating their findings—and enhanced public conversation of this nature among genocide scholars and researchers of perpetrators. As the researcher shifts to disseminating the findings, additional risks can emerge in contexts where perpetrator research is especially controversial, as the fourth key question indicates. This may lead to backlash from affected communities or, in rare cases, even campaigns aimed at discrediting the researcher from the government or community. As Maček notes, the sociopolitical context in which you are interviewing affects the stories that participants tell, but

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it can also affect our interpretative lens, obscuring alternative ways of making sense of the people with whom we work and the information that they share with us or prompting the researcher to self-censor their findings to avoid controversy. The researcher should strive to be aware of the broader social context surrounding their research and treat this as an additional “layer” to our data, while not distorting our results to avoid controversy or align with political interests. Many community concerns can be allayed through dissemination strategies that are grounded in local knowledge as well as being connected to the community. Ideally, researchers should make their research publicly accessible through publishing in open-access journals, engaging with the media, where appropriate, or making sure their research findings are accessible to the communities and people with whom they have worked, though where perpetratorfocused research is concerned, this may not always be safe to do. Government campaigns aimed at discrediting researchers’ work can be more challenging, as the researcher may be at a significant power disadvantage vis-à-vis the state and its supporters. Researchers who have thoroughly documented their methods, obtained informed consent, and triangulated their data may be partially insulated from such discrediting discourse, but not entirely. Moreover, foreign researchers must carefully consider that their publications and related outcomes may pose fresh risks to research subjects and other people connected to their project long after they leave the communities where they have conducted their fieldwork, as the chapter by Williams explores. In obtaining informed consent from participants during fieldwork, researchers may think that they have fulfilled their ethical obligations. But researchers must also carefully consider the continuation of risks after a project ends, particularly as its results are made accessible to the public. Foreign researchers often have the luxury of leaving many of the risks of “the field” behind, while local researchers, in-country partners, research assistants, and participants remain exposed to significant risks long after the fieldwork ends. Moreover, the risks posed to locals are not static but may change over time in response to changes in the surrounding political context. These risks go beyond violence and ostracism at the hands of the state and include possible negative effects on participants’ standing in their communities and even in their families. Participation in research may involve an increase in status, or a decrease where the individual’s participation is seen as treacherous or inappropriate. As several of the book’s contributors note, anonymity in small communities, such as villages or prisons, can be impossible to maintain where other individuals are easily aware of the location and activities of members of the community. It may be appropriate, where such risks are amplified, to adjust dissemination strategies, further anonymize data, or delay the publication of research findings.

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Ethical and Methodological Challenges for Future Discussion This preliminary code of practice, while an important step in demystifying the process of conducting qualitative research among perpetrators and prompting researchers to think through the special challenges they may encounter, is by no means an exhaustive protocol for this area of inquiry. Indeed, there are several key ethical and methodological issues that merit further consideration by future studies in the field. Qualitative research among perpetrators should not be undertaken without an adequate accounting of the risks as well as thorough and thoughtful mitigation strategies. Key among the unaddressed challenges in the broader literature that surrounds research among perpetrators relates to the ethics procedures that nonacademic researchers, such as journalists and personnel working with nongovernment organizations, might follow in their work. The methodologies and objectives of NGO research and other professional settings are often different than those found in academia, yet the overarching challenges and risks remain similar. Accordingly, research should not be undertaken without a process assessing and mitigating risks. In the absence of a formal review process, the questions outlined in this conclusion will be a helpful starting point for establishing an ethical framework, but researchers may find they need to engage far more extensively with professionals who have long-term fieldwork experience in the contexts and locations where they intend to work. Likewise, scholarly researchers may also find that they are undertaking research alongside other fact-finding processes, such as legal investigations or truth and reconciliation commissions. This may pose particular challenges for ensuring that research participants clearly understand the purpose of your research, which may seem intertwined with the broader transitional justice mechanisms in which they are embedded. Courts undertaking formal investigative processes may also respond with trepidation toward coincidental scholarly research, the fear being that by interviewing individuals who are providing witness statements and other forms of evidence, the researcher might inadvertently “poison the well”—compromising evidence or making prospective witnesses reluctant to speak to investigators. Where researchers are conducting research in close proximity to judicial processes, they should proceed with caution, especially to avoid exposing protected witnesses. Key among the unaddressed methodological challenges in this book and other methodology-focused literature is the special considerations that surround working with research assistants—a topic that informs much of the perpetrator research being undertaken internationally. Because the field of perpetrator

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studies, like most academic disciplines, is grounded in Euro-American discourses, most researchers—even where they may be fluent in participants’ preferred language—will engage in some form of translation to communicate their findings to an appropriate audience. Indeed, all the chapters in this volume have included various forms of translation, from working across one or more languages in the original interviews with the help of interpreters to transcribing and translating the resulting transcript in order to present their chapters in English. Whatever form it may take, this issue of translation is significant for researchers’ findings and the manner in which they communicate these findings to their intended audiences, and yet it often goes unexplored in the resulting publications and other outputs. What impact does this process of translation have on understandings of the qualitative research that has been conducted? How does the researcher address difficult-to-translate concepts and phrases? What additional ethical and methodological challenges might be introduced by the presence of research assistants and other interlocutors in addition to the researcher and participant? And how might research assistants further influence the research process, particularly in terms of analysis and dissemination? The process of transcription also bears special mentioning here. As a general principle, any interview excerpts that a researcher intends to use in publications should reproduce the participant’s perspective as faithfully as possible. This does not preclude critical analysis of narratives, but researchers should not misrepresent respondents’ statements by placing them out of context or by combining excerpts from different parts of an interview, for instance. These considerations are present with all qualitative interviewing, but perhaps even more salient when working with perpetrators, whom the researcher may harbor biases against. Such considerations should be extended to the transcriber as well in cases where the researcher is not transcribing the interviews themselves. The transcriber may require advanced training in creating verbatim transcripts, particularly where the transcriber may feel compelled to correct what they interpret to be inaccuracies in the participant’s narrative. Likewise, it may be necessary for the researcher to make sure the transcriber is fully aware of the potentially sensitive and emotionally distressing nature of the interviews that they will be transcribing and that the transcriber has access to appropriate support services, should they encounter any difficulties. To this end, the researcher should carefully consider the question of compensation for research assistants and participants. Where researchers have the resources to do so, people should be fairly compensated for their time in accordance with local customs, given that participation in research projects often represents a form of intellectual and/or emotional labor. This labor is often heightened where people are discussing difficult themes like personal

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experiences of violence and trauma. Moreover, it also represents a time commitment from research assistants and participants that often undermines, if even on a short-term basis, their ability to work elsewhere or can even cost them money, such as when they need to pay to travel to meet the researcher. Where researchers are able to compensate people for their time, the terms of this compensation—whether monetary or other kinds of support—should be clearly set out in the preinterview stage, and the researcher should adhere to this. Compensation can help to mitigate imbalances between researcher and subject as well as the economic risks that are sometimes involved in participating in research projects. However, compensation may also pose risks, particularly where compensation becomes a primary motivation for participation in research, for example. In such cases, compensation may amplify power imbalances between researchers and the people with whom they intend to work, making research subjects feel that they must participate for economic reasons, especially where they live in economically precarious circumstances. In some overresearched contexts, compensation may also lead to the “professionalization” of research subjects. Some individuals may have been interviewed many times and, where they receive ample recompense, they may become professional research participants, offering their services to scholars, journalists, human rights observers, and other professionals. Perhaps such professionalization is rightful considering the labor involved, but it may also contribute to participants producing narratives that they imagine are desired by the researcher. It may also create moral ambiguity for researchers who find themselves providing economic benefit to individuals who have been involved in perpetrating extreme rights violations. For these reasons, researchers should carefully consider that the forms of compensation they offer are appropriate for the context in which they intend to work. Related to this is the issue of personal security for people who engage in or support qualitative research among perpetrators, including local researchers, research partners, gatekeepers, research assistants, and participants. As the fieldwork takes shape, to what extent are people exposed to surveillance, heightened social stigma, and perhaps even official harassment as a result of their association—both real and perceived—with this kind of research? While seemingly rare, researchers and other parties to qualitative research on sensitive topics may encounter official surveillance and interference that jeopardizes their personal safety, particularly when they conduct such research in a context in which they are a citizen. Take, for example, the 2014 case of Alexander Sodiqov—then a doctoral student in political science at the University of Toronto—whose fieldwork on conflict prevention in Tajikistan, his country of origin, prompted the secret police to detain him illegally on suspicion of espionage.17 While his

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research was not overtly concerned with perpetrators, the authoritarian political climate in Tajikistan proved a heightened threat to his personal safety because he was a citizen of Tajikistan. It took five weeks for Sodiqov’s supporters to negotiate his release on bail, after which he was unable to leave Tajikistan and return to Canada until September 2014—nearly three months after his arrest.18 While Sodiqov’s case ultimately had a positive outcome, Steve Swerdlow of Human Rights Watch noted that Sodiqov benefited from “a wide array of [international] actors pressing for his release,” making his case “one of those rare bright spots from a region that sees arrests and imprisonments on flimsy pretexts.”19 Beyond the region, Sodiqov’s case suggests that researchers who are citizens of the countries in which they undertake sensitive research need to think carefully about the potentially heightened risks they face, in addition to the heightened risks faced by other local actors who are involved in their research— a topic that is rarely discussed in perpetrator studies. For this reason, researchers who conduct fieldwork in highly volatile settings—and particularly when they are at heightened risk of illegal detention or other threats to their personal safety—should establish check-in and exit protocols for themselves and the people with whom they are working. Political scientist Angélica Durán-Martínez recommends establishing a “point person”—someone with “the capacity in terms of time, commitment, resources and language skills”—who is informed regarding the researcher and/or research team’s whereabouts and activities and who receives regular updates on their safety as they undertake fieldwork.20 This point person would then be responsible for initiating an emergency protocol—including the possibility of informing families and employers and arranging emergency travel away from a dangerous situation—in the event the researcher or members of the research team fail to check in or become incapacitated. The point person may also need to secure or destroy data or be able to contact someone trustworthy to do this on her behalf. To this end, data security is another comparatively overlooked topic surrounding qualitative research among perpetrators. Political scientist Enrique Arias—whose expertise centers on drug trafficking networks and policing in Latin America—argues that special effort should be made to conduct an honest threat assessment and put in place any necessary data security protocols prior to the start of fieldwork. Arias emphasizes that scholars should be aware that establishing absolute data security is impossible. This was the case forty years ago, when security agents could break into the home of a researcher to steal paper files, and it is certainly the case today. A flash drive containing thousands of pages of information can be quietly carried away without

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the researcher’s becoming immediately aware of the loss. External hackers can gain access to a computer to upload large portions of a researcher’s hard drive without the researcher’s ever becoming aware that the files have been taken or that the computer has been accessed. Governments with sophisticated information technology systems can comprehensively monitor significant portions of national electronic communications, using programs to sift through data for potential threats. State agents can also target individuals’ data through targeted data monitoring or physical seizure of their electronic devices.21

For this reason, researchers who work in contexts with heighted surveillance should anonymize their data up front as much as possible and use extreme caution when using public Wi-Fi services, smartphones, or peripheral devices such as printers and scanners that have their own memory and storage capacity. They should likewise encrypt their hardware, maintain adequate antivirus and malware software on their computers, use robust passwords that are changed frequently—at least once every ninety days—and otherwise take steps to ensure their data security protocol remains up to date, even after their research is concluded, by regularly consulting with data security experts.22 Further complicating matters, many funding bodies and other institutions currently require that researchers’ data be shared through public platforms to encourage transparency, which means researchers may experience heightened pressure to make their data publicly accessible. Yet adhering to these policies may pose particular risks in perpetrator research, where participants’ identities and themes often cannot be publicly shared without exposing them to heightened social stigma and prosecution, for example. Researchers who work with perpetrators may need to err on the side of caution and firmly justify their reasons for withholding raw data and/or participants’ personally identifying information to effectively minimize harm for the people involved in their research. Regarding dissemination, a key theme that remains relatively unaddressed by this book and other literature in the field is the extent to which researchers may self-censor to maintain their access to the research site or to validate their deeply held beliefs about the individuals, communities, and conflicts that they study, prompting them to misrepresent the data that they have collected— a topic of discussion initiated in 2017 by sociologist Kathleen Blee.23 At best, critical issues and results of the research may go undiscussed, and at worst, researchers will consciously produce research that legitimizes the actions of authoritarian regimes or of individual actors. This bartering of controversial results for continued access occurs frequently in contested research spaces but is rarely discussed in the academic literature emerging from genocide studies and

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perpetrator studies. Is such a cost-benefit analysis inimical to rigorous research, or is it a practical necessity? How much can be bartered before the resulting research outcomes distort rather than illuminate? Conclusion This concluding chapter has amplified the various special ethical and methodological considerations that surround qualitative research with perpetrators. In doing so, it is important to reiterate that these potentially heightened ethical and methodological challenges are not intended to imply that perpetrator research is so risky and challenging that it becomes an inappropriate endeavor. Conversely, we argue that the ethical, methodological, and theoretical insights presented throughout this book amply demonstrate that perpetrator research explores vital and often troubling research questions that are of great importance for understanding the local dynamics through which genocide and related mass atrocities can take shape in a society. We can learn much from perpetrators if we approach research thoughtfully, openly, and diligently. However, we acknowledge that researchers of perpetrators can and should be much more transparent about these challenges and how they navigate them in order to enhance our ability to minimize harm for everyone involved in our research and ensure that work in this emergent field is being held to high ethical and methodological standards. We hope that this book is an important first step in this regard and that it is but the beginning of a much larger and timely conversation at the interfaces of perpetrator studies and genocide studies. Notes 1. For some potentially relevant, discipline-specific ethics guidelines, see American Anthropological Association, “Principles of Professional Responsibility,” 2012, http://ethics.americananthro.org/category/statement/; American Sociological Association, “Code of Ethics and Policies and Procedures of the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics,” 2008, https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/images/asa/docs/ pdf/Codeof Ethics.pdf; Oral History Association, “Principles and Best Practices,” 2018, https://www.oralhistory.org/principles-and-best-practices-revised-2018/; Oral History Society, “Is Your Oral History Legal and Ethical?,” 2019, https://www.ohs.org.uk/ advice/ethical-and-legal/; and UNESCO, “Professional Journalistic Standards and Code of Ethics,” 2017, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-informa tion/freedom-of-expression/professional-journalistic-standards-and-code-of-ethics/.

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2. Erin Jessee, “The Limits of Oral History: Ethics and Methodology amid Highly Politicized Research Settings,” Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 292–93; Susan Thomson, “Getting Close to Rwandans since the Genocide: Studying Everyday Life in Highly Politicized Research Settings,” African Studies Review 53, no. 3 (2010): 19–34. 3. See, for example, Kjell Anderson, “The Margins of Perpetration: Role-Shifting in Genocide,” in Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theory, Method, Evidence, ed. Alette Smeulers, Maartje Weerdesteijn, and Barbora Holá (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 132–52; Erin Jessee, “On the Margins: Role-Shifting in Atrocity Crimes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crimes, ed. Barbora Holá, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, and Maartje Weerdesteijn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and Timothy Williams, “Thinking beyond Perpetrators, Bystanders, Heroes: A Typology of Action in Genocide,” in Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Dynamics, Motivations and Concepts, ed. Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 17–35. 4. See, for example, Erin Jessee, “Managing Danger in Oral Historical Fieldwork,” Oral History Review 44, no. 2 (2017): 322–47. 5. See, for example, Kimberly Theidon, “‘How Was Your Trip?’: Self-Care for Researchers Working and Writing on Violence,” Drugs, Security and Democracy Working Papers on Research Security, no. 2 (2014): 1–17. 6. Many universities and related institutions have specific risk assessment protocols in place, particularly where researchers are working overseas. In the absence of a formal procedure, political scientist Angélica Durán-Martínez has drawn upon her experiences in Latin America to create an informal risk assessment based on key questions of relevance to the researcher’s personal safety as well as that of research assistants and participants. Angélica Durán-Martínez, “Building an Effective Research Safety Protocol and Emergency Exit Strategies,” Drugs, Security and Democracy Program Working Papers on Research Security, no. 4 (2014): 1–43. 7. For more self-care in research, see Theidon, “‘How Was Your Trip?’”; and Laurie Anne Pearlman, “Vicarious Traumatization in Mass Violence Researchers,” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation, ed. Ivana Maček (London: Routledge, 2014), 171–97. 8. Lee Ann Fujii, “Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” Political Science and Politics 45, no. 4 (2012): 722. 9. There is a nascent literature on perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS) and “moral injury.” See, for example, Rachel M. MacNair, “Causing Trauma as a Form of Trauma,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 21, no. 3 (2015): 313–21; and Brett T. Litz, Nathan Stein, Eileen Delaney, Leslie Lebowitz, William P. Nash, Caroline Silva, and Shira Maguen, “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695–706. 10. Trauma, from a Euro-American biomedical perspective, is defined as a range of psychological and psychosomatic symptoms that interfere on a temporary basis—

Conclusion

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usually less than a month—with “normal functioning” of the mind and nervous system, resulting from an experience “so overwhelmingly frightening and life threatening that [the mind] cannot come to terms with it.” For more information, see Babette Rothschild, Trauma Essentials: The Go-To Guide (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 18. PTSD, meanwhile, is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as “clinically significant distress or impairment of an individual’s social interactions, capacity to work or other important areas of functioning” resulting from “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violation.” American Psychiatric Association, “What Is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder?,” 2013, https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/ Psychiatrists/Practice/DSM/APA_DSM-5-PTSD.pdf. The symptoms associated with each condition can vary greatly in different cultures, and so researchers should make special effort to determine how they might manifest for themselves and for the people with whom they intend to work. 11. Johan Neuenschwander, Oral History and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 30. 12. Neuenschwander, Oral History and the Law, 20. 13. See, for example, the chapters by Maček and Pető. 14. See, for example, the chapters by Jessee and Williams, which touch on their reliance on research assistants at different points in their fieldwork. 15. See also Julie Norman, “Got Trust? The Challenge of Gaining Access in Conflict Zones,” in Surviving Field Research: Working in Violent and Difficult Situations, ed. Chandra Lekha Sriram, John King, Julie Mertus, Olga Martin-Ortega, and Johanna Herman (London: Routledge, 2009), 71–90. 16. Fujii, “Research Ethics 101.” 17. Jennifer Clibbon, “Alexander Sodiqov, University of Toronto Researcher, Being Detained in Tajikistan,” CBC News, July 17, 2014. 18. Jennifer Clibbon, “How Alexander Sodiqov Was Freed Following Espionage Charges,” CBC News, September 23, 2014. 19. Clibbon, “How Alexander Sodiqov Was Freed.” 20. Durán-Martínez, “Building an Effective Research Safety Protocol,” 15–21. 21. Enrique Arias, “Data Security in Highly Violent Settings,” Drugs, Security and Democracy Program Working Papers on Research Security, no. 7 (2014): 4. 22. Arias, “Data Security in Highly Violent Settings.” 23. Kathleen Blee, “How Field Relationships Shape Theorizing,” Sociological Methods & Research 48, no. 4 (2019): 1–21.

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Contributors

Kjell Anderson is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the study of mass violence and mass atrocities. He is currently an assistant professor of law and director of the Master of Human Rights program at the University of Manitoba. He has conducted genocide and conflict-related field research in Iraq, Bosnia, the African Great Lakes region, South Asia, and Oceania. He holds LLM and PhD degrees in international human rights law (from Utrecht University and the National University of Ireland, respectively) as well as BA and MA degrees in conflict studies (from the University of Saskatchewan and Carleton University, respectively). His recent research focuses on perpetrators of international crimes, the criminology of genocide, and transitional justice. His book, Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (2018), is an interviewbased criminological study of the perpetration of genocide. He is currently completing a book on the life and International Criminal Court trial of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and then Lord’s Resistance Army commander in Uganda. Marie-Sophie Devresse is a professor with the School of Criminology’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Deviance and Penalty at the University of Louvain in Belgium. She has worked for several years in France as a lecturer at the University of Lille 1 (urban sociology and sociology of deviance). After conducting research on the criminalization of drug use, she now works on transformations of criminal justice, particularly in the area of new technologies and enforcement of sanctions. She also conducted (at the request of the minister of justice) research on electronic monitoring of prisoners. She has published many articles and books on criminology. Erin Jessee is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Her research relies on the use of oral historical and ethnographic

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methods to engage with people’s experiences of postconflict transitional justice, including survivors, bystanders, ex-combatants, convicted perpetrators, and government officials in postgenocide Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. To date, she has published peer-reviewed articles with Medical History, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Memory Studies, Conflict and Society, Oral History Review, History in Africa, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, and Forensic Science International. Her book, Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History, was published in 2017 with Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Oral History series. Ivana Mac ˇek is a senior lecturer of social anthropology at Stockholm Univer-

sity in Sweden. She studied ethnology, history of art, and theoretical mathematics at Zagreb University, Croatia, before coming to Uppsala, Sweden, in 1990, where she studied cultural anthropology and African studies and received her PhD in cultural anthropology in 2000. Maček’s research interests are in the field of anthropology of war and mass political violence, psychological and more-than-human anthropology, and anthropological methods. Her regional expertise is in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Sweden. Her major publications include Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (2009) and the edited volume Engaged Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation (2014) as well as an assortment of book chapters and journal articles.

Andrea Peto ˝ is a professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She holds a PhD in contemporary history from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. She is the author or editor of hundreds of books and articles published in twenty-three languages. She is the coauthor, with Ildikó Barna, of Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (2015) and the coeditor, with Ayşe Gül Altınay, of Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversation on War, Genocide and Political Violence (2016), and she edited the volume on war in the Interdisciplinary Handbook: Gender series (2017). Her most recent book is Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (2020). In 2005 she was awarded the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by the president of the Hungarian Republic, and in 2006 she received the Bolyai Prize from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Presently Pető is working on gendered memory of World War II and political extremism. Damien Scalia is a professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the

Université libre de Bruxelles. He previously conducted research studies on pronounced and executed penalties in international criminal law at the Geneva

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Academy, the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, and the Columbia Law School. He has also worked on international prison law. He is currently working on international criminal justice, considered from the experience of acquitted and convicted persons. Ug ˘ur Ümit Üngör (PhD Amsterdam, 2009) is Professor of Holocaust and

Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. His main areas of interest are genocide and mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He is an editor of the Journal of Perpetrator Research and a coordinator of the Syrian Oral History Project. His publications include Genocide: New Perspectives on Its Causes, Courses and Consequences (coeditor, 2016), Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (2011), and the award-winning The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 191–1950 (2011). From 2014 to 2019, Üngör coordinated a Dutch Research Council–funded research project on paramilitarism, which led to the monograph Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (2020). He is currently working on its follow-up monograph, Assad’s Militias and Mass Violence in Syria (2021).

Eva van Roekel is an assistant professor in social and cultural anthropology at

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For her PhD she carried out ethnographic research on the trials for crimes against humanity in Argentina from a victims’ and perpetrators’ perspective. Her research interests lie with violence, human rights, morality, and visual anthropology. She is the author of Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina (2020) and several journal articles and has made three documentaries. She is cofounder of Dokumento, a cultural platform for storytelling. Her current research focuses on United Nations peace missions and the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

Timothy Williams is a junior professor of insecurity and social order at the Bundeswehr University Munich in Germany. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, where he also completed his PhD in 2017 (summa cum laude). His doctoral dissertation was subsequently acknowledged with two awards from the University of Marburg and the German Peace Psychologist Association. His research deals with violence, focusing on its dynamics, particularly at the microlevel, as well as its consequences for postviolence societies and the politics of memory these evoke. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Cambodia as well as Armenia and Rwanda and was awarded the Emerging Scholar Prize of the International

Contributors

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Association of Genocide Scholars in 2017. Williams has published in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Terrorism and Political Violence, International Peacekeeping, Genocide Studies and Prevention, and Transitional Justice Review, among others. He has also authored a book, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (2020), and coedited a volume on perpetrators (with Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 2018).

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Index

abandonment, 83, 122 abstract third people, 60–62 access, 138, 143–44, 200–203 accountability, 11–12, 116–17, 122–26, 130–31, 162, 165, 186, 201 accused, 205 actors, 7, 12, 31, 33, 39, 51, 109, 143, 147, 174–76, 183–84, 191–92 Adams, Jenni, 29, 43 Aditjondro, George, 9 Adorno, Theodor, 27, 45n21 affects (anger; embarrassment, fear, silence, and meaning), 98, 106–9, 113n41, 124 Akçam, Taner, 31 al-Assad. See Syria al-Berri. See Syria ambiguity, 30, 96, 107, 215 amnesia, 125 Anderson, Kjell, 10–11 anonymity, 51–62, 149, 209, 212 antisemitism, 167 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 20, 110, 163 Argentina, 6, 9, 11, 33, 115–31, 145, 204; death flights, 115, 119, 123, 127–29; Dirty War, 6, 144, 204; disappearances, 116–17, 125–29, 133n19; junta, 6, 11, 117, 120, 127–28; just war, 118, 122, 125, 130

Arias, Enrique, 216 Armenian genocide, 31, 48n85, 196n27 arrest, 50, 56, 74, 77–82, 137–38, 150, 159, 163, 167, 185, 189, 216 Arrow Cross. See Hungary atrocities, 6–18, 24, 29–33, 37, 41, 72–79, 92, 96, 116–24, 130–31, 138, 142, 152–53, 162, 173–74, 180 Auschwitz. See Holocaust Bab al-Nayreb. See Syria Beck, Aaron, 35 Belgium, 196nn26–27 Bernstein, Michael André, 26 best practices, 4, 200, 218n1 bias, 15, 39–41, 53, 55, 60, 183, 188, 200–201, 208, 211, 214 Blee, Kathleen, 18n1, 120, 217 Bluen, Kelly-Jo, 7 Bosnia, 5–6, 9, 13, 24, 33, 49, 91–109; Ratko Mladić, 19n10, 33; Slobodan Milošević, 33; Sarajevo, 9, 92–96, 99, 105–6; Srebrenica, 5–6, 19n10, 96–100 Bourdieu, Pierre, 23–24 Browning, Christopher, 8–9, 42, 49, 111n13 Burnet, Jennie, 70 bystanders, 3, 7, 68–72, 85

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cachot, 79, 88n32 cadres, 13, 49–63, 202 Cambodia, 29, 34, 49–66; Khmer Rouge, 5–6, 9, 12–13, 29, 34, 49–63, 121, 202; S-21, 29, 34; Vann Nath, 29 children, 67–85, 93–97, 100–107, 113n41 choiceless decisions, 9–10 Civil Defense Forces, 32 civil war, 12, 49, 75–80, 137–53 coercion, 8, 13, 51, 62 cognitive dissonance, 36, 111n13 collaboration, 8, 79, 130, 158–59, 164 collective memory, 164–68 Communism, 13, 160–68 compensation. See research methods complicity, 12–14, 43, 74, 82–83, 87n17, 89n41, 104, 120, 131, 152 composure, 15, 36, 40, 126 concentration camps. See Holocaust confession, 12, 33, 50, 69, 116, 120–30, 134n36, 145–46, 174 confidentiality, 57–60, 149, 209 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 74, 121 contamination, 35 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 84 Crane, David, 32 crimes against humanity, 115–31 criminological analysis, 177–80 critical criminology, 91, 177–78, 181–84 Croatia, 91–96, 105–6, 111n13, 112n18, 112n20, 187 data security. See research methods Dawes, James, 9 Dawson, Graham, 15, 36, 126 death flights. See Argentina defenders, 9, 94, 98, 105, 110–11n11 dehumanization, 3, 34–35, 51 Dely, Piroska. See women perpetrators democracy, 75–77, 164 democratic reform, 84, 90

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denial, 21n34, 23, 43, 45n21, 61, 69, 100–101, 126, 135n54, 181–82, 192, 196n26 Des Forges, Alison, 85n1, 88n29, 90n47 Devresse, Marie-Sophie, 14, 17, 39, 202, 209 Dirty War. See Argentina disappearances. See Argentina discrimination, 80–83, 89n37, 105 dishonor, 80, 127 disgust, 27, 41, 107, 131 dissemination. See research methods distress, 28, 59, 68, 202–4, 214, 219– 20n10 Doughty, Kirsten, 85 Due Obedience, 117, 121–23, 128, 130, 133n19 Durán-Martínez, Angélica, 216, 219n6 Durkheim, Émile, 32 education, 37, 75–82, 96, 124, 130 Eichmann, Adolf. See Nazis Einsatzgruppen, 27 elders, 74 elections, 76, 90 emotion, 3, 17, 29, 33–34, 39–41, 51, 58–59, 68, 85, 106–8, 119, 124, 134n39, 135n54, 144, 152, 166, 192, 202–5, 214 empathy, 25, 35, 39, 68, 84, 116–17, 131, 204 enemy, 56, 76, 92–95, 129, 133n31, 184 esprit de corps, 122 ethics, 15, 29, 43, 71–77, 108, 111n13, 124, 135n66, 199–204, 213, 218n1 ethnicity, 50, 145 ethnographic seduction, 16, 72, 207 ethnography, 50, 116 evil, 7–8, 11, 17, 20n18, 23–30, 42, 51, 89n42, 117, 120, 162, 204 exploitation, 83, 150, 182 extremists, 67, 73, 80, 83, 160, 201 false allegations, 78–79 Fein, Helen, 6

Index

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field theory, 24 fieldwork. See research methods Fiennes, Ralph, 28 films, 25, 28; Hotel Rwanda, 28; Schindler’s List, 28 foreign fighters, 147 forgetting, 126, 135n54, 157–60, 186 forgiveness, 73–81, 101, 120–23, 161 Free Syrian Army. See Syria Friedländer, Saul, 26–27 Fujii, Lee Ann, 9, 17, 40, 204 gacaca. See Rwanda gatekeepers, 11, 70, 201–2, 207–9, 215 gender-based discrimination, 28, 80–83, 89n37 genocide: Armenian genocide, 31; definition, 4–6, 67; denial, 21n34, 23; génocidaires, 12, 49, 68–74, 76–80, 82–85, 86n10, 87n21, 88n29, 88n32, 89n37, 89nn42–43, 92, 95; genocidal intent, 31, 67–68, 71; genocide ideology, 70, 84–85, 90n46; prevention/ intervention, 4; United Nations Genocide Convention, 5, 19n8, 67, 116. See also Cambodia; Holocaust; Rwanda Germany, 96, 100, 138, 158–59, 162–65 government, 69–80, 84–85, 85n1, 86n5, 90nn46–47, 93, 117, 128, 138–39, 144–46, 153, 158, 188–90, 209, 212, 217 Grossman, David, 26, 43 Habermas, Jürgen, 162–63 Habyarimana, Juvénal. See Rwanda harassment, 202, 215 harm (economic, legal, physical, psychological, social), 203 hatred, 35, 51, 70–71, 83, 111n16, 140, 146 health: mental, 132n2, 204–5; physical, 68, 208

Index

hidden population, 52–62, 187 hierarchy of credibility, 185 historical revisionism, 157–60 Hitler, Adolf. See Nazis Hogg, Nicole, 89n42 Holocaust, 5–9, 19n10, 24, 26, 27–28, 33, 35, 41, 49–51, 63n1, 64n4, 101, 104, 111n12, 159–66; Auschwitz, 24, 26, 27, 31, 33, concentration camps, 8, 24–27, 31–35; Nuremberg Tribunal, 19n10, 41, 173, Ravensbrück, 25, Sonderkommandos, 8, 9; Treblinka 34; Warsaw Ghetto 26, 35. See also Kindly Ones, The; Nazis; Reader, The honor, 80, 122–27, 150 hostile framing, 35 Hotel Rwanda. See Rwanda human rights conventions, 84 humiliation, 79 humor, 28, 33 Hungary, 13–14, 157–69; Arrow Cross, 158–59 Hutu Power. See Rwanda igipinga. See Rwanda imprisonment, 12, 68–69, 81–82, 122, 133n31, 167–68, 181, 209, 216 incitement, 73 independence, 12, 76–77, 91, 128 indoctrination, 9, 11 Indonesia, 6, 27 inferiority, 72 informed consent, 59–60, 71, 135–36n66, 207–12 ingando. See Rwanda injustice, 12–13, 39, 69, 74–80, 165–67, 188 innocence, 32, 36, 78, 81–82, 98, 118–19 Interahamwe. See Rwanda intergenerational transmission, 97, 112n21, 29 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 84

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international criminal courts/justice system, 173–92; International Criminal Court (ICC), 5, 30, 73–75; International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 33; International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 38–39 international criminal law research and studies, 173–75 International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), 12, 111 interpretation of perpetrator stories, 16, 27, 40–42, 75, 124–26, 129, 135n54, 165–66, 184, 198n54 intersubjectivity. See research methods interviews. See research methods intimidation, 13, 86n10, 189, 202–3 investigations, 12, 213 inyangarwanda. See Rwanda

land dispute, 78 Lanzmann, Claude, 25 law, 29–34, 42, 115–19, 123–26, 133n19, 136n69, 147, 163, 173, 176, 177–92, 201 legal ordering, 30 legal representation, 31, 75 legitimacy, 76, 119, 152, 173, 177, 184 Lemkin, Raphael, 4–5, 48n85 Levi, Primo, 8–9 Leys, Ruth, 27 lies, 70–72, 85 literature, 25, 26; The Kindly Ones, 28–29; The Long Voyage, 26; The Reader, 25, 28; See under Love, 26; Shakespeare, 28 Littell, Jonathan, 28–29 Long Voyage, The, 26 looting, 12, 77, 81–83 loyalty, 76, 116, 120–24, 149–52

Jensen, Olaf, 10 Jessee, Erin, 11–12, 15, 17, 201–11 Jewish, 4–8, 13–14, 35, 159–69. See also Holocaust judicial process/inquiry/judgment, 14, 29–34, 39, 42, 52–53, 59, 61, 136n69, 173–76, 182–92, 205, 209, 213 junta. See Argentina justice: outgroup justice/ingroup justice, 191; procedural justice, 188–89; transitional justice, 4, 14, 17–18, 31, 37, 52, 56, 68, 78, 84, 86n9, 117, 174, 213 justification, 36, 51, 93, 116–31 just war. See Argentina

Maček, Ivana, 13, 16, 202–4, 211 Malkki, Liisa, 75 manipulation, 70, 72, 85 Maruna, Shadd, 37 masculinity, 28, 147 masking, 53, 58 Mégret, Frédéric, 31–32, 181 memorials, 24–29 memory, 31, 92, 97, 106 Metz, Jeremy, 25–26 Milgram, Stanley, 42 military, 118, 125–26, 129–31 Milošević, Slobodan. See Bosnia Mladić, Ratko. See Bosnia monarchy, 12, 76–80 morale, 83, 119 morality, 30 Mukhabarat (Syrian intelligence). See Syria

Kagame, Paul. See Rwanda Kayibanda, Grégoire. See Rwanda Khizam, Ali. See Syria Khmer Rouge. See Cambodia Kindly Ones, The, 28–29 labeling, 11, 14, 179 Lacapra, Dominic, 26–27

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narrative, 3–18, 25–43, 54, 58, 68–75, 77–78, 80–85, 126, 158, 162–68, 173– 74, 183, 202–15

Index

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Nazis, 5–9, 25–28, 34, 41, 92, 107, 158, 161–67, 169n10; Adolf Eichmann, 7–8, 20n18, 33, 43; Adolf Hitler, 8, 27–28, 161, 190 Nath, Vann. See Cambodia National Defense Forces (NDF). See Syria nationalism, 23, 95, 101, 106, 111n16 Nuremberg Tribunal. See Holocaust objectivity and subjectivity, 40 official history, 75, 84, 106 Ongwen, Dominic, 21n31, 30, 46n42 oppression, 9, 14, 74–77 oral history. See research methods outgroup justice/ingroup justice, 191 People’s Tribunals, 158–69 perpetration: continuum of, 109; definition of, 28, 108; distant, 105; entanglement with victimhood, 59, 69, 93, 104–5, 108; “spectacular,” 13, 92–94, 109; study of, 3–4, 10–11, 14–18 perpetrators: artistic representations of, 24–29; definition of, 23, 29–34, 92, 139–40, 161, 174–76, 182, 199, 208; intimate social networks of, 96; self-representation of, 23, 36–38, 43, 206; social construction of, 92, 179; typologies, 161–62; as victims, 100, 102, 104, 116; as villains, 29 perpetrator imaginary, 10–11, 23–43 persecution, 14, 167–68, 202 Pettitt, Johanne, 26 Pető, Andrea, 13–17 Poland, 6, 8, 26, 35, 170n13 political elites, 76, 83–84, 141, 144, 153n5 positions (soldier, civilian, deserter), 94, 109 possession: spiritual, Satanic, 74 post-traumatic stress disorder, 126, 204 prejudice, 28, 77, 97, 201 primordial, 94

Index

prisons, 29, 34, 52, 70–85 privacy, 52, 139 Probing the Limits of Representation, 26–27 procedural justice, 188–89 profane expertise, 183–84 prosecution, 5, 12, 17, 30, 33, 42–43, 59, 90n46, 115–18, 133n19, 184–85, 189, 205, 217 psychiatry, cognitive, 35 qualitative research. See research methods racism, 8, 212 radicalization, 141 rape, 19n10, 27, 73–77, 119, 129, 152 Ravensbrück. See Holocaust reaction theory, 180 Reader, The, 25, 28 reconciliation, 32, 37, 78–79, 89n39, 120, 162, 174–75 recording. See research methods recruitment. See research methods referral. See research methods rehabilitation, 70, 78, 192 rejection, 25, 42, 177, 190 remorse/guilt, 8, 11, 25, 29, 32, 37, 39, 41, 46n44, 52, 58, 73–81, 95, 106, 110n7, 116–28, 130, 134n39, 135n54, 152, 184, 189–90 Republican Guard. See Syria research design. See research methods research fatigue. See research methods research methods, 24, 38–41, 67–74, 106–8, 115–16, 119–20, 130–31, 138–39, 148–49, 157–60, 175–76, 186–89; analysis and dissemination, 210–18; compensation, 39–40, 53–55, 146, 214–15; data security, 216–17; ethical and methodological challenges, 57–60, 71, 204–6, 213–18; fieldwork, 3–4, 10, 16–18, 41, 50–52, 58–63, 67,

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research methods (continued ) 72, 92–93, 106–8, 112n21, 115–22, 135n61, 138–39, 148, 173, 204, 207–18; intersubjectivity, 106–8; interviews, 68–73, 75–77; oral history, 36, 39–40, 72, 104; qualitative research, 3–4, 7, 16–18, 41, 199; recording, 49, 107, 135n66, 209; recruitment, 53–57, 61, 101, 201–5; referral, 53–58, 63, 211; research design, 200–207; research fatigue, 200–201; research team, 208–9, 216; respondent-driven sampling (RDS), 52–57, 60–63, 202; respondents, 14, 17, 53–59, 138, 149, 173–76, 180, 182, 186–92, 202, 209, 214; respondents’ approach, 175–77, 187–92; sampling, 52, 187, 202, 211; self-reflexivity, 15, 108, 114n47, 175; transcription, 214; translation, 17, 40, 72, 214; transparency, 70–72, 158, 207, 210–11, 217; “unloved” participants, 3, 7, 18n1, 40–41, 199, 203; vulnerable subjects, 39, 47n78 research team. See research methods resentment, 75, 84, 153 resilience, 32, 180, 204 resistance, 11, 89n39, 128, 133n31, 165–67 respondent-driven sampling (RDS). See research methods respondents. See research methods respondents’ approach. See research methods responsibility, 8, 15–16, 19n10, 31, 37, 50–51, 56, 62, 73–74, 89n42, 94–96, 101–3, 122–31, 142, 158–60, 167, 183–92 retaliation killings, 86n10 retraumatization, 58–59, 63, 203 revenge, 34, 59, 79, 88n29, 146 Richard III, 28 Ricoeur, Paul, 16 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 35 risk, 16–17, 26, 36, 69, 85, 157–58, 180–83, 198n59, 201–19

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Robben, Antonius C. G. M., 16, 72 role-shifting, 202 Roma and Sinti, 7, 48n84 Rome Statute, 5, 19n8 rumors, 76–82 Rwanda, 5–6, 9, 11–12, 24, 28, 30, 34–39, 67–85, 174–75, 187–91, 201; gacaca, 33, 38, 70–71, 78–81, 86n9; Grégoire Kayibanda, 75–76; Juvénal Habyarimana, 75–76; Hotel Rwanda, 28; Hutu Power, 5, 76, 83, 201; igipinga (political subversives), 69, 86n5; ingando, 37, 78; Interahamwe, 38, 76; International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 38–39; inyangarwanda, 75, 85; Paul Kagame, 75, 79; Rwandan Patriotic Army, 12; Rwandan Patriotic Front, 12, 75, 87n19, 90; ubuhake, 76–77, 87n22 sampling. See research methods Sarajevo. See Bosnia Sartre, Jean-Paul, 24, 43 Scalia, Damien, 14, 17, 202, 209 Schindler’s List, 28 Schlinck, Bernhard 25 Second Sino-Japanese War, 9 self-care, 204 self-categorization, 56–58 self-reflexivity. See research methods Semprún, Jorge, 26 sentencing, 29 sexual violence, 12, 35, 73, 86n3, 142 Shabbiha. See Syria shame, 102–4, 125–30, 135n54 Sierra Leone, 32, 104, 110n6; Special Court for Sierra Leone, 32 social relations/ties, 30, 53–63, 97, 108, 144 social repair, 85 social/societal reaction theory, 180–82 Sodiqov, Alexander, 215–16

Index

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Sonderkommandos, 8–9 Spielberg, Steven, 28 Srebrenica. See Bosnia Stalin, Joseph, 13, 165 stigmatization, 6, 31–33, 52, 71, 82, 104, 180, 190, 201–9, 215–17 surveillance, 90n47, 139, 202–10, 215–17 survivors, 3, 7–9, 25, 33–35, 68–79, 84–85, 86n3, 139, 152, 158–65, 202–4 Sweden, 92–107 Syria, 6, 12, 135–53; al-Assad, 137–53; al-Berri, 149–51; Aleppo, 145–53; Ali Khizam, 143; Bab al-Nayreb, 149–50; Free Syrian Army (FSA), 150; Mukhabarat (Syrian intelligence), 139, 142–44; National Defense Forces (NDF), 142, 147, 150; paramilitaries, 141, 143–45; Republican Guard, 142–43; Shabbiha, 137–53, 145–48, 150–53 Szejnmann, Claus-Christian, 10 taboos, 53, 161, 200, 202, 206 Tertsakian, Carina, 79, 89n40 testimony, legal testimony, 7, 38, 43, 68, 78, 100, 123, 205 torture, 4, 12–13, 27, 69, 76–84, 87n17, 115–19, 123, 128–29, 138, 142, 146, 152 transitional justice. See justice transcription. See research methods translation. See research methods transparency. See research methods trauma, traumatization, 26, 40–41, 58–63, 101, 123, 126, 144, 203–5, 215, 219nn9–10 Treblinka. See Holocaust trials, 12, 29–33, 38–39, 41, 69, 78, 30, 31, 115, 125, 159, 163–64, 190, 205. See also specific court cases trust, 39, 53, 61, 96, 100, 116, 124, 139, 182, 207–8, 216

Index

truth, 30, 31, 33, 38–39, 77, 85, 99, 105–7, 118, 125, 162–66, 174–75, 181, 188–89, 206, 213 ubuhake. See Rwanda Üngör, Uğur Ümit, 12 United Nations, 5, 33, 52, 59, 67, 88n29, 116 United Nations Genocide Convention, 5, 19nn7–8, 67, 116 universal accountability, 11–12, 201 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 84 “unloved” participants. See research methods van Roekel, Eva, 11, 15, 17, 203–4, 207 victims, victimization, 4–15, 24–29, 31–43, 74, 77–78, 83–85, 85n1, 94–96, 100–109, 115–17, 120–21, 125, 141–43, 152–69, 174, 182, 189–92, 202–4 victor’s justice, 75 vulnerable subjects. See research methods war crimes, 5, 12, 14, 32, 90n46, 119, 126, 153, 157–59, 162–63, 165–68, 175–80, 204 Warsaw Ghetto, 26, 35 Williams, Timothy, 10, 12–13, 201–2, 211–12 Wirths, Eduard, 25 withdrawal, 117–18 witnesses, 38–39, 89n42, 137, 189, 213 women perpetrators, 28, 80–83, 157–58, 161–62; Piroska Dely, 157–60, 163–64 Yugoslavia (former), 33, 91–92, 95, 100, 103, 106, 175, 187; International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 33. See also Bosnia; Croatia

231

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Critical Human Rights

Researching Perpetrators of Genocide Edited by K j ell A nders o n and E rin Jessee Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil R ebecca J . A t enci o Prisoner of Pinochet: My Year in a Chilean Concentration Camp S er g i o B i t ar ; translated by E rin G o o d m an ; foreword and notes by P e t er W inn Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State Edited by L y dia B o y d and E m il y B u rrill Bread, Justice, and Liberty: Grassroots Activism and Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile A lis o n J . B r u e y Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia Michelle C aswell Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Thierr y C r u vellier ; translated by C hari V o ss How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999 C arl o s I v á n D e g re g o ri ; edited and with an introduction by S t eve J . S t ern Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling: Listening to Silences in Postdictatorship Argentina N anc y J . Ga t es - Madsen

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From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990–1994 A ndr é G u icha o u a ; translated by D o n E . W ebs t er Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina E lissa H el m s Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide B er t I n g elaere Amending the Past: Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History A le x ander K arn Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet Michael J . L a z z ara Torture and Impunity A l f red W . Mc C o y Elusive Justice: Women, Land Rights, and Colombia’s Transition to Peace D o nn y Meer t ens Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru C y n t hia E . Mil t o n Historical Justice and Memory Edited by K la u s N e u m ann and Janna Th o m ps o n The Wars inside Chile’s Barracks: Remembering Military Service under Pinochet L ei t h P ass m o re Buried Histories: The Anti-Communist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia J o hn R o o sa The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents Edited by S t eve J . S t ern and S c o t t S t ra u s Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America Edited by Jessica S t i t es M o r

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Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence Edited by S c o t t S t ra u s and L ars W ald o r f Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War M o ll y T o dd Long Journey to Justice: El Salvador, the United States, and Struggles against Empire M o ll y T o dd The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919–2010 L u is van I ssch o t The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention A n t o n W eiss - W end t The Politics of Necessity: Community Organizing and Democracy in South Africa E lke Z u ern