Perpetrators are making a comeback on the world’s stage. They are instigating massive human rights violations in today’s armed conflicts even as past violators are often not prosecuted. Who are these perpetrators, and how should we study them?
Impunity of Perpetrators
Perpetrators of current armed conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Middle East are acting with impunity, despite international calls for their prosecution —and past initiatives at accountability too often have been meager. For example, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has since its inception in 2002 convicted only eleven defendants.
After roughly fifteen years in operation, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia closed in 2022 have tried and convicted only three people for genocide and atrocity crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-79.
We were able to gather valuable information through indirect questions resulting in answers that heightened our cognitive and affective empathy.
Finally, over one thousand perpetrators were convicted in Argentina for crimes against humanity committed during the 1976-83 dictatorship, but the current vice-president is defending the military regime and veterans of state terrorism are calling for amnesty.
Perpetrators Defined
In our book Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side, we define political perpetrators as “active participants in state institutions and repressive organizations or informal associations and networks who carry out genocide, mass killings, or violent acts for the presumed greater good of the state, a people, or an ideology.”
Perpetrators of nonstate organizations such as al-Qaeda and Boko Haram are more localized, while state agents operate in larger hierarchical systems.
The term perpetrator applies therefore not only to the actual killers, but also to the architects and organizers of mass violence who were not personally involved in atrocious acts but conceived and ordered them. Different actors can thus be held accountable for the same human rights violation.
Empathy
The three perpetrator types can require different research approaches that relate to the nature of their involvement, but they all require an empathic researcher.
Empathy sounds contradictory because the term perpetrator has a legal inflection of committing unlawful acts and implies immoral harmful transgressions against helpless victims.
Perpetrator research is fraught with difficulties and uncertainties because of the hidden realities of mass violence and the concealed conduct of perpetrators.
Why should researchers be empathic to perpetrators? Empathy should not be confused with sympathy.
Empathy means to put oneself in the place of another in the full awareness that the other’s beliefs and feelings are different.
Sympathy implies compassion for persons by merging their feelings and perspectives with those of the researcher. In our book, we distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy as research methods.
Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive empathy charts the representations of the world that underlie the mass violence designed, ordered and carried out by perpetrators.
These mental maps are based on religious, racist, political or ideological ideas, including fundamental beliefs about the existence of the Divine, that all people are created equal, or that a natural hierarchy is foundational to human society. Knowledge of these worldviews is essential to understand the plans, decisions, and actions of perpetrators.
Face-to-face encounters with perpetrators came at a personal cost.
Research into the worldviews of today’s perpetrator-architects and organizers requires a close reading of their public pronouncements in newspapers, the social media, and at political events to delineate their worldviews.
Further information can come from decrees and policies. Mapping the worldviews of perpetrator-facilitators is harder because they do not operate in the public eye.
They are primed to violent action by the worldviews of architects and organizers that justify their atrocious acts. Researchers learn about those acts from victim-survivor testimonies in human rights reports, interviews, transitional justice proceedings, or the occasional confessions from repentant perpetrators.
There may also be rare footage available on the social media of executions and mistreatment discovered by investigative journalists. These manifestations of humiliation, dehumanization, and torture reveal the power relations between captors and captives and help explain the human rights violations.
Affective Empathy
Affective empathy is the foremost research method to study perpetrator-facilitators. Affective empathy puts the researcher emotionally in their place.
How do torturers, executioners and guards experience their violence against victims and captives emotionally? Again, victim-survivor testimonies and, to a lesser extent, confessions by perpetrators are crucial here.
This is not to suggest that perpetrator-architects and organizers operate only on the cognitive level. Their mental representations of the world evoke also personal feelings and emotions, whether as elation and euphoria when their plans succeed or anger and frustration when they fail.
Their personal sentiments may be detected in the way they speak in Manichean ways, glorify their supporters and vilify their enemies in moral terms that hint at their feelings and emotions about designing and organizing the mass violence.
Interviewing Perpetrators
Conducting interviews will significantly improve the quality of perpetrator research but this is generally only possible when the violence has ended.
And even then, perpetrators are reluctant to give interviews for fear of self-incrimination. We only succeeded in speaking with perpetrators by living for extended periods in Cambodia and Argentina and developing our networks through referrals and recommendations.
Perpetrators personify the uncanny spectacle of violence and death.
We were able to complement the data extracted from public and declassified sources with first-person information from the protagonists of mass violence. We had no illusions about the veracity of their statements. Their denials were understandable —as were their attempts to manipulate the interviews with rhetorical arguments and deceptive disclosures.
However, we were able to gather valuable information through indirect questions resulting in answers that heightened our cognitive and affective empathy.
The Price of Interviewing Perpetrators
Face-to-face encounters with perpetrators came at a personal cost. It was not only difficult to listen to the persistent denials of wrongdoing after having heard the painful testimonies of victim-survivors, but some perpetrators came to haunt us at night. Daily residues of our meetings appeared in nightmares and anxiety dreams.
- Alex Hinton dreamt about being trapped in a fortress and being forced up a narrow stairwell by a faceless man.
- Antonius Robben dreamt about making a frustrating call to an Argentine foundation to locate his disappeared brother.
Rather than dismissing these disturbing dreams, we turned them to investigative use by exploring their relation to our in-situ research.
- Alex understood his dream as a manifestation of his anxiety about visiting the former torture center Tuol Sleng and meeting a survivor there later that day.
- Antonius interpreted his dream as an identification with an uncle who had been missing for months after the Second World War until the Red Cross confirmed his death in a Nazi concentration camp.
Such analytic reflections prepare researchers for the manipulative dynamics of interviews with perpetrators and allow researchers to probe into their discourse.
Writing about Perpetrators
The intricacies of examining perpetrators, delineating their worldviews, and grasping their feelings and emotions require a range of writing strategies.
As we detail in our book, writing about perpetrators cannot be confined to one style because of the complexities and contradictions involved in the perpetration of genocide and atrocity crimes. Scholars can employ multiple ways to write about perpetrators—even within one text—such as expository arguments, polyphonic narratives, creative nonfiction, and ethnographic poetry and graphic novels.
The inclusion of photographs is another way of adding meaning. Images and texts interact. They enhance each other’s representations and interpretations, even as both are partial representations that may inform as much as distort our understanding of perpetrators.
Three Guidelines for Perpetrator Researchers
Perpetrator research is fraught with difficulties and uncertainties because of the hidden realities of mass violence and the concealed conduct of perpetrators. In our book Perpetrators, we therefore formulate several guidelines for researchers.
- First, we emphasize that perpetrator researchers must be aware of the social identities, personal beliefs and moral convictions they bring into their relation with perpetrators, even when the researcher does not meet them in person. Likewise, they must consider the subjectivity and positionality of perpetrators beyond their involvement in mass violence. Are they high-ranking or low-ranking officers and operatives? Old or young? Male or female? Do they have families? Which jobs did they have before committing human rights violations?
- Second, perpetrator researchers must be receptive to different writing strategies, preferably cultivating several styles and when possible juxtaposing them within one text because perpetrators are contradictory persons whose different sides are hard to express within one mode of writing.
- Finally, perpetrator researchers resemble the Greek mythological figure Perseus who looked at Medusa’s reflection in his shining shield to protect him from her petrifying gaze before decapitating her.
Perpetrator researchers face the violence indirectly, often after the fact, but still need to protect themselves from what they see and hear. The encounter with perpetrators can mesmerize and petrify them because perpetrators personify the uncanny spectacle of violence and death.
This contact may receive the disapproval of colleagues and others who regard them as abject, as if they were contaminated by their personal association with perpetrators. At the same time, the struggle with Medusa’s gaze forces perpetrator researchers to seek roundabout ways to describe and analyze them since the reflected images may be closer to the perpetrator’s complexities than the person before them.
