Genocide, war crimes and the conflict in Bosnia: understanding the perpetrators

Clark, Janine Natalya

doi:10.1080/14623520903309479

Cited by 18 publications

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“…The cognitive requirements for these crimes are complex and simply could not be negotiated by a highly symptomatic and disorganized individual. As previously noted with the Nazi Hypothesis, by viewing the problem of genocide from a narrow theory of evil, it creates the misconception that genocides will occur only when evil or insane men are in political power (Clark, ). Our findings with Milan Lukić are consistent with the literature that ordinary individuals are capable of carrying out acts of extreme violence under specified environmental conditions or when ordered by authority figures to do so (Webber, ; Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report^†

Hough

Twemlow

2016

Appl Psychoanal Studies

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The authors provide a psychological portrait of Milan Lukić, a convicted war criminal, whose case was convened at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Such in-depth case studies are rare in the study of war criminals and unique to the study of war criminals associated with the Bosnian conflict. The authors relied upon extensive psychological interviews and psychological testing conducted over a series of days with Lukić and a review of extensive background records to create this psychological portrait. The evaluation data indicate that Lukić was found to be essentially "normal" psychologically, consistent with prior studies of war criminals who were also found to be psychologically normal and legally sane. Our findings contribute to the refutation of the so-called Nazi personality hypothesis that emerged after World War II. There was no evidence from Lukic's developmental history that would be predictive of his war crimes behavior before the outbreak of the Bosnian conflict. The authors hypothesize that Lukic's war crimes behavior was, in part, a by-product of the breakdown of the social and moral order that occurred in Bosnia. His ruthless and sadistic behaviors that were manifest after he entered the war suggest an emergent atypical pattern of psychopathic behaviors which manifested under conditions of extreme social and moral duress and which were also reinforced by blind obedience to authority. The authors advocate that future studies of war criminals include an examination of personality as embedded within a particularized social and historical context. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.We can no longer assume that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right mind." (Thomas Merton 2010 p. 241) † The term "ordinary men," as used in this title was suggested to us by the work of Christopher Browning in his study of how ordinary German soldiers during World War II could be induced to commit heinous acts during wartime while serving in a police unit in Poland. The observation that men with such normal backgrounds, who were not trained killers such as with the SS, could commit these killing acts has remained a paradox when attempting an explanatory formulation for war crimes in general (Browning, 1992).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report^†

Hough

Twemlow

2016

Appl Psychoanal Studies

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“…In some, the human spirit was completely transformed: what would have once been considered atrocious was now considered commonplace. (Clark, 2009: 431)…”

Section: Evidence From Other Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… In view of these dramatic variations, therefore, it is perhaps more helpful to conceptualize the perpetrators’ deportment more in terms of erratic movements up and down a sliding scale of positive and negative behavior rather than a steady development along a continuum of destruction. (Clark, 2009: 437)…”

Section: Evidence From Other Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Radicalization as cause and consequence of violence in genocides and mass killings

McDoom

2020

Violence: An International Journal

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Major theories of participation in genocides and mass killings offer seemingly opposing explanatory logics for how and why individuals come to commit violence. The long-standing consensus on “perpetrator ordinariness” contrasts with explanations that continue to highlight the prior, intensely held negative attitudes and beliefs about the victim group. I propose a theoretical reconciliation. Radicalization would be better theorized not only as an antecedent to the act of violence but also as a consequence of it. Killing transforms individuals. A well-established point in social psychology, not only do attitudes drive behaviors, but behaviors also shape attitudes. Some perpetrators dehumanize their victims, internalize exclusionary ideologies, and otherwise develop negative sentiments toward their victims following their participation in the violence. Attitudinal shift becomes a form of dissonance-reduction. Perpetrators come to espouse radical beliefs in order to justify their actions. This revised theorization has implications for our understanding of (1) perpetrator heterogeneity: individuals must vary in their vulnerability to radicalization, and (2) non-instrumental violence: why we often observe the infliction of gratuitous pain and suffering on victims. I re-interpret testimony of perpetrators from Rwanda, the Holocaust, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Cambodia to support the article’s central theoretical proposition.

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“…Within this study of the micro-dynamics of genocidal violence, there has been an important focus on the motivations of the people participating in violence, particularly in genocide, with many thought-provoking studies studying these men and women as cogs within a larger machine and endeavoring to understand their motivations for participating. There have been excellent studies conducted on the Holocaust (Browning, 2001; Dumitru and Johnson, 2011; Grabowski, 2013; Gross, 2003; Kühl, 2014; Lifton, 2000; Mann, 2000; Welzer, 2006), the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Fletcher, 2007; Fujii, 2009; Hogg, 2010; Jessee, 2017; McDoom, 2013, 2014; Smeulers, 2015; Smeulers and Hoex, 2010; Straus, 2006; Verwimp, 2005), as well as on the Armenian genocide (Mann, 2005), Bosnia in the early 1990s (Clark, 2009; Lieberman, 2006; Mueller, 2000; Petersen, 2002), the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s (Hinton, 2005; Williams and Neilsen, 2019; Williams and Pfeiffer, 2017), as well as on the microdynamics of intercommunal violence (Bergholz, 2013). These are complemented by more systematic and comparative approaches (Alvarez, 2001; Anderson, 2017; Waller, 2002; Williams, in press).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While increasingly some authors do specify more closely that motivations should always be understood for a specific point of time and postulate a dynamic understanding of motivations (Anderson, 2017), few works have focused explicitly on how they change from one point in time to the next. Notable exceptions to this is the social psychological work of Ervin Staub (1989) on the “continuum of destruction,” that has found empirical relevance also in Rwanda (Fujii, 2009), Bosnia (Clark, 2009) and Cambodia (Hinton, 2005: 288), although in both this temporal dimension is not explored in more depth. Scott Straus (2006: 95, 135) makes it quite explicit in his study of Rwandan génocidaires : “Some Rwandans killed for multiple reasons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivational change in the perpetration of genocidal violence

Reinermann

Williams

2020

Violence: An International Journal

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While the study of perpetrators has benefited greatly from burgeoning work on motivations for participating in genocidal violence, there is a considerable gap regarding how these motivations change over time. This article draws on psychological theories to provide an approach to understanding such motivational change. In the interaction of situational and dispositional approaches, the article proposes that motivations derive from and are structured by hierarchies of needs and that these hierarchies can change through three processes of adaption within the hierarchy: motivation addition, motivation removal and hierarchy re-ordering. The article is primarily conceptual but draws on insights from various different cases in its development and illustrates the model with empirical examples of motivations for participating in genocidal violence.

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Genocide, war crimes and the conflict in Bosnia: understanding the perpetrators

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report^†

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report^†

Radicalization as cause and consequence of violence in genocides and mass killings

Motivational change in the perpetration of genocidal violence

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Genocide, war crimes and the conflict in Bosnia: understanding the perpetrators

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report†

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report†

Radicalization as cause and consequence of violence in genocides and mass killings

Motivational change in the perpetration of genocidal violence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report^†

War Criminals and Other “Ordinary Men”: A Case Report^†