The Complexity of Evil

Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series

EDITED BY ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON, STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER, AND NELA NAVARRO

Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture

Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide

Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor

Eyal Mayroz, Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur

Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide

S. Garnett Rusell, Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Eva van Roekel, Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina

Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide

Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

Natasha Zaretsky, Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina

The Complexity of Evil

PERPETRATION AND GENOCIDE

TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Williams, Timothy, 1987- author.

Title: The complexity of evil: perpetration and genocide / Timothy Williams.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020008452 | ISBN 9781978814295 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814301 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978814318 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814325 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814332 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Genocide. | Mass murder. | Violence.

Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .W547 2020 | DDC 304.6/63—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008452

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Timothy Williams

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To my parents, Lesley and Adam, for your unending support and love.

And to Susanne for your generous mentorship and guidance.

This work was supported by a scholarship, funded by

the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

CONTENTS

1. List of Abbreviations

2. INTRODUCTION

3. Vignette I     Chandara: A Fearful Volunteer Enters the Tiger Zone

4. CHAPTER  1  THE COMPLEXITY OF EVIL: INTRODUCING THE MODEL

5. Vignette II     Sokong: A Coerced Killer with A Conscience

6. CHAPTER  2    MOTIVATIONS

7. Vignette III    Sokphary: A Female Unit Leader with a Sense of Responsibility for Her Subordinates

8. CHAPTER  3    FACILITATIVE FACTORS

9. Vignette IV   Sopheak: An Interrogator Searching to Unearth Enemy Strings

10. CHAPTER  4   CONTEXTUAL CONDITIONS

11. Vignette V    Sokha: A Child Guard the Regime Turned On

12. CHAPTER   5   DIVERSITY, COMPLEXITY, SCOPE: DISCUSSING THE MODEL AND ITS EMPIRICAL APPLICATION

13. Vignette VI   Ramy: A Garment Worker Participating in the Evacuation of Phnom Penh

14. CONCLUSION

15. Appendix: List of Interviewees

16. Acknowledgments

17. Glossary

18. Notes

19. References

20. Index

ABBREVIATIONS

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. secret service

ECCC

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

KGB

Komitet gossudarstwennoi besopasnosti (Committee for State Security), Russian secret service

MRND

Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (Republican, National Movement for Democracy and Development), Rwandan party of President Habyarimana

RPF

Rwandan Patriotic Front, Tutsi rebel army

RTLM

Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (Free Radio-Television of the One Thousand Hills), hard-liner Rwandan media broadcaster

S-21

Santebal-21, meaning Security Center 21

SAT

Situational Action Theory

UN

United Nations

The Complexity of Evil

Introduction

IN APRIL 2015, I was milling through a crowd of people at an exhibition that I was about to open, when I overheard a woman speaking to her companion. The exhibition was on perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide and included eleven portraits of former cadres of the Khmer Rouge and several text panels that discussed the motivations of low-level perpetrators for participating in genocidal violence, including a number of original quotes from individual perpetrators themselves.[1] This woman remarked that one could see the evil in the eyes of the man whose picture she had been looking at—the portrait that in a more anonymized version adorns the cover of this book. I looked back at the picture and saw a man whom I had sat opposite and whose story he had told me. I saw no evil in those eyes, and I am almost certain that the woman would not have seen it either, if she had not been at an exhibition on perpetrators. This man is an ordinary man, a farmer in a Cambodian province. But the actions he undertook during the rule of the Khmer Rouge are anything but ordinary; one might even say that these acts were evil.

There are manifold other examples of such evil acts throughout history: Rounding up Jewish people and herding them to the woods to be killed. Ghettoizing, deporting, and then killing Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, disabled people, and other “antisocial elements”—sometimes by gassing, sometimes by shooting. Constructing roadblocks, raiding homes, and patrolling the marshes to root out and kill every last Tutsi in Rwanda. Imprisoning, torturing, and killing people who were suspected to be internal enemies of the revolution in Cambodia. Expelling Armenians from their homes and sending them on a death march into the desert where they were free to be looted, raped, and killed. Holding Bosniaks in concentration camps, then raping and killing them in the dissolving former Yugoslavia. These are just a fraction of the actions committed in just a few of the cases of genocide, but they highlight the extraordinarily brutal and cruel topic of this book. And yet remarkably, the people participating in these actions are generally ordinary people who are in no way demographically and psychologically aberrant from the rest of the population—as I discuss later in this introduction. So, if it is not the inherent evil of these men and women that drives these actions, what is it? To this end, the research question that this book seeks to answer is, Why do individuals participate in genocide?

It is a simple question with a complex answer. This book approaches the question of why people participate in genocide by offering a model that demonstrates at once the complexity of such motivations and their everyday, banal character. It develops the Complexity of Evil model, which draws on research in social psychology, sociology, political science, criminology, psychology, and anthropology and their theoretical, experimental, and empirical insights into various cases. Thus, it provides the conceptual underpinning to help us understand individual low-level perpetrators and their actions in genocide and offers researchers a tool for explaining perpetration comparatively across different cases.

The Complexity of Evil model pulls together research from this broad array of disciplines and synthesizes previous findings to create an innovative approach to understanding perpetration. The model creates an abstract model that can serve as a heuristic for readers for understanding participation in genocide across various different cases. The Complexity of Evil model provides an approach that systematically orders the various factors according to their causal effect, differentiating among motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions. Motivations are the actual impulse for participation, without which it would not occur, and can be differentiated between motivations driven by the perpetrator’s ingroup, motivations emanating from the victim group, and motivations that are based on the opportunistic self-service of the actor. The presence of a motivation is causally necessary for participation to occur, and each individual motivation can be sufficient, although the specific motivation depends on the individual.[2] Facilitative factors make participation easier for the perpetrator, but these factors alone would not make someone participate; while they are causally neither sufficient nor necessary, they do increase the likelihood that participation will occur if a motivation is present. Finally, contextual conditions provide the macro-level, genocidal context within which participation occurs; the context is thus a necessary foundation within which everything else develops. The focus here is on how this context is perceived by the individuals acting within it and how it impacts their perpetration. This book will comprehensively go through the various elements of the model, introducing and explaining their relevance empirically and conceptually for individuals’ decision to participate in genocide.

The Complexity of Evil model thus provides a schematic approach to participation in genocide that synthesizes previous approaches and systematically orders the relevant factors. In this way, the model emphasizes how diverse and complex reasons for participating in genocide can be, while at the same time highlighting how mundane and simple many of the motivations are. By integrating empirical insights from various cases throughout the book, the comparability of perpetration across various cases is emphasized. The Complexity of Evil model allows researchers to approach perpetrators’ reasons for participating in different kinds of genocide around the world and throughout history in a comparative manner.

The title of this book, The Complexity of Evil, references Hannah Arendt’s ([1963] 1994) iconic phrase of “the banality of evil,” which she coined in her seminal book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt broke with the interpretation of Holocaust perpetrators being psychopaths, ideological fanatics, or in other ways aberrant. Instead, she suggested that Adolf Eichmann was “terribly and terrifyingly normal” (276) and that in the context Eichmann was situated in, the evil acts he committed did not require evil motivation, his motivations were quite banal, and indeed he was just “thoughtless” regarding the moral consequences of his acts.[3]

I take up and adapt this notion of the banality of evil to develop the idea of the Complexity of Evil model by arguing that individuals’ motivations to participate in genocidal action are indeed most often banal, but they are also manifold and complex. The Complexity of Evil model systematically differentiates between different types of motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions, arguing for a complex understanding of genocidal motivations. At the same time, these factors are hardly extraordinary and reveal less about the depths of human depravity, but instead they highlight the banal, simple, and quotidian reasons why many people participate and how similar they are to many of the factors that motivate action in many other walks of life. I focus here not on those individuals in the highest echelons of power, the people who dreamed up the hellish ideologies with which the countries were ravaged, the brains behind the operation. Instead, I focus on the people on the ground who participated, the foot soldiers who implemented these genocidal policies.

Heinrich Popitz once wrote that “a human never has to, but can always act violently, he never has to, but can always kill—individually or collectively—together or with division of labor—in all situations … in different moods … for all imaginable ends—anyone” (Popitz 1986, 76; my translation). It is the aim of this book to unpack why people take this step, to act violently, to kill, to participate in genocide. Before introducing previous work on this question and explaining what this book will contribute to the extant broader literature, I will demonstrate what the various elements of the research question mean precisely. The question implies an interest in causality, and the Complexity of Evil model provides a systematic approach to integrating various types of factors that together make individuals participate in genocide and with this provide a framework that differentiates various types of factors.[4] This causal answer includes motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions that together can explain why people participate in genocide.

The question also defines the focus of this book as directed toward the individual who commits these acts of violence and his or her reasons for doing so. In order to do this, the perspective of the individual must be taken on; we must put ourselves in the shoes of these people. Rather than distancing ourselves and understanding these people as “evil others,” this book upholds the consensus in the literature that these perpetrators are quite like everyone else, although this makes it all the more unsettling to take on their perspective. The Complexity of Evil model allows us to delve into history and understand it through the eyes of the actors who made it reality, the low-level perpetrators, to try to grapple with the experienced unfolding of events that at the time were their lived present and only in retrospect became the grand sweeps of history (see Neitzel and Welzer 2011b, 27). While the individual is firmly at the center of this analysis, the individual and his or her motivations can only be fathomed by heeding the situation one is in, by acknowledging the broader genocidal context, and by reflecting on the group dynamics and relations one has. These various levels are included in the Complexity of Evil model, but are always related back to the individual and their perceptions of them. It is their perceptions of the situation, context, and so on that interest us in order to gauge what part they play in pushing the individuals toward participation in genocide.

Motivations for participation in genocide are at the center of analysis—that is, the book studies the motivations for actions, not for becoming a certain type of person. The Complexity of Evil model is not interested in thinking about participation through the simplistic and essentialist categories of perpetrator, victim, bystander, or rescuer. This is an important distinction, as perpetrators can also engage in any number of further acts in the context of genocide: rescuing victims, being bystanders, or even becoming victims themselves (see Williams 2018b). These gray zones of people’s actions make it necessary not to essentialize individuals as perpetrators but to focus on their motivations for specific actions. I would argue that a more accurate understanding of perpetrators accepts that people are perpetrators precisely because, and only insofar as, they perpetrate. At the same time, they may also be bystanders, rescuers, or victims. Therefore, I think that an action-centric conception is more helpful, as it allows us to interrogate the connection between the actor and the action. At the same time, it is important to note that the model explains participation in genocide as a broad process—it is not a model that explains why people join genocidal organizations (although this can sometimes factor into their motivations to participate in genocide). Further, as the viewpoint is firmly rooted in the individual’s perspective, organizational structures and strategies are interesting only insofar as how they influence the individual, but will not be studied in and of themselves.

WHY CONDUCT RESEARCH ON PARTICIPATION IN GENOCIDE?

Conducting research on participation in genocide is important because we can only really understand and explain how the dynamics of genocide manifest if we also understand the individuals who implement them. Perpetrator research allows us to go beyond simplistic explanations and fathom the more complex realities as they occur on the ground while genocide unfolds. A deeper look at perpetrators also allows us to unpack questions of agency and make it “at least conceivable that a number of those actors could have made different choices” (Gross 2003, 12), thus impacting the way the genocide evolved. Genocide is not a static occurrence but a process (see Rosenberg 2012), and this process is the product of a multitude of individual actions. Only by understanding these actions will we be able to truly understand the genocidal process as a whole. It is important not to treat “the ‘masses’ as an undifferentiated whole,” as this will not allow a differentiation between the more ambitious and the more passive and may overstate the role of volition (Fujii 2009, 9). It is thus important to account for local dynamics and go beyond emphasizing just top-down, elite perspectives (Kalyvas 2004; 2006, 43).

Further, it is important from an ethical point of view to emphasize that the endeavor of understanding these participants to genocide and the necessary step of taking their viewpoint in no way endorses their actions. As Christopher Browning succinctly puts it, “Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving” ([1994] 2001, xx). It is about taking a nonnormative, analytical perspective that forwards understanding about, rather than judgment for, these individuals’ actions. An interesting perspective is taken by Janine Natalya Clark, who pushes this further, claiming that “by demonizing and dehumanizing perpetrators, we thereby engage in the very same processes that helped to make their crimes possible in the first place” (2009, 424). A significant part of genocidal violence is that it strips the victims of their identity and their individuality, rendering them identical for all intents and purposes from the perpetrator perspective. We should certainly be wary of doing this ourselves as researchers, toward both victims and perpetrators, and try to grapple with the albeit more difficult perspective of these individuals who participated in genocide. Just as all victims are individuals and not all identify with the victim group (Kühl 2014, 44), so too are all perpetrators individuals and should be treated as such. This book takes this perspective seriously, and the Complexity of Evil model provides a tool to understand each of these individuals, while at the same time opening the space to compare them within and across cases.

However, taking on the perpetrator perspective does bear problems in relation to the victims of this violence, as there are “pervasive differences between perpetrator and victim perspectives” and the events “typically seem worse to the victim than to the perpetrator” (Baumeister 2002, 243). Thus, researchers can understand motivations for participating only by—at least temporarily—viewing the violence through the eyes of the perpetrators and by trying to understand how they perceive these acts, which is undoubtedly very different from how victims perceive them. While Roy Baumeister (2002, 243) distills from this a “genuine moral danger,” I believe that from an academic viewpoint this is not problematic, as long as it does not lead the researcher to relativize the relevance or nature of the acts themselves. Also, there is an equal danger in research on victims, about taking on the victim perspective and exaggerating the acts. Thus, researchers studying both sides of the genocidal violence need to be aware of these biases in individual perceptions.

Following on from this, a note on the use of language in this book is in order, particularly in the context of taking on perpetrator perspectives. In the following three points, I draw on Kühl (2014, 39–44), who argues that researchers should use a neutral vocabulary and speak, for example, of mass killings rather than mass murder in order that one opens up the possibility for some perspectives at some points in time to see this as murder, while others will not see it as such. Equally, we should only critically adopt the language used by the perpetrators of genocide and indicate this throughout, as these often include euphemisms such as “deportations,” “pacification actions,” “Final Solution,” “ethnic cleansing,” and so on. Finally, and quite fundamentally, we should be wary of dichotomous language use that differentiates, for instance, between “Germans,” “Poles,” and “Ukrainians,” on the one hand, and “Jews,” on the other, as this suggests that Jews were not also members of these nationalities. In dichotomizing Jews and these nationalities, we foreground religion, as it was ascribed to the victims (many of whom did not even identify as Jews), and take on the National Socialist perspective on society. Thus, when referring to these groups, I will instead opt to use terminologies such as Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians.

Finally, it should also be noted that by individualizing our perspective on low-level participants of genocide, we avoid the danger of collectivizing the guilt of these actions (Clark 2009, 425), allowing individuals to be held accountable for their actions and not tarring with the same brush all members of the group perpetrating the genocide. The Complexity of Evil model allows just this: to understand each individual and his or her motivation for various actions, but without assuming that each person’s pathway must be the same as the others.

GENOCIDE AND PERPETRATION: APPROACHING THE CONCEPTS

Before we embark on this journey of exploring why people participate in genocide, it is important to lay some conceptual foundations of what I understand as genocide and perpetration in it. Although the model, along with the book, is titled the Complexity of Evil, this is an admittedly slightly polemic use of the word “evil.” This allows the book to be tied to Arendt’s phrase and placed in line with a row of other works on genocide (Card 2010; Miller 2004; Staub 1989; Vetlesen 2005; Waller 2002). However, this book does not use evil as an analytical concept (for a more systematic treatment, see French, Wettstein, and Goldberg 2012) but simply uses it as a synonym for participating in horrific acts of genocide, which is admittedly and undeniably a colloquial usage. While focusing solely on participation in genocide limits the scope of my arguments vis-à-vis participation in mass killing or even state-sanctioned crime more generally, it allows the model to be precise for this type of violence, not stripping it of the possibility of being tested for possible application to other forms of violence at a later point (see Overmann 2016).

Coined by Raphael Lemkin (1944), “genocide” is a fundamentally legal term defined in Article II of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of 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;

(e)   Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (United Nations 1948).

The Genocide Convention has been juridically implemented through various ad hoc UN or hybrid courts, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). While prosecution of genocidal crimes is enabled by this convention, its wording has been criticized strongly in academic literature, primarily for its reductive enumeration of who could be classed as a victim group (see Alvarez 2001, 74; A. Jones 2006, 22; Shaw 2010, 158), its too-inclusive nature regarding the acts that constitute genocide, broadening it beyond mass killing (see Jonassohn 1992, 21; A. Jones 2006, 22; Thornberry 1991; for counterarguments see Shaw 2010, 161), its failure to specify the perpetrating agents as a state (Alvarez 2001, 10), and the puzzling use of the phrase “as such” (for a discussion of this, see Boghossian 2010a, 77; 2010b, 108; Schabas 2010, 96–97; Weitz 2010, 103). This critique has led some to distance themselves from the legal phrasing for academic use (Sémelin 2005b, 83–84; 2012, 27), and a plethora of academic definitions have arisen. However, there is no consensus on how an alternative academic definition should read, and it seems unlikely that agreement will be reached on this. There is, however, remarkable overlap on the cases identified as genocide, even if there is no consensus on the definition of the concept.

I would like to emphasize that while mass killing is central to the idea of genocide, other acts against members of the target group can also be committed that fortify the effects of the mass killing. For instance, other forms of one-sided violence against members of the target group could include, but are certainly not limited to, sexualized violence, torture, and assault; furthermore, the elimination of the group’s constitutive space could be pursued by the perpetrator group. Moreover, cultural discrimination, assimilation, or any other policies designed to undermine the viability of the group’s continued existence can also exist. These further acts do not constitute genocide as such but certainly amplify the suffering of the victims and contribute to certain mechanisms such as dehumanization.

Having defined what constitutes genocide, I now turn to the issue of defining perpetrators and perpetration. The focus here is on low-level perpetrators, the ordinary men and women who participated in genocide but were not the national instigators or intellectual ideologues of it. Given the complex situations that arise when genocide is unfolding at the local level, ideally we would be able to make a clear distinction between perpetrators and nonperpetrators. Unfortunately, the black-and-white categorization of perpetrators and nonperpetrators is empirically difficult as people engage in different actions at different points of time and thus can be seen variously as perpetrators, rescuers, victims, or bystanders. Thus, rather than essentializing the category of perpetrator, it would be better to study various types of actions that are possible in the context of genocide and from here categorize who is our subject of interest.

For a more in-depth dealing of various action categories, I refer to a typology of genocidal action that I have published elsewhere (Williams 2018b) that is empirically useful in helping to position individuals’ actions within genocide along two axes of individual impact and proximity to the killing. The resulting typology includes fourteen types of genocidal actions, including acts of perpetration, rescuing, and bystanding. In the end, “perpetrators,” in the narrowest sense of the word, would only be engaged in the type “enforcing,” which occurs proximately to the killing and has the impact that certain people die who otherwise would not have died; these are people who execute the genocidal policies and kill other people. However, a broader understanding of perpetration allows people who are assisting in this process to be seen as perpetrators with their actions also being necessary for individual victims to be killed but more distant from the killing itself—for example, arresting, guarding, or transporting the victims or enabling the killing process in other ways. Without these actions, the killing would not be possible, as there would be no victims available to kill. Further yet, some forms of active facilitating and active encouraging, such as onlookers cheering and giving moral support, could be seen as perpetrator actions also, when these actions change the situation to such a degree that they are pivotal for driving the killing forward. Thus, the “low-level perpetrators,” who are the focus of this book, includes in its definition of a perpetrator a broad array of actions that are pivotal to the successful implementation of genocide. Beyond direct perpetrators, these people are who Markusen (2002, 86) terms as accomplices, with their contributions in articulating, rationalizing, and distributing a genocidal ideology, writing and implementing discriminatory legislation, developing and maintaining the necessary technology for killing, and, most importantly, actually arresting, guarding, and preparing the victims for their deaths. Given the important role of organization and the division of labor in the perpetration of genocide, due to its extremely broad attempt to destroy an entire group, these people who “merely” enable the process through political, logistical, or bureaucratic means actually play a pivotal role. Thus, the term “accomplice” perhaps does not go far enough, as used by Markusen. Without these people’s participation, the genocide would not occur; thus, their inclusion as perpetrators is necessary. Perpetration is more than just killing; perpetration includes all manner of action that is involved in the complex process leading up to and supporting this killing.

PARTICIPATION IN GENOCIDE: WHAT ARE THE CURRENT RESEARCH TRENDS?

This is not the first book on participation in genocide, so it stands in a long and rich tradition. Scott Straus has done the field a service by repeatedly analyzing various trends, postulating the development of a “second-generation, comparative” scholarship after the first, primarily Holocaust-centric generation (2007a), looking at the emergence and shortcomings of various theories on genocide (2012), and, with Evgeny Finkel, differentiating various levels of analysis in macro-, meso-, and micro-level research (Finkel and Straus 2012). Here I will only briefly discuss some of the developments in the field as salient to this book, but refer to this other work for a deeper and broader treatment. First, I will discuss how research on perpetrators has morphed from a focus on individual dispositions to a focus on the situations these individuals are acting within, before today emphasizing more an interaction between the individual and the situation; second, I will demonstrate the development in the type of scholarship from the study of one case, via comparative research to disaggregated studies; third, I will discuss the controversial role of ethnicity across studies of participation in genocide and genocide studies more broadly; finally, I will introduce the previous, most systematic work specifically on motivations.

From Dispositions to Situations as Motivators for Genocide

Research on perpetrators originated after the Second World War when scholars became interested in trying to explain why people participated in the Holocaust. Their research focused on the individual characteristics of those participating, and Theodor Adorno and others (1950; see also Altemeyer 1981) advanced the idea of an authoritarian personality that was ethnocentric and obedient to authority and thus naturally predisposed to Nazi ideology. This dispositional conception is also prominent in media reports today that boil participation down to certain individual characteristics of the perpetrators, portraying participants in genocide as evil or “sick,” and certainly as different from “ordinary” people. Such portrayals of perpetrators as different from ordinary people are appealing, as they firmly place most people outside the circle of potential participants. Very few scholars, however, have accepted the idea that genocidal perpetrators can be categorized as merely deviant others. Instead, they prefer to think of them for the most part as ordinary people—to use a broader formulation of the “ordinary men” who were the topic of Browning’s ([1994] 2001) seminal, eponymous book[5]—who were “extraordinary only by what they did not by who they were” (Waller 2002, 8).

Instead, situational influences have gained explanatory traction, with Philip Zimbardo metaphorically stating that perpetrators are not bad apples but are in a bad barrel, and suggesting that “any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us—under the right or wrong situational circumstances” (2008, 211). Particularly experimental, social-psychological work, seminally by Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch, propelled this fundamental shift in genocide research toward accepting that participation can be understood only by understanding the social context within which the individuals are embedded.[6] Situations refer to the direct environment of individuals within which decisions are made, relations to others are experienced, and the dynamics around one are perceived.

Going further than these situational explanations, others argue that situations do not drive participation in genocide unilaterally and deterministically, but that individuals themselves and their characteristics impact how they perceive their situations and thus shape their decisions on participation. Leonard Newman argues emphatically that pitting dispositional factors against situational ones is a false dichotomy, that “a given situation can have quantitatively and qualitatively different effects on people as a function of the dispositions they bring to those situations” (2002, 50), and that situations and dispositions interact with each other (2006, 110). Furthermore, individuals not only react to situations but also shape these situations through their actions (Newman 2002, 51; 2006, 115; Waller 2002, 175). Thus, throughout the process of genocide, it is possible for an individual’s participation in genocide and their use of genocidal rhetoric to change the situation they are in, which in turn can change the motivations as experienced by the individual.

This book is clearly located in this last camp, arguing for the fundamental importance of the situation for people’s motivations to participate in genocide, while at the same time acknowledging that different people react to situations in different ways and that they themselves interact with and shape their situations. Thus, it is an overstatement to say that in certain situations, anyone would participate, as certain people will be disposed to choose punishment or even death rather than participate; but at the same time, it is also true that many people in these situations do indeed go along with these expectations.

Making Research on Genocide Comparative and Disaggregated

Straus (2007a) argues that we have seen two generations of genocide research, beginning with a literature in the 1970s and 1980s that was case specific and mostly focused on the Holocaust (Fein 1979; Horowitz 1976; Kuper 1981; Staub 1989). The second generation was heralded by more comparative works, which over time became more systematic (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Chirot and McCauley 2006; Gerlach 2010; Kiernan 2007; Mann 2005; Melson 1992; Midlarsky 2005; Moses 2008; Rummel 1994; Sémelin 2005a; Shaw 2003; Valentino 2004; Weitz 2003), and various macro-level case studies are providing a wealth of case-specific insights on other cases (Gagnon 2004; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2008; Kiernan 1996; Mamdani 2001; Prunier 2005).

Two key developments have occurred that were only nascent at publication of Straus’s (2007a) paper: First, in parallel to these more systematic, comparative qualitative studies, a new quantitative literature on genocide and mass violence also developed, which is becoming ever more sophisticated and influential (Goldsmith et al. 2013; Harff 2003; Krain 2005; Querido 2009; Rost 2013; Schneider and Bussmann 2013; Ulfelder and Valentino 2008; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004; Wayman and Tago 2010; R. Wood 2010).[7] Second, there is now a third generation of qualitative genocide scholarship, which not only puts an emphasis on systematic comparison but also is beginning to disaggregate the genocidal process in both time and space (e.g., Burleson and Giordano 2016; Owens, Su, and Snow 2013, 70). Primarily this is achieved by eschewing the purely macro-political view and instead looking in more depth at the perpetrators and the processes of perpetration. While there has been a long tradition of researching individual perpetrators (predominantly in the Holocaust), most of these studies have been historical-biographical in nature, particularly the German-language literature, providing a wealth of historical details and deeper understanding of these personalities and their life narratives (e.g., Abmayr 2009; Dean 2000; Fulbrook 2012; Herbert 1996; Lower 2013; Mallmann 2002; Orth 2000; Paul 2002; Schwartz 2006; Sereny [1974] 1977; 1995; Stangneth 2011; Wildt 2002). Often these works asked more about who these people were than why they acted as they did (Dean 2000), either focusing more on the elites or leaving the lower-level bureaucrats and implementers “faceless” (Paul 2002, 28; my translation) or unrelated to other actors and thus contributing little to a comparative research agenda.

This third generation of scholarship goes further than this, though, progressing along what Charles King termed a “micropolitical turn,” which is driven by “a concern with uncovering the precise mechanisms by which individuals and groups go about trading in the benefits of stability for the inherently risky behaviour associated with violence” (2004, 434). In newer research, the meso-level organizations and the micro-level perpetrators and their actions come into view and become agents who shape the genocidal processes themselves and who react to the situations they are in (among others, Allen 2002; Black 2011; Browning [1994] 2001; Clark 2009; Clegg et al. 2013; Dumitru and Johnson 2011; Dumitru 2014; Fletcher 2007; Frydel 2018; Fujii 2009; Grabowski 2013; Gross 2003; Hinton 2005; Jessee 2015; Kopstein and Wittenberg 2011; Kühl 2014; McDoom 2013; 2014a; Mueller 2000; Smeulers and Hoex 2010; Smeulers 2015; Solonari 2014; Straus 2006). This new approach is also informed by differentiating different forms of killing (Meyer 2009) and introducing psychological and social-psychological frameworks for explanation (see Waller 2002).

This disaggregation of genocide is helpful for understanding the precise processes and the causal mechanisms underlying the broader occurrence of genocide. New research in this direction allows the underpinnings of the macro-level events to be shown and explained through meso- and micro-level determinants and in this way allows a more nuanced and complex comprehension of the phenomenon. The Complexity of Evil model presented in this book follows this trend and offers a systematic approach to analyzing the motivational mechanisms that make individual people participate in the broader genocidal dynamics. This approach will allow for “causal depth” in the process of genocide—that is “the explicit identification of the microfoundations, or the social cogs and wheels, through which the social facts to be explained [participation in genocide] are brought about” (Hedström and Bearman 2009, 9). In this sense, we are looking for the cause as the factor(s) without which an outcome would not otherwise have occurred.

The Controversial Role of Identity and Ethnicity

Given the fundamental impact of identity on conflict framing, the role of ethnicity has elicited controversial discussions in the genocide studies literature. At the macro level, ethnicity plays a key role in the identification of many victim groups in genocide and can impact the outbreak of genocide, and this ethnic difference plays a major part as the foundation of many genocidal ideologies (see section 4.3 for more details). However, ethnicity’s role at the micro level is more complicated. The image of perpetrators burdened by centuries of their group’s ancient ethnic hatreds and ethnic fears is popular in media reports and cultural representations of genocide. These ideas have their roots in an essentialist understanding of ethnic identities as fixed natural categories. From a constructivist perspective, however, ethnicity is a socially constructed category that does not exist by itself but rather is an identity created by individuals who either identify with the relevant ethnic group or identify others as an ethnic “other.” Ethnicity is not static and fixed but can change over time; it has no independent influence of its own, but only becomes important in conflict when taken by actors as a salient category and defined in a certain way (Chandra 2006, 420).

I follow the overwhelming majority of literature and disregard theories of ancient ethnic hatred as central to motivations to participate in genocide (see among many others Fujii 2009; McDoom 2008; Mueller 2000; Oberschall 2000; Straus 2006). Lee Ann Fujii’s (2009) research on genocide perpetration in Rwanda demonstrates elegantly and emphatically how little explanatory value ethnic hatred and ethnic fear have. For Bosnia, too, such explanations are limited as most studies demonstrate “cordial and amicable relations between Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats” and an overall satisfactory perception of ethnic relations before the war (Lieberman 2006, 298).

Predominantly, ethnicity can act as a sorting mechanism for perpetrators in delineating who is a member of the legitimate victim group when genocide is defined in ethnic terms. In a process of “collective ethnic categorisation,” perpetrators can speak of the victim group as one unit and thus collectively classify them as “the enemy” (Straus 2006, 173). These ethnic categorizations can then be used by elites to construct identities that polarize ethnic groups and aim to rally individuals around their ethnic identity to heighten their security fears (see Posen 1993) or, for example, to create a politically salient distinction between who is a native and who is a settler (Mamdani 2001, 31–32). Anthony Oberschall (2000) discusses for the case of Yugoslavia how the role of ethnicity can shift as cognitive frames regarding this ethnicity change from a cooperation frame to a crisis frame that draws on historical memories to stoke fears.

The most promising approach on how ethnicity is utilized is provided by Fujii, who portrays “state-sponsored ethnicity not as an external force that acts on people, but as a ‘script’ for violence that people act out” (2009, 12). This script refers to a piece of theater that is acted out in a context of crisis and uncertainty, and “the performance of which constitutes an event or moment out of the ordinary” (12). This script is provided by national elites following strategies for ethnic mobilization in genocide, but is reinterpreted for the precise context by local leaders (directors) who are seeking to establish recognition and authority in their given situations. Further, this local interpretation of the state-sponsored ethnicity script is then performed in reality by participants (actors) who together create the performance but individually can have diverging ways of contributing and motivations for this (13). This analogy to the theater world is helpful for demonstrating that the concept of ethnicity is not fixed by national elites and then hegemonically disseminated but is an idea that can be used and reused differently in various local contexts. Fujii suggests that local ties and group dynamics mediate this script in determining how people perceive the genocidal situation and how they decide to react to it (2009, 19). Thus, we as researchers can also take these scripts in an attempt to grapple with how people understood the unfolding violence and the role ethnicity played in it.

This book draws on these ideas and relates them to other bodies of literature in an attempt to show what role ethnicity and other identities can play in different ways with different other factors. While the role of ethnic ascriptions cannot be neglected in any understanding of genocide and participation in it, it is important to clearly define how it actually impacts causally.

Previous Systematic Approaches to Motivation Research

While many scholars of the Holocaust and other genocides refer to perpetrator motivations in passing, it is a relatively new topic in and of itself. As will become clear throughout the rest of the book, most authors have concentrated either on just one case or on one disciplinary approach. There have been excellent studies conducted in various disciplines on broader groups of perpetrators, attempting to abstract from individuals, primarily on the Holocaust (e.g., Browning [1994] 2001; Gross 2003; Lewy 2017; Lifton [1986] 2000; Mann 2000; Welzer 2006) and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (e.g., Fletcher 2007; Fujii 2009; Hogg 2010; McDoom 2008, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Smeulers and Hoex 2010; Smeulers 2015; Straus 2006; Verwimp 2005), as well as some individual works on the genocide in Bosnia in the early 1990s (e.g., Clark 2009; Lieberman 2006; Mueller 2000; Petersen 2002), the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 (Hinton 2005), and the Armenian genocide (Mann 2005).[8]

On top of these individual cases, other disciplinary approaches are important. There exists significant social-psychological and psychological literature that is explicitly or implicitly relevant for questions regarding motivations for and pathways into genocide participation (e.g., Bandura 1999; Burger 2009; Milgram 1963; Newman 2002; 2006; Sidanius and Pratto 1999; Staub 1989; Sternberg 2005a; Vetlesen 2005; Waller 2002; Zimbardo 2008). Also, while still in its infancy, criminological literature on genocide perpetrators is also informative (Anderson 2018; Brannigan 2013; Jäger [1967] 1982; Rafter 2016). The precise arguments put forward in each of these studies will be discussed at the relevant points throughout the book.

All these studies approach the topic of motivations for participating in genocide with varying degrees of systematization. Michael Mann (2005, 27–29) and Alette Smeulers (2008), for example, present typologies of perpetrators, differentiating between individuals according to the motivations these individuals had for participating. Straus’s (2006) and Omar McDoom’s (2008) studies on Rwanda, and Browning’s ([1994] 2001) and Stefan Kühl’s (2014) work on the Holocaust are also relatively systematic approaches to understanding the dynamics of those cases. Probably the most schematic and systematic approach to date has been provided by James Waller (2002), creating a broad model of participation motivations, albeit only from a social-psychological and psychological perspective. His work has been enormously influential in the field, as it brings together the wealth of psychological influences an individual can experience in their participation decision and synthesizes this succinctly. It is the aim of the Complexity of Evil model to perform a similar exercise for all factors, going beyond just psychology and social psychology.

THE COMPLEXITY OF EVIL MODEL’S SYSTEMATIC, COMPARATIVE, AND COMPLEX APPROACH

It may appear that much has been said on the subject already and that, within the wealth of literature already published on the question, another book looking into the motivations of perpetrators is not needed. However, this book provides a different approach to the topic than previous studies. The idea behind the book started out as a meta-study of participation in genocide, looking at what had already been found on the issue and bringing the various insights together. In this endeavor the book brings together disparate literatures that hitherto have only minimally spoken to each other across disciplinary borders and differing cases. The dynamics described in various studies on different cases often speak about very similar phenomena, albeit labeling them differently and describing different manifestations of similar dynamics in the respective context. Likewise, many of the empirical cases could be enriched by some ideas from social psychology, psychology, anthropology, criminology, and so on, but fail to integrate them across the board. The approach in this book takes all these various research findings and brings them into conversation with each other. On their own these studies are interesting, but in combination they can explain an even larger degree of perpetrators’ behavior in genocide.[9]

The Complexity of Evil model is more than just a meta-study that brings together previous research, though, as it seeks to genuinely synthesize the findings and create something new. It does this by systematizing the findings to such a degree that an abstract model is created that can be used as a heuristic to help explain participation in genocide across various different cases. In this way, the model becomes a template that can be laid over individual acts of perpetration in various different cases, allowing us to not only understand them but also grapple with them in comparison with other cases.

In the Complexity of Evil model, I want to go further and understand better what the individual causal impact is of different factors. To do this, I differentiate between motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions, which have different causal connotations on how they impact whether someone participates in genocide. Motivations are certainly at the center of this analysis as they are causally crucial, while facilitative factors and contextual conditions play into participation decisions in other ways. Furthermore, I group the salient factors within these different types of factors, to highlight how they may be interconnected with each other, how they are similar and different. This approach is a reaction to the demand of analytical sociology that “social scientific theories should be presented with such precision and clarity that it is possible to clearly distinguish the causal mechanisms upon which they are founded” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010, 58). The model thus allows for more abstraction and generalizability, while also providing a more nuanced and more complex approach than previous research. Centrally, I do this by including more factors but clearly grouping them thematically and specifying their causal role.

Any approach attempting to create such an encompassing model needs to pay homage to the fact that “any search for a single motivation that causes individuals to commit genocide is surely a futile exercise” (Straus 2006, 62) and that to commit a genocide, which is a massive operation, there will normally be many different types of perpetrators, with several different logics for their participation. The Complexity of Evil model is designed as a general model through which various individuals’ actions across various genocides can be explained. To do this, the model engages in a strong degree of abstraction, systematization, and causal ordering, aiming to be able to explain perpetration across very different contexts. An example, often cited by the perpetrators themselves, would be obedience to authority. Both in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and during the Holocaust, individuals were ordered by people with authority to participate, and some (or many) followed these orders. The nature of authority may differ between different contexts, but the mechanism of how this affects participation remains—for example, a major in the order police in the General Government in 1941 may possess authority through his rank and his position within the strict police hierarchy, while a local leader in Rwanda may derive authority from more traditional sources, such as coerced communal labor (umuganda). In this vein, the underlying mechanism of authority is the same across various contexts, although the empirical manifestation differs.

A critique that Kühl leveled at Browning’s “structuralist approach” in Ordinary Men reads that “the various motivations are strung together in a mundane study of factors. The various aspects are not justified, weighted, nor—and this weighs more strongly—put in relation to each other” (Kühl 2014, 14; my translation). The Complexity of Evil model attempts to fill precisely this gap, demonstrating how motivations are causally crucial for participation, while facilitative factors merely take on a supportive role and contextual conditions create only the framework within which both perpetrators and nonperpetrators act. The Complexity of Evil model takes its inspiration from Waller’s Becoming Evil and his idea of systematizing the psychological factors that cause people to participate in genocide. Yet, my model defines more precisely what causal impact factors have and particularly includes more than just psychological factors, integrating insights from other disciplines. The model supports these categorizations with a wealth of empirical material from various individuals who participated in a range of genocides, although focusing primarily on the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Cambodia.

Thus, the Complexity of Evil model strives to be a “middle range theory”—that is, a theory that lies between the working hypotheses derived from empirical research on individual cases and grand theory, “all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behavior, social organization and social change” (Merton [1949] 2007, 448). Put another way, the Complexity of Evil model strives to be a theory that is located between thick descriptions, rich with empirical data and detail, and thin descriptions, so abstract they are reductionist (see Hedström and Udehn 2009, 25–32). The model thus provides a degree of abstraction that allows us to compare individual motivations across various genocides and the very different contexts they occurred in, but retaining enough specificity to be able to detail the underlying mechanisms precisely and demonstrate how they would manifest themselves empirically.

Moving forward to the actual phenomenon being explained in the Complexity of Evil model, it is important to emphasize that it is the participation in genocide and the motivations for this that are being studied as the unit of analysis. That is, we are looking at the motivations for specific actions rather than focusing on the perpetrator in general. Naturally, it is not possible to completely isolate one from the other, and no one would suggest that a perpetrator is anything but someone who perpetrates. But the focus on action allows us to think of motivations at very specific points of time, for very specific types of actions, while a focus on the person leaves open what type of action the motivation is for. Furthermore, this action-centric approach acknowledges that the person has a history before and after these actions and may even have engaged in parallel acts of rescuing or bystanding. These overlapping categories of actions are drawn out well by Fujii (2011, 146) and are explored in more depth by Erin Jessee (2015, 2017) and Erin Baines (2009) in their concepts of complex political actors and complex political perpetrators.[10] They both acknowledge that individuals we conventionally would label as perpetrators often have experiences of victimization, rescue others at times, and stand idly by in others. These differences and nuances cannot be fathomed when speaking of the person solely as a perpetrator, and so it is necessary to follow this action-centric approach (see Gudehus 2018). Thus, one would understand a perpetrator only as the summation of his or her actions, including many acts of perpetration, while the individual could also be a bystander, rescuer, and so forth. Only by focusing on individual actions as the unit of analysis can we understand how motivations can change from one moment to the next. Given this emphasis, the words “participant” and “perpetrator” are used synonymously throughout the book to refer to someone who engages in an action, defined as perpetration.

Intertwined with this are questions of agency. As mentioned earlier, research on perpetrators neither justifies their actions nor excuses them, but seeks to understand them. However, it is an important question to reflect on how different circumstances and situations may impact people’s agency (see Baines 2009; Solonari 2014, 60; Clegg et al. 2013, 327; Williams 2018a). While one perspective sees resisters as those individuals who “did not relinquish their agency to that of a group but continued to act as individuals” (Fujii 2008, 587), others highlight how individuals often participate of their own free will (Gross 2003, 133). I would agree with Mahmood Mamdani that it should be avoided that an “explanation obscures the moment of decision, of choice, as if human action, even—or, shall I say, particularly—at its most dastardly or heroic, can be explained by necessity alone. Though we need to take into account circumstances that constrain or facilitate—that is, necessity—we must resist the temptation to present necessity as choice and thereby strip human action of both the dimension of possibility and that of responsibility” (2001, 196–197).

Furthermore, organizations can even afford certain spaces to their members within which these individuals can unfold their agency and which inhibit the individual from being able to displace responsibility for their actions wholly to the organization (Kühl 2014, 146). What follows from this is that while it remains important to acknowledge varying degrees of constrained agency, it is nonetheless pivotal to also consider why the person acted the way they did and remember that alternative actions are always available.

RESEARCH PROCESS AND CASE SELECTION

Research Design

The structure of this book belies the actual process that the research took. The project began with a theory-testing research design in which I first developed the model from the broad theoretical literature and the wealth of empirical studies on the Holocaust and Rwanda.[11] Subsequently, I then wanted to test the validity of the Complexity of Evil model in a crucial case in which it was least likely to hold, as it would be all the more surprising if the model did work here and would significantly update our confidence regarding the plausibility and validity of the model across further cases.

For this test, I selected the genocide by the Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia, which is the most lethal regime of the twentieth century in relative terms, with between 1.7 and 2.2 million out of a population of around 7 million dying during the regime (Tabeau and Kheam 2009). The Cambodian case is suitable as a least-likely crucial case because the country has a radically different cultural context than the Holocaust and Rwanda, a culture that is heavily influenced by Buddhism and animist spirituality (while the others are both Christian-influenced cases), as well as ideas of losing face and status, resulting in a hierarchical society structured very differently than the other cases. Also, the violence was mostly not against a different ethnic group as defined by the perpetrators—that is, Tutsi in Rwanda, and Jews, Roma and Sinti, and others in the Holocaust—but against ethnic Khmer defined to be political enemies (even though ethnic minorities were also targeted). Furthermore, the genocide in Cambodia occurred in a very different political context, being a constitutive part of the Communist peasant revolution that the Khmer Rouge was attempting to accomplish. Finally, while the Nazi regime has been categorized as a totalitarian state, the nature of Khmer Rouge terror and absolute control over every single aspect of people’s lives lifts this to an even higher level, making it very different from any other case.

It should be noted that there has been other work that studies perpetrator motivations in Cambodia, penned by Alexander Laban Hinton (2004, 2005), which has also been widely received in the genocide studies community. However, while Hinton’s very anthropological and culturalist perspective is undoubtedly helpful for understanding the genocide’s occurrence, processes within it, and people’s participation, it is useful to supplement this with my own study here. The Complexity of Evil model’s approach is a useful addition to Hinton’s work as it comes at the topic from a very different perspective including many additional disciplinary approaches, demonstrating that many of these cultural ideas are not actually causally sufficient for participation but only facilitate participation, while other factors that focus more on social dynamics in the perpetrator group or on opportunity structures help explain individual participation better.

Thus, I spent six months in 2014 and 2015 in Cambodia conducting field research (more on my field research and my interviews below). The test showed that the Complexity of Evil model fits remarkably well to the case of Cambodia and is very useful in understanding why people participated in the genocide. The way the various motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions appeared in Cambodia was obviously different from the way they appeared in the Holocaust or Rwanda, which were also different between themselves, but this just highlights the importance of the abstract model, which allows one and the same causal mechanism to manifest differently in different empirical settings. From this it appeared more sensible to present the insights from the Cambodian data alongside the empirical insights from the literature on the Holocaust and Rwanda in order that Cambodia not be exoticized and instead to clearly demonstrate and discuss the parallels to these other cases and the empirical idiosyncrasies of each. This book approaches the topic of motivations for participating in genocide as comprehensively and thoroughly as possible, and by discussing the various factors as mechanisms alongside the empirical data from all available cases, it is my intention to provide a richer presentation that can then easily be applied by other scholars to understand perpetration in other cases of genocide.

This book draws on insights and evidence from the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the genocide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. However, the data from Cambodia naturally takes a special place, as my insights here are deepest given that I collected and analyzed the data myself, learning of the stories of fifty-eight former cadres of the Khmer Rouge (see below). Thus, the sections on Cambodia tend to be longer than for the other two cases, but I am certain the reader will forgive this, as he or she gains access to new empirical insights to a case otherwise seldom discussed.

Creating a Model

The substantive underpinning of this research endeavor rests on the development of an explanation of why people participate in genocidal violence. In pursuit of this research goal a systematization of previous knowledge is necessary, bringing together the empirical findings on participation in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia with relevant studies from the social-psychological, sociological, political science, criminological, psychological, and anthropological literature. This systematization will take on the form of a conceptual model, a term that is not discussed often in the methodological literature of the social sciences but is inherent to many attempts at systematic representation of various social and political phenomena. The process of creating a conceptual model is basically one of abstraction, meaning that models are by definition not “literally true account[s] of the process or entity in question” (Hughes 1990, 71; for more on truth, see Mäki 2011), nor are they “faithful representations of real worldly systems” (Psillos 2011, 8). They are also not fictions (Psillos 2011, 8–9; see also Frigg 2010), but instead useful abstractions that help our understandings of the represented topic. Nicole Saam and Thomas Gautschi (2015, 36) suggest that in model construction, when deciding the degree of abstraction needed, one should follow the economic principle of the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam that a theory should be as parsimonious as possible but as complex as necessary.

For the construction of a conceptual model in the context of this book, it is an attempt at creating an idealized representation of people’s motivations to participate in genocide. Thus, the model draws on the wealth of knowledge and attempts to strip away as much of the context as necessary to create an explanation that is parsimonious but at the same time can still point to the key determinants that cause a person’s participation in reality. This conceptual model will attempt to lift to an abstract level the motivations of perpetrators, and in this process take them out of their concrete contexts, reducing them to their idealized relations. While the model is not especially parsimonious, the abstraction makes it a helpful tool for analysis, as it allows the individual mechanisms to be applied comparatively to different cases, embedding the same mechanism in the relevant contexts in potentially very different empirical manifestations.

My approach is different from typologies of perpetrators that have been developed in the past. Past typologies have focused on the positions of the perpetrators (Ambos 2010; Hilberg 1992), the motivations of perpetrators (Mann 2005, 27–29; Smeulers 2008; Paul 2002), or the types of actions that individuals engage in (Fujii 2009, 16, 130). These typologies all implicitly limit an individual to one “box,” suggesting that each person has only one motivation for their action, while the model explicitly shows that multiple factors can be working at the same time, both within and across causal dimensions. The Complexity of Evil model, therefore, allows a more nuanced abstraction of participation motivations, recognizing how different factors can have different causal effects. This nuance is lost in conventional typologies, as they fundamentally assume that the type of causal effect must be the same for all types. Contrasting this, my model allows for motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions to all work in parallel with each other in different causal ways.

Fieldwork in Cambodia

Fieldwork was carried out in Cambodia between July 2014 and January 2015, with a preliminary trip having been conducted in March 2014. Based in Phnom Penh, I conducted interviews during this time in ten provinces: Banteay Mancheay, Battambang, Kampong Chhnang, Kampong Thom, Kandal, Mondolkiri, Pailin, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, and Takeo. This regional diversity is helpful as it enables me to paint a more nuanced picture of former Khmer Rouge perpetrators’ genocidal actions. This is because these regions and the people living in them have had different experiences of the civil war preceding the Khmer Rouge regime, the takeover by the Khmer Rouge, the regime’s time in power, and the post-1979 dynamics. Particularly Pailin province and the part of Battambang province directly on the Thai border remained strongholds of the Khmer Rouge throughout the civil war ensuing after the Vietnamese invasion until well into the 1990s. Here people lived under the rule of the Khmer Rouge for significantly longer, and most people here had fled the rest of the country and were part of the armed resistance to the Vietnamese who were perceived as illegitimate occupiers. Most other people returned to their villages directly after the fall of the Khmer Rouge or quite soon thereafter, after only a short sojourn with the Khmer Rouge in the jungles who had headed toward Thailand and the refugee camps there. Given that most of these people are now back in their home villages, it was necessary to interview people in several provinces so as to gauge any differences in their narratives given that the Khmer Rouge took power gradually across the country. It is quite plausible that people will have very different stories of their recruitment and everyday life, as well as a different perspective on violence depending on when the Khmer Rouge took power in their region and how the regime’s rule manifested itself. I opted for such a broad perspective instead of classical ethnographic fieldwork (see Millar 2014) for a number of methodological, ethical, and conceptual reasons (Williams 2018d).

Interviews were conducted with fifty-eight individuals[12]—some as single interviews, some being visited multiple times. Interviews were semi-structured, beginning biographically and then continuing thematically. I talked to them about their life histories, how they perceived the historical developments, being recruited into the Khmer Rouge, and their experiences during that time, including not only their and other people’s motivations for violence but also their various roles, their everyday lives, and their relationships to others. Most interviewees did not talk about their own killing or violence, at least to begin with; but in a manner that is more culturally appropriate in the Cambodian context, we discussed these issues that obviously pertained to these individuals indirectly. All interviews were conducted through translation provided by Keo Duong, a Cambodian historian of the Khmer Rouge era. While this meant that Keo was not a professional translator, he had significant expert knowledge on the topic of research, understanding the concepts of research better than a translator, having contacts in the field, and, importantly, possessing extensive experience interviewing former members of the Khmer Rouge. I qualitatively analyzed the data generated in the interviews in order to use it to test the model.[13]

Given that the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge occurred in the late 1970s, the time elapsed since the genocide poses a question mark regarding the validity of the data, due to respondents’ potential memory loss. However, despite the longevity of passed time, given the stark nature of the experiences it is unsurprising that all respondents were still able to speak about this time in great detail. The issue of time lapsing and its effects on memory loss or distortions should not be minimized, but it is a problem confronting any scholar who is talking to people about their past. In the end, what I elicit here is the memories that people have today of motivations, which—while not perfect—is a sufficient approximation. Furthermore, there is an issue regarding the incentives being stacked against a researcher in eliciting truthful responses, a key problem in any study of perpetrators as they have few incentives to be honest with me and strong incentives to hide the truth, misconstrue their role, and provide an alternative narrative. People could choose to lie both in an attempt of psychological rationalization toward themselves and in order to avoid any social or legal repercussions within their community. However, the words of Fujii, written on her experiences interviewing Rwandan perpetrators of genocide and how to deal with the biases this may introduce, ring true in the context of Cambodia also: “Despite the reasons people had to lie or withhold, they nonetheless did agree to talk with me, many multiple times, knowing there was no payment or reward for them and that they risked raising the suspicions or jealousies of their neighbours by doing so. The task of the researcher, then, is to sift through and analyze the data as they come, while keeping in mind the particular circumstances in which they arose” (2009, 44).

Furthermore, I chose the strategy of only indirectly asking them about violence; I did not ask for their own experiences to start with, but instead about why other members of their group participated in the violence, thus making it significantly easier for them to talk about the topic without losing face by admitting that they themselves had done these things. While it can be expected that many talked partially about their own experiences through the narratives on others, this cannot be judged with any significant certainty. Altogether, then, it is necessary in the data analysis to be critical, to be vigilant of these possible problems, but this should not lead to an analytical paralysis in which a researcher does not dare to use any of the interview material due to the possible lack of “truth” in parts of the data. Again, Fujii offers an eloquent circumscription of how researchers can approach these difficulties:

Because of the vagaries of memory, the passage of time, and incentives to deviate from or adhere to certain narratives, we cannot judge the quality of the data by the truths or accuracies contained within them.… Instead, we must treat the data as repositories of shared meanings and understandings about how the world works. Interpreting these data thus involves identifying patterns of meaning or what I call the “logics” that underlie people’s statements about the genocide as well as daily life. How people talk about the world—whether true or not—gives clues as to how they make sense of the world—how it is and how it ought to be. These logics form a type of causal knowledge. (2009, 42)

In the end, it is not necessary for interviewees to specify whether these were their own or others’ motivations, as it still allowed the topic to be spoken about openly. Therefore, a full qualitative analysis of the interview data was possible—though mindful of the interpretive difficulties alluded to above.

Of the fifty-eight people I was able to interview during my field research, fifty-five were men and three were women.[14] Most of my interviewees were farmers today, although some also had small businesses or were low-level state officials or teachers; almost all lived in villages in the countryside. The interviewees’ stated ages ranged from fifty to ninety-two years old at the time of interview, with the average age at just slightly over sixty-two years.[15] To illustrate what this means, the average interviewee would have been eighteen years old at the time of Lon Nol’s coup against King Norodom Sihanouk in 1970, twenty-three years old when the Khmer Rouge took power in the entire country, and twenty-seven when the Vietnamese invaded and liberated many parts of the country. It also means the youngest interviewee was only six during the coup when the civil war started and was first conscripted into a unit by the Khmer Rouge when he was only twelve years old. My population of interviewees is biased against older people who will have died in the years and decades since the period being studied, although this bias is not as strong as one would expect. It was an explicit policy of the Khmer Rouge to primarily recruit children, as the regime hoped to be able to indoctrinate them better (see Williams 2018a). Thus, my interviewee age structure certainly excludes some of the members who were older at the time, yet there will not have been many of them.

My sample population of former Khmer Rouge cadres possibly somewhat underrepresents those who engaged in the most violent action, as these people would be less inclined to give me an interview than people who had less of a violent past to hide, a so-called nonresponse bias (see Eck 2011, 172). Indeed, I did experience higher refusal rates for interviewing in former strongholds of the Khmer Rouge, and I found it harder to gain trust. However, through the cultivation of relationships and repeat visits, I attempted to gain trust wherever possible, and it was possible to gain interviews with people with a more violent past, too. Also, in terms of a selection bias, I was most often speaking to people who had been identified previously as Khmer Rouge cadres and who had already given interviews. To minimize the risk of “practice effects” (Heiman 2002), I put an emphasis on selecting interviewees who had given only one or a few prior interviews.

I also analyzed all notebooks of former Khmer Rouge cadres that have been collected by DC-Cam. While most of the 378 notebooks were on military tactics, training, and other topics unrelated to the field of interest here, there were also some on ideological trainings, which included some very interesting passages revealing insights on how the cadres thought at the time of writing down their notes. Some of the notebooks included letters they had sent to their families—where referred to, the codes reflect the DC-Cam archiving system.

To put my interviewees more center stage in this book, I have included six vignettes between each of the chapters. These short interludes tell some of the life stories (or parts thereof) from the perspective of my interviewees themselves.[16] These vignettes confront us even more directly with the perpetrator perspective, and I draw on the various stories throughout the book when talking about certain mechanisms. These vignettes are deliberately not analytical and are written in a different format in order to reflect this; instead, they aim to demonstrate experiences my interviewees had, the stories that the Complexity of Evil model is trying to explain. As such, they do not necessarily relate directly to the chapters that sandwich them but are separate from the general flow of the book.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CASES

This book deals conceptually with motivations, but the insights from three cases are particularly pertinent. This section will briefly—and with no claim to any semblance of sufficient depth—introduce the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 targeting political enemies and ethnic minorities, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Holocaust.

The Genocide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia

Cambodian history is structured by violence and subordination, by a self-sufficient peasantry and strong leaders. These elements ebb and flow through Cambodian history, and the Khmer Rouge’s rule in Cambodia can only be understood within the context of these historical currents. Fears of subordination are fundamental to the Cambodian national identity, and the narratives of horrendous violence that the neighboring and dominant Vietnamese were capable of have been propagated by various rulers throughout Cambodian history. In the course of global decolonization, King Sihanouk negotiated independence from the French Protectorate and separation from the overbearing neighbor Vietnam in 1953 (see Chanda 1986; Kiernan 1985). Sihanouk subsequently secured and expanded his hold on power through various roles and managed to maintain neutrality between the Communists and the Americans in the raging war in neighboring Vietnam, making himself useful to both sides. His immense domestic popularity was only slightly dented by his mismanagement of the country’s fragile economy (Chandler 2008, 233–254; Kiernan 1996, 17).

In 1970, Sihanouk was removed from power through a coup by his prime minister General Lon Nol, triggering civil war as Sihanouk by radio called on his subjects to go into the jungle and join an organization later known as the Khmer Rouge. This unprecedented alliance between a monarch and Communist rebels emphasized reinstating Sihanouk and socialist propaganda was restrained (Bultmann 2017, 9). The rebels’ ranks swelled significantly from as few as 3,000 armed combatants in 1970 (Chandler 1999, 88), also fueled by Lon Nol’s pro-American course regarding the Vietnam War, allowing American troops to expand their bombardment of the Vietcong who had pulled back into Cambodian territory (Shawcross 1979, critiqued by Etcheson 1984, 95–102). In the civil war that engulfed the country, around 500,000 people died (Chandler 2008, 256), including an estimated 150,000 Cambodian civilians killed by more than 100,000 tons of U.S. bombs (Chandler 2008, 252; Kiernan 1996, 24). Gradually the Khmer Rouge gained military control and took power in various parts of the country, so its rule has diverging start dates in different places, ultimately taking Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, ending Lon Nol’s rule and marking the beginning of the new regime: Democratic Kampuchea. For most of the people interviewed in the course of this project, 1970 marked a more significant turning point than 1975, given the catastrophic impact of the civil war and the regional differentiation of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of power. Greeted by a population enthusiastic about the end of the civil war, the Khmer Rouge wasted no time in implementing its vision for a new Cambodia, within hours beginning to evacuate the cities. Two million people were expelled immediately from Phnom Penh, including those sick in hospitals, the elderly, and small children, many of whom were abandoned along the road out of the city (Chandler 2008, 256; Kiernan 1996, 8; for a vivid eyewitness account, see Ponchaud 1978, 17–70). Furthermore, executions of Lon Nol military and administrative personnel began, continuing across the country with commune chiefs being instructed to round up any of these individuals to be executed (Chandler 2000, 45); local leaders were expected to keep lists of all the people in their area and their previous occupation (Hinton 2005, 155), lists later used for creating arrest and execution lists. In many places these former Lon Nol functionaries were given the false promise that they would be given positions of equal rank in the new regime and just needed to show themselves. When most of those suspected to have been affiliated with the Lon Nol regime had been eliminated, this violent trajectory continued nonetheless. In a speech in September 1976, Pol Pot announced the presence of suspected internal enemies within the regime, so-called microbes trying to undermine the revolution (Chandler 2000, 45–76), who were mostly identified as coalescing with Vietnam (Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua 1988, xii).[17] The rhetoric became successively less optimistic and more focused on enemies (see Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua 1988), framing subsequent violence in terms of internal enemies and their antirevolutionary aspirations and the resultant need to eliminate them.

Building on this new total control, the Khmer Rouge regime went about the task of implementing this revolution, putting Sihanouk under house arrest and killing several members of his family. Given that most peasants in Cambodia owned their land, the Communist ideals of toppling the exploitative landlords had little traction (Tyner 2011, 56). Formally, everything was collectivized and everyone wore the same black clothes and haircut, ate collectively, lived collectively, learned collectively. The institution of the family was abolished, and children were told that Ângkar, as the organization of the Khmer Rouge was known, was their new parents and that their loyalties should be toward the collective (Hinton 2005, 130). Formal education was abandoned, replaced by a sole emphasis on ideological training (Clayton 1998). The Khmer Rouge also sought to impact the people’s mentality in obligatory self-study and criticism sessions (Path and Kanavou 2015; Thion 1983, 29); these sessions—like many of the regime’s practices—adapted Buddhist traditions (Harris 2013, 57), also suggesting that only Ângkar could offer the path to true enlightenment (Hinton 2005, 129). While the idea was to create class consciousness and enhance the people’s understanding of and passion for the revolution, these sessions actually resulted in individuals accusing each other of antirevolutionary behavior or thinking and thus condemning each other to death (Path and Kanavou 2015, 306).

An ambitious four-year plan was set, forcing people to work up to twelve hours a day every day with no material rewards, little free time, and very limited access to their spouses and children (Chandler 2008, 264), and “thousands soon died from malaria, overwork, and malnutrition” (265). The strictures of the high agricultural quotas put local leaders in a quandary, as they had to send rice to Phnom Penh while also keeping in seed for planting the next year and feeding their population, often reducing the rations rather than risk not fulfilling their quota and being purged as internal enemies (Hinton 2005, 11; on famine under the Khmer Rouge, see DeFalco 2014). Further, the new regime sealed Cambodia off from the rest of the world (Kiernan 1996, 9) in order to allow its peasant revolution to flourish in isolation from the exploitative, capitalist West (Chandler 2000, 14).

Anti-Vietnamese sentiment was a driver of Khmer Rouge policies, and there were widespread internal purges in which the security centers—particularly Santebal-21 (Security Center 21 [S-21]), the highest level central security center, which today houses the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum—played a central role in interrogating and then killing suspected inner-party traitors (Chandler 2008, 265–266; most comprehensively on S-21, see Chandler 2000; for a detailed study of the prison system see Ea 2005); these purges then intensified in December 1976 when Pol Pot identified a “sickness in the party” (Chandler 2008, 267; 1999, 123–130). Over the years of the regime, more than half of the cadres of the Khmer Rouge themselves were killed for being implicated in one string or another (Bultmann 2017, 126).

S-21’s “mission was to protect the Party Centre. It accomplished this task in part by killing all the prisoners in part by altering their autobiographies to align them with the requirements and suspicions of the Party” (Chandler 2000, 14–15); further, in these confessions they had to identify the “strings of traitors” (khsae kbot) to which they belonged,[18] “creating the impression of a vast nationwide conspiracy” (Chandler 2000, 81). As soon as an individual was arrested, their guilt was assumed and interrogations then had to use torture to extract the information that backed this up (Chandler 2000, 7), forcing them mostly to admit membership in the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).

Only occasionally did the local militias or armed security personnel, known as chhlop, at the district or even commune level[19] arrest and kill people immediately, particularly if they were being killed for more “obvious” reasons that did not necessitate intense interrogation first—for instance, if they had been caught in sexual immorality having an extra- or premarital affair or if people who had been expelled from the cities committed repeat offenses such as breaking tools or being lazy. Given the predominance of violence being exerted in the confines of security centers, eyewitness reports of violence are actually rare, even though this may strike one as surprising given the extreme nature of the regime (Bultmann 2017, 114).

In late 1978 the Vietnamese attacked Democratic Kampuchea on several fronts and took Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979, with the leadership fleeing just before the city fell, taking many of their cadres with them to the Thai border and continuing their struggle against the Vietnamese occupation from there, until the late 1990s (for a post-1979 history of Cambodia, see Etcheson 2005; see also Chandler 1999, 157–188; 2008, 277–295). In the final years of this second civil war, ever more cadres accepted amnesty by the new government led by Cambodia’s next strong man, Hun Sen, and reintegrated into society and politics. International involvement in dealing with the post–Khmer Rouge period includes a UN intervention in the early 1990s (Widyono 2008) and the international criminal justice proceedings conducted at the hybrid UN-Cambodian ECCC (see Beachler 2014; Bernath 2016; Gray 2012; 2014).

Altogether, between 1.7 and 2.2 million people of the pre–civil war population of 7.9 million people died during Democratic Kampuchea, half as violent deaths, while the rest died from starvation, overworking, and disease (Tabeau and Kheam 2009, 19). The focus in this book is on the violent deaths that were perpetrated almost entirely by the security system of the regime. Ethnic minorities were particularly vulnerable to Khmer Rouge violence: 36 percent of Chams, 40 percent of Laos and Thais, 50 percent of Chinese, and almost all Vietnamese perished during the three years, eight months, and twenty days of Democratic Kampuchea (see Tabeau and Kheam 2009). The killing of other ethnic groups can be legally subsumed under the definition of genocide, but also the killing of the internal enemies by the Khmer Rouge fits broader understandings of genocide, as the Khmer Rouge believed these strings of CIA agents to be a clear-cut group. Given the diverse nature of the killing, the term “auto-genocide” is unhelpful (Ciorciari 2004), because the Khmer Rouge certainly did not perceive its victims to be part of the Khmer group, often referring to them as people with Khmer bodies but Vietnamese heads.

The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

Genocide in Rwanda was short and intense, lasting only one hundred days but killing a significant proportion of the Tutsi population. The precise number of deaths is contested, but estimations range from 500,000 (Des Forges 1999, 15–16; Straus 2006, 51–52) to 800,000 (Prunier 1995, 265) to current official estimates of over 1 million[20] Tutsi civilians and several thousand moderate Hutu having been killed. Discourses in the international media, as well as propagated by genocidal leaders during the genocide, emphasized the ancient hatred between the two primordially defined groups of Hutu and Tutsi (Straus 2006, 19). Yet before colonialism, Hutu and Tutsi were fluid, socioeconomic categories that allowed for individual movement between them. Under Belgian colonial rule, these categories were then solidified through the introduction of identity cards specifying ethnicity (for a broader discussion, see Des Forges 1999, 31–34; Fujii 2009; Mamdani 2001, 41–75; Straus 2006, 20–21)[21] and a politization of ethnicity as the Belgians systematically favored the Tutsi. In the process of decolonization and democratization, the independence movement was directed against the Belgian colonial oppressors as well as against the Tutsi overlords (Mamdani 2001, 103). Independence came in the wake of a “Social Revolution” with a new Hutu president, Grégoire Kayibanda, and purges of Tutsi throughout the administration. Ethnic identities of Hutu and Tutsi are thus “political identities” that have been created politically and served various political functions over the years of their existence (Fujii 2009; Mamdani 2001, 41–75).

Independence was marred by violence, and there were waves of massacres in the early 1960s and in 1973 during which about one-third of the Tutsi population left the country as refugees, followed by more people in later years (see Chrétien [2000] 2003, 299–305). Initially, the violence was as retribution for Tutsi government violence that sought to maintain their control as their power receded during and after independence (Mamdani 2001, 105); henceforth, violence escalated and became trapped in a cycle of retaliation. The primary actors of this cycle were, on the one side, the Hutu government, which encouraged, instigated, or even ordered anti-Tutsi massacres and purges, and, on the other side, raids committed by incursions of armed Tutsi refugees belonging to the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the exiled Tutsi armed forces, which killed Hutu officials and civilians (Straus 2006, 182–191). Discrimination against and massacres of the Tutsi were reduced under Kayibanda’s successor, Juvénal Habyarimana, who kept the country under tight control until a degree of political opening that came about on the coattails of the end of the Cold War.

Civil war broke out in October 1990 when RPF troops began attacking various positions in the country and there followed a major crackdown and mass arrests of Tutsi civilians and Hutu oppositionists in the country who were suspected of coalescing with the RPF, as well as massacres of Tutsi civilians around the country that were nationally instigated but locally executed (Mamdani 2001, 193). The incitement in the run-up to and during the genocide tapped into deep-seated fears and emotions that drew heavily on symbolic representations of this past violence (Kaufman 2006) and fused these to create an enemy that meshed real and imaginary attributes to make an imaginaire that was “truly frightening” (Sémelin 2005a, 21).

Similar to these earlier dynamics of violence, the genocide does not stand in a political vacuum but is embedded in a broader trajectory of political developments that unsettled the Hutu hard-liners’ grip on power. Habyarimana had succumbed to pressure by international partners to open the one-party, Hutu-dominated system to multiparty politics. Elections had been held and Habyarimana had entered into an uneasy coalition with moderate Hutu parties, bringing in several more previous opposition elites into government positions. Furthermore, Habyarimana had signed a peace deal with the RPF, the so-called Arusha Accords, falteringly bringing the civil violence to a tentative halt that was supposed to be monitored by UN troops.[22] Both of these developments reduced Hutu dominance broadly—and more specifically, the power of Habyarimana’s ruling party, Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (Republican, National Movement for Democracy and Development, MRND)—and this deeply displeased his more hard-liner followers, who from November 1993 and in reaction to developments in Burundi started calling themselves “Hutu Power.” Attempts to implement the peace deal repeatedly failed, and both sides were preparing for a resumption of violence; in parallel, Hutu hard-liners were preparing for an all-out war against the Tutsi civilians, too. This included the creation of local neighborhood defense units that armed civilians, organized roadblocks, and aimed at equipping people to nominally protect their communities in the event of Tutsi attack; the expansion and arming of the youth division of the MRND party, the interahamwe, as a radical and well-trained militia; and local authorities being instructed to prepare lists of Tutsi living in their communities (Straus 2006, 26–28).

It was in this context that hard-liners started escalating rhetoric and moderate voices were silenced. In the years of the civil war and the genocide itself, Tutsi were increasingly portrayed as traitors and accomplices of the RPF. This construction of the Tutsi enemy was effectively forwarded through media reporting in the extremist newspaper Kangura (Kabanda 2007) and the hard-liner radio station Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). Radio has been suggested to have been key to mobilization (Kimani 2007, 123; Yanagizawa-Drott 2014), but while the radio did have the power to “demonize, incite and perhaps even direct violence,” ordinary people “did not swallow everything they heard whole” (Mironko 2007, 134; see also Li 2007; Sémelin 2005a, 95); instead, the media’s effect was significant only when it was situated within a broader context of violence (Straus 2007b).

Genocide was gradually established as a norm and killing as the dominant strategy to react to the purported security threats posed by the RPF and the Tutsi (Fujii 2004). At the local level, the policy of genocide against the Tutsi became “the law,” with each local authority advocating it and also actively mobilizing participants. In most locales, the interahamwe took the lead, coming in from outside and initiating the violence and subsequently forcing locals to participate; these individuals in turn recruited others to participate, and soon large numbers were involved (Straus 2006, 119–120). Who precisely was recruited depended on social and geographic proximity to local leaders and other perpetrators (McDoom 2013). While the degree of voluntary participation may have varied, civilian participation was widespread, and it was this broad participation that enabled the dimensions of violence to go beyond previous massacres and become the genocide that unfolded. Women also participated in the genocide, although they served in more supportive roles, with less participation in actual killing (Adler, Loyle, and Globerman 2007; African Rights 1995; Gertz, Brehm, and Brown 2018; Hogg 2010; Holmes 2014; Nyseth Brehm, Uggen, and Gasanabo 2016; Smeulers 2015; see also Jessee 2015); however, understanding the actual gendered differences between men and women is difficult, because some researchers speak only with women.

While to begin with, people were found in their home and killed, many people were also slaughtered in churches, schools, or hospitals where they had sought refuge. Anyone trying to flee was stopped at roadblocks, and the killing groups combed the marshlands, hills, and forests to find as many Tutsi as possible. Most of the killing was committed using machetes, a common agricultural tool in Rwanda, but firearms were also used under specific circumstances (see Verwimp 2006). Individual Tutsi were saved by heroic Hutu individuals, some of whom were also perpetrators involved in massacring other Tutsi (Fujii 2011).

The genocide was ended by the progressing RPF troops who took power in the country as hundreds of thousands of Hutu, including leading politicians and many of the hard-liners and killers, fled westward. The genocide has played a pivotal role in Rwandan politics since, strongly impacting post-genocide Rwandan governance, society, and transitional justice in the country (see among many others Buckley-Zistel 2009, 2012; Jessee 2017, as well as many chapters in Straus and Waldorf 2011).

The Nazi Holocaust in Europe

The Holocaust is the quintessence of organized mass killing, the archetype of genocide, and is widely taken as the worst event humankind has ever wreaked upon itself. The Holocaust conventionally connotes the mass killing of the European Jewry instigated by Adolf Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National-Socialist German Workers Party, also known as Nazis) in its attempt to implement “the Final Solution of the Jewish problem” and to establish dominance of the Aryan race and rid a larger German Empire of people they deemed to be subhuman. The overwhelming focus of eliminationist policy was thus directed at the Jews, and over six million were killed under Nazi rule (for a detailed breakdown, see Benz 1991).[23] However, other victim groups were also targeted for systematic elimination (for a broad overview, see the chapters in Berenbaum 1990), including 300,000–500,000 Roma and Sinti (Bársony and Daróczi 2008, 28; Lípa 1990; see also Lewy 2000), 70,000–80,000 mentally and physically handicapped people (Browning 2004, 432),[24] and several thousand homosexual men.[25] Furthermore, other groups were targeted not for complete annihilation but were killed or allowed to die on a large scale under Nazi occupation, including 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war in German custody, as many as 11 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, and 2 million ethnic Poles (Bloxham 2009, 10; see also Christine King 1990; Lukas 1986; Streit 1990), as well as many other smaller victim groups, such as black people or other prisoners of war (Lusane 2002; Scheck 2006).

In order to explain the Nazi state’s anti-Semitic radicalization toward the Final Solution, intentionalist and structuralist (or functionalist) explanations have been offered, although today a broader agreement has been reached that an “incremental decision-making process in which Hitler played a key role” ultimately led to the decision to implement the Final Solution with 1941 as the key year in which a tipping point was reached (Browning 2000, 1; see also Bloxham 2009; Breitman 1998; Kershaw 2008; Sydnor 1998). Anyone who wanted to succeed in the political vicinity of Hitler had to demonstrate their interest in the Jewish question; those wanting to ingratiate themselves would compete to present him with ideas, guidelines, and plans, thus gradually radicalizing Nazi policy toward the Jews (Browning 2004, 424; see also Snyder 2010). Thus, “a framework of vicious, paranoid Jew-hatred” (Stone 2010, 7) existed within which all other events unfolded and which provided an underlying assumption that people knew of and had to position themselves within, although most used this anti-Semitism strategically to forward their careers (Browning 1978; see also Mommsen 1998).

The direct antecedents to the destruction of the European Jewry lie in the discriminatory policies of the Nazi regime in the 1930s that sought to establish the Jews’ difference from the Aryan majority, and to denigrate and isolate them. During this time, it was still possible for many to emigrate out of the Third Reich, although this often had serious economic repercussions (Dean 2008). A significant development occurred on 9 November 1938 with a night of pogroms, which the Nazis termed Reichskristallnacht,[26] in which Jews were attacked and many Jewish shops and businesses were ransacked and destroyed. This event epitomizes the trajectory of non-Jewish attitudes toward the Jews as most people were not enthusiastic about, even disturbed by, this overt violence against their Jewish neighbors, yet few people publicly expressed criticism or physically sought to stand up for the Jewish community (Browning 2004). In this vein, the majority of people did not need to support the deportations that commenced in the late summer of 1941, but their lack of visible dissent allowed the deportations to proceed. An important actor for implementing racial policy was the gestapo, but as an understaffed institution it was highly dependent on cooperation by the population, particularly in the form of denunciation (Gellately 1990); while not everyone cooperated, enough did to make the system viable. Similarly, there was significant corporate involvement in the processes leading up to and implementing the Holocaust, and non-Jewish businesses had the potential to profit quite significantly (Bajohr 1997; Hayes 1998; Kobrak and Schneider 2004).

Eventually, German Jews and others from occupied Western Europe were deported east. The Jewish populations of Poland and other Eastern countries were forced brutally into ghettoes (Cole 2004). Jews were also sent to concentration camps across the Nazi-occupied territories, in which they were subjected to forced labor, abominable living conditions, harassment on a daily basis, and even medical experiments (Lifton [1986] 2000); while many other victim groups were also imprisoned in concentration camps, Jews were treated significantly worse than others.

As Nazi policy developed, the expulsion of Jews was deemed insufficient and the extermination of the entire population of Jews under German authority was decided on. The process of extermination began in a rather haphazard manner but became increasingly coordinated and structured, allowing the implementation of large-scale, efficient, and systematic mass killing. While the Holocaust is widely associated with killing in the gas chambers of Auschwitz (see Gutman and Berenbaum 1994), the genocide(s) of the Nazis were actually implemented in various locations and using different means (see also Hilberg 1992). The death camps and their gas chambers, which relied on carbon monoxide and later Zyklon B, are certainly the most important loci of destruction, responsible for killing about half the victims (just over 3 million) in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1944 (Friedlander 1995, 287). People were also killed in large numbers in the concentration and work camps, whose SS guards have become the infamous faces of the Holocaust (Lifton [1986] 2000; Orth 2000, 2002; Schwartz 2006; Segev [1988] 1992; Sereny [1974] 1977). However, while the urban Jews who had been concentrated in ghettoes were logistically unproblematic to transport to the death camps, this was not possible everywhere, particularly in more remote locations without suitable railway infrastructure. In much of rural Eastern Europe, extermination groups were selected of SS members (Rhodes 2002) and also of the reserve police who had been stationed across the occupied territories to enforce German order and crack down on local dissent (see, for example, Angrick 2008; Browning [1994] 2001; Haberer 2001; Issinger 2016; Kühl 2014; Mallmann 2002; Welzer 2006, 2008). These were frequently supported by auxiliary forces drawn from conquered territories, so-called Trawniki men who often had to take on some of the most gruesome tasks (Black 2011; D. Pohl 2002; Rein 2006). At the front, the Wehrmacht was party to atrocity against a broad variety of victim groups, including eliminating many of the Soviet Jews (see Gerlach 1999).

Thus, a range of different actors were involved in the destruction of the Jews (Matthäus 2004; Sandkühler 1999), and—as is possibly unsurprising given the sheer magnitude of the undertaking—the implementation of the Holocaust diverged in different parts of Nazi-occupied Europe (Fein 1979). One reason is that the priorities varied in terms of which Jews one wanted to get rid of, prioritizing the German Reich as more important than the periphery—for example, Romania (Bloxham 2009, 9; Ioanid 2000) or Hungarian-ruled Transylvania (Braham 1983)—and there were also lower-level spatial variations depending on available resources in the periphery (Solonari 2017). Furthermore, the relationship between the Nazis and the local population and between the local Jewish population and the non-Jewish population played out differently in different countries (see chapters in Bankier and Gutman 2003); the dynamics also varied depending on the enthusiasm and support offered by members of the local society, with some pogroms occurring following local initiation and German permission (Dean 2000, 2004; Frydel 2018; Gitelman 2014; Grabowski 2013; Gross 2003; Levis Sullam 2017; Solonari 2014, 2017).

The mass killing ended only when Soviet and Allied forces militarily defeated Germany in May 1945. This brought to an end one of the most murderous regimes the world has ever seen, the acts of which have defined and continue to influence political discussions to this day. The Holocaust has become a symbol of the capacity for human evil, and for scholars has become a reference point like no other in terms of mass violence and genocide.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

I have structured the book into five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 introduces the model as a whole and the underlying assumptions behind it. After presenting the three levels of the model (motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions), the chapter briefly discusses the importance of understanding subjective meaning as dependent on the context and situation an individual is in. The chapter then discusses the multilevel and dynamic nature of the model, before explaining what motivations are precisely, defining them as mechanisms for choosing between action alternatives. Before concluding, the chapter also discusses the nature of causality for the different parts of the model, particularly discussing how the various motivations’ impact can be seen causally.

Chapter 2 delves into the heart and soul of the Complexity of Evil model: the motivations. The model differentiates between ingroup-driven, outgroup-driven, and opportunistic motivations. Ingroup-driven motivations focus on dynamics within the perpetrator group, with motivations being constituted through the social influence of peers and of authorities, as well as coercion, which is exerted by these actors. Outgroup-driven motivations focus on the relationship of the individual with the victim group, particularly the emotions that the victim group or members of it evoke for the individual, as well as ideologies that can motivate. Opportunistic motivations are any motivations not dependent on the ingroup or outgroup but resulting from the person themselves and their own self-interest.

Chapter 3 continues to the next level of the Complexity of Evil model and introduces various facilitative factors that are not the actual impetus for someone participating but make it psychologically easier. The model differentiates between four main types of facilitative factors. First, the ideological framework of the genocidal regime will be able to provide moral justification and even stipulate the necessity of the killing, sometimes portraying the enemy as threatening or using facilitative linguistic strategies. Second, some factors can morally disengage the individual from their actions—for example, dehumanizing the victim or creating distance to the act. Third, the effect of groups on responsibility, the anonymity of the individual, and the organization and division of labor can all positively impact someone’s decision to participate. Fourth, over time people can become habituated into violence, or participation can become inevitable as commitments escalate.

Chapter 4 presents the genocidal context within which participation occurs, the last level of the Complexity of Evil model. While it may have been intuitive to begin with a discussion of contextual conditions and then home in on the more specific motivations, I have structured the book to begin with motivations and then facilitative factors, as these are the key mechanisms that are causally crucial for perpetration; this chapter then brings in the context and shows its specific relevance at the micro level in its impact on the motivations and facilitative factors (hence needing these to be introduced already). The chapter discusses major factors from the literature that make a context conducive to genocide. These are attributes of the state, particularly authoritarian regimes; societal tensions around ethnicity and discrimination; ideologies; political uncertainty, upheaval, and war; economic factors; and various cultural factors.

Chapter 5 grapples with the issue that not every motivation, facilitative factor, and contextual condition presented in the model is equally empirically important. Thus, I take the empirical evidence from the three main cases underlying this study—the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia—and look at which motivations are predominant across individuals in each of the cases, working out the specificities of each case. After this, the chapter brings these very focused results together and argues which of the elements of the Complexity of Evil model are most important generally.

The conclusion brings together the ideas presented throughout the book and offers some thoughts on the limitations and the possible contribution of the Complexity of Evil model for the literature, as well as some thoughts for how it could be used in the future.

VIGNETTE  I

Chandara

A FEARFUL VOLUNTEER ENTERS THE TIGER ZONE

DURING THE REGIME of General Lon Nol I was at high school in Battambang town and it was the civil war. I joined a chhlop [militia] commando that supported Lon Nol in order to have some money to support my studies. I did not tell my family as they would not have allowed it because of the dangers in the battlefield. I was recruited with thirty other students from the school, my friends, and we had half a month’s training. It was very strict. After the training we went to school during the day and were on duty for the commando at night.

When the Khmer Rouge reached victory, we as a commando were very happy and surrendered our weapons to them. I changed into civilian clothes and was ordered to evacuate the city of Battambang along with the rest of the city’s students in order to return to my home. When I got home, nobody in my family, neither my parents nor my relatives, knew that I had been a commando, because I had not told them. If the Khmer Rouge knew about your background, they took you to be killed.

As people were being evacuated, they started to kill those people with bad backgrounds, such as former soldiers. I felt really insecure during this time. So to survive I joined the chhlop unit of the Khmer Rouge by hiding my background and volunteering in a different commune where no one knew me. I went to join the militia with my cousin; he had not been a member of the commando but knew that I had, but I trusted him. When we joined the chhlop, it was because of me. I called him to join the chhlop and told him that we had to do it to survive.

When we joined it was like we entered into a tiger zone, so we had to be a tiger like them. If not, they could take us to be killed. So, we needed to be a tiger like them, to be cruel like them. To have no morality like them. That’s why they were like that. When I joined the chhlop, I was called a 17 April person, meaning that I joined the Khmer Rouge after the victory. Another group was called old comrades, and these were those who joined the revolution a long time ago. If we did not work well, they might kill us. So, we had to be immoral like them, cruel like them, whatever the order was, needed to be done.

Wherever we went, we worked hard. We guarded and arrested former officials. The chhlop unit received reports about, what we called, traitors of Ângkar or enemies and then we would investigate whether the report was true. For example, if the chhlop knew for certain that someone was a former Lon Nol official, they would arrest him or her immediately. The motto was “Better to arrest some wrong people, but not to let any enemies go free.” Whether we investigated also depended on who had given the report. If the reporter was a base person, we trusted them; but if it was a new person, we were not sure if it was true or whether they were falsely reporting on each other. But it was better to kill a wrong person. People’s lives had no value. They could kill any time they wanted. There was no law to protest to or appeal to. If they protested, all would be killed.

So, whenever we stayed in a village, we also helped the people there, growing vegetables, although we did not stay for a long time before we moved to other places. Then they saw our performance and I was assigned to also educate our group during our meetings. Then they saw my ability to lead the group and they promoted me. My performance was admirable and many people were satisfied so I was promoted. The most important criterion for promotion was our working performance, not only killing enemies. But killing enemies was one criterion showing bravery. Another criterion was that we could lead the group successfully and educate group members and that we could support the living of the unit. Not only just the killing.

In all matters we had to follow orders. If we did not follow them, they would possibly accuse us of being internal enemies. So, whatever they ordered, we had to follow it. But we could be clever putting the order into practice. For example, when they ordered our group to arrest and kill people, we could avoid the killing but still stay a member of the group. Those who volunteered to kill, would be promoted. I could avoid the killing for the entire regime. I arrested people but I never killed them. I kept my hands clean without blood.

Today he is the head teacher of a school in Battambang province.

CHAPTER   1

The Complexity of Evil

Introducing the Model

THIS CHAPTER INTRODUCES the Complexity of Evil model in broad strokes, thus allowing us to capture the complexity of why people participate, with each individual having their own personal story to tell, but at the same time reducing it to common patterns and comparable dynamics. The chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, providing an overview of the Complexity of Evil model itself and discussing what motivations are and how they impact an individual’s actions, as well as how these motivations are related to the situation and the context this person is in. These discussions are necessary before analyzing in detail the various elements of the model. While most people will have an intuitive understanding of what a motivation is and how it informs individuals’ actions, a more precise specification allows us to relate the various parts of the Complexity of Evil model to each other better.

Participation in genocide occurs as a two-step process. The first step is recruitment into the organization or group perpetrating the genocide, while the second step is the actual participation in the genocide, either through one’s own use of lethal violence against victims or through the performance of some actions in roles leading up to this killing. The first step is a necessary precursor to the second one in most cases, as violence is exerted by the regime itself, its constituent and affiliated organizations, or groups that have been allowed to conduct the violence. However, recruitment can be formal or informal, conscripted or voluntary, and with or without knowledge of the intent of the organization; the time between the two steps can vary strongly. Furthermore, people can also be recruited into nonviolent groups that in due course become violent (see Anderson 2018). For example, in the Holocaust, recruitment into the SS or into a police battalion occurred without knowledge that this would lead to genocidal action, it was a formal process, and individuals spent a significant amount of time in the group before engaging in genocidal actions. In Rwanda, the interahamwe followed a similar process; but for the ordinary killing groups, one was recruited much more informally by friends and almost immediately one was then involved in the genocide, similar to some forms of popular violence in Eastern Europe in the Holocaust. In Cambodia, the process was also formal recruitment without knowing that this would mean participation in the genocide, and considerable time normally passed between recruitment into the Khmer Rouge and one’s participation in the genocidal processes (on Khmer Rouge recruitment, see Williams 2018a). Whether someone is approached to participate both in the group and in the killing is a different question, and social ties and geography can play a role here (Fujii 2009, 138–140; McDoom 2013), as can chance (McDoom 2008, 267). How people then react is interesting to us; while it is interesting to also ask why people do not participate (see Straus 2006, 145, 246),[1] it is the motivation for taking this second step, the motivation for actually participating in genocide, that is the focus of the Complexity of Evil model.

The chapter is structured as follows: it will first present an overview of the Complexity of Evil model itself, introducing the various elements and highlighting how together they purport to explain participation in genocide (section 1.1). The rest of the book is then dedicated to looking in depth at these various parts of the model conceptually and empirically. However, before we can dive into this endeavor, a small step back to discuss the conceptual underpinnings and the fundamental assumptions of the model is necessary. First, I briefly discuss the multilevel and dynamic nature of the model (section 1.2), as it is pivotal to understand how the individual perceives his or her context and situation in order to then be able to explain the resulting action. I discuss how subjective meaning is constructed and the influence of the situation and the context on this (section 1.3); thus, it is important to think about which cultural or social frames of reference an individual experiences his or her context and situation through. Next, what actually constitutes a motivation is discussed and an overview given on how motivations work precisely (section 1.4). It is suggested that motivations are mechanisms that mediate between the context and situation an individual is in and his or her needs and desires. Motivations allow individuals to make decisions between various action alternatives, the motivation following various rationales. The final section of this chapter (section 1.5) explores the nature of these motivations’ causality and positions them as INUS conditions. No one motivation is deterministically responsible for participation, but various different ones can come to the fore in certain contexts.

1.1  THE COMPLEXITY OF EVIL: AN OVERVIEW OF THE MODEL

The Complexity of Evil model developed in this book answers the question, Why do individuals participate in genocide? The idea behind the model of perpetrator motivations is to bring together the many strands of research on the micro-dynamics of genocide that have emerged over the past decades and synthesize them to an overarching concept of participation. In this way, the Complexity of Evil model should be able to explain participation of individuals in genocide across multiple different cases, all acting in different contexts. The Complexity of Evil model will merge literatures that hitherto have not communicated sufficiently, or at all in some cases. Much fine work has been done on this research question with a mass of historical studies of the Holocaust and individual participation in it, social-psychological literature on situations and context within which a person is compelled to act against his or her moral framework, and political science, sociology, and anthropology literature on genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust. Furthermore, the Complexity of Evil model will also import some of the insights from the study of other forms of violence, such as terrorism, riots, or rebellion. By synthesizing these various disciplines, insights from different cases, and insights from other forms of violence, this research aims to be able to construct an interdisciplinary and intercontextual model that can explain motivations for participating in genocide across several or all genocides, as well as for most or all participants in these genocides.

A schematic representation of the Complexity of Evil model on why people participate in genocide can be seen in figure 1.1. In the development of this model, I have differentiated between three levels of factors that have an impact on why people participate. Most importantly and at the center of the investigation in this book are the motivations of the perpetrators. Motivations provide the actual impetus for action, and they are the reason people participate; without this specific motivation (or multiple motivations), this individual would not participate (for a more detailed discussion, see section 1.4). Second, there are facilitative factors, which are not the actual reason why someone participates, but they impact the individual by making participation easier when a motivation is present. A multitude of facilitative factors can be present, but an individual will not participate unless he or she has at least one motivation too. Third, there are contextual conditions, which provide a framework within which genocidal action unfolds and which impact the individual’s understanding of the situation and can make the salience of motivations and facilitative factors vary. These are macro-level conditions that are not specific to an individual and thus have no explanatory power on their own on why a certain person participates and another individual does not, but they are important for understanding how motivations and facilitative factors receive the meaning that they do.

1.1.   Schematic representation of the Complexity of Evil model

I will discuss a couple of key concepts in more depth after the model has been introduced, but I mention them now so that the reader has an inkling of the structure of the Complexity of Evil model (see section 1.2 for a deeper discussion of these concepts). I understand the context as the broader environment in which a genocide occurs, and thus it provides the macro-level framework within which the genocide occurs; within this context, I term as the situation the direct environment in which an individual is embedded, the space which he or she actually perceives and with which he or she interacts. To explain people’s motivations for participating, it is pivotal to understand the subjective meaning that these individuals ascribe to the context and the situations they are in: that we can only really understand people when we try to see the world as they see it. Broadly, the context can be located at the macro level, the situation at the meso level, and the individual at the micro level (see Balcells and Justino 2014, 1345). It is the aim of the Complexity of Evil model to bring these levels into interaction with each other in explaining why people participate in genocide.

1.1.1 Motivations

Within this framework for analyzing perpetrator motivations, one can differentiate between three categories of motivations, characterized by the source of the motivation: motivations focused on the ingroup, motivations focused on the outgroup, and opportunistic motivations. This differentiation builds on the concept of ingroups and outgroups as popularized by Henri Tajfel, from whom the scientific community has inherited his social identity theory (Tajfel et al. 1971; Tajfel 1978; Tajfel and Turner 1979; for an overview, see Ellemers and Haslam 2012; see also Dovidio 2013). The basic tenet of social identity theory is that people prefer a positive self-concept to a negative one and that identity is composed of both a personal and a social identity. A social identity is “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his … knowledge of his … membership in a social group (groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel 1978, 63; see also Tajfel 1981, 229). People’s sense of self-worth and their self-esteem thus come in part from their social identity—that is, from their group memberships and the evaluation of their ingroups compared with relevant outgroups (Tajfel 1981, 258; see also Schmitt, Branscombe, and Silvia 2000, 1599). In this comparison, individuals focus on the positive distinctiveness for their ingroup, which in turn can result in biased judgments and discriminatory behavior (Tajfel and Turner 1979; see also Cottam et al. 2004, 46).[2] Here it is important to emphasize that explicit competition between the groups is not necessary when one uses identities as an explaining factor (Tajfel et al. 1971, 151), contradicting Sherif and Sherif’s (1969) findings of how intergroup conflict can arise from competition over material resources.[3] Likewise in Tajfel’s experiments, the groups were split according to absolutely minimal criteria, making the selection nearly arbitrary. Yet, the mere introduction of a dichotomy between an ingroup and an outgroup sufficed in provoking discrimination of the outgroup and favoritism toward the ingroup. Furthermore, the denigration of the outgroup was more important for participants than successes for the ingroup—or put another way, relative gains of the ingroup compared with the outgroup were seen as more important than stronger absolute gains for the ingroup, so participants were prepared to forgo ingroup gains in order to avoid minimal outgroup gains (Tajfel et al. 1971).[4]

The first category of motivations refers to the ingroup—that is, the group of perpetrators and the social dynamics within it. In an ethnically or racially framed genocide, such as the Holocaust or Rwanda, this would refer to one’s own ethnic group or race, while in Cambodia its definition stops short of the Khmer ethnic group as the ingroup would be constituted only by those deemed loyal to Ângkar. Within this ingroup, the fact that it is a group matters—criminologists acknowledge that of all the factors that influence people in becoming deviant in all sorts of crimes, “the single most important or determinative feature may have been the simple fact that it was committed by a group of individuals acting together” (Warr 2002, 2–3; see also Sémelin 2005a, 241). In this context, different social dynamics within the perpetrator group can impact an individual and motivate him or her to participate in genocide. First, vertical relations between an authority and an individual can motivate people to participate through obedience to an authority’s explicit orders or the desire to conform to the authority’s anticipated desires. Similar dynamics are also apparent with regard to horizontal relations within the group, and individuals can be driven by a desire for conformity with their peers[5] in order not to be socially excluded from the group. Further, these peers can also actively apply indirect or direct pressure on the individual to participate. Also, these horizontal and vertical dynamics can be supplemented by the threat or actual use of violence, with this coercion by other members of the group (and the desire to avoid it) providing a strong incentive to participate. Furthermore, taking on a certain role, that of perpetrator, and accepting the values, attitudes, and behavioral norms associated with this role can also provide a motivation for participating in genocide. Finally, the status afforded to someone for participating, the hope of status gain, or the fear of status loss within the ingroup can also motivate some people to participate in genocide.[6]

The second focus of motivational categories is on the outgroup, which in the genocidal context of this book means the victim group: Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, and others in the Holocaust, Tutsi in Rwanda, and ethnic minorities and those deemed counterrevolutionary in Cambodia. This group is constructed along specific ideological lines by the perpetrator group. While the individual perpetrator does not necessarily have to share the ideological outlook of the regime under which they live, they will be able to comprehend the ingroup–outgroup division proscribed by the genocidal ideologues. Thus, one should be able to identify who is theoretically a member of the victim group (even if this does not mean, in reality, that one can actually tell which people belong to the group, if no physical differences exist). Not only can the victims be identified, but this outgroup can be the focus of two motivations in the model. The most prominent motivation is a genocidal ideology directed toward the victims. This is the epitome of genocidal motivations given its prominence in media reports and popular discourse, and encompasses rational ideological orientations, ethnic or racial hatred, and any other adherence to a moral framework that stipulates that the eradication of the victim group is desirable and necessary. The second motivation in this category is constituted by various emotions an individual can have toward the victim group, including fear, anger, hatred, resentment, or disgust, which can lead an individual to want to lash out and kill the victims as an emotional reaction to the individual’s situation and perception of the victims.

The third category of motivations is independent of both the ingroup and the outgroup and focuses on opportunistic motivations of the participating individuals. While this does not mean that these motivations are completely decoupled from the social situation in which an individual acts, these motivations are focused on the self of the perpetrator and his or her own self-interest. Most prominently featured among opportunistic motivations are material interests such as the ability to loot or otherwise enrich oneself through participation, the improvement of career prospects, or the chance to settle personal disputes behind the smokescreen of genocidal intent. A further motivation for participating in genocide is sadism, the pleasure that one can gain from the killing of other human beings. The thrill of participating in killing and/or the excitement of committing crimes can also motivate individuals to join genocidal action.

These motivations are discussed in greater depth and incorporate the broad insights of the conceptual and empirical literature, as well as my own fieldwork in Cambodia. Noticeably absent from the Complexity of Evil model are motivations based on emotional development or psychoanalytical explanations (see Baum 2008; Brunner et al. 2011; Hannemann 2011; Pohl 2011; Schelling 2004). The published studies in this field to date fail to present any form of empirical evidence and thus remain as little more than wild stabs in the dark of attempting to explain human behavior in genocidal situations.

1.1.2 Facilitative Factors

These motivations are complemented by what I term facilitative factors, which make participation in genocide easier. Facilitative factors alone would not suffice in making someone participate in genocide, but they can help tip the scales on participation when a motivation is present. I have divided the facilitative factors into four categories and will discuss them in greater depth in chapter 3.

The first category of facilitative factors is that of the ideological framework, which encompasses the genocide and provides moral justification for the acts to be perpetrated; this factor is closely tied to the motivation of ideology. Here various ideological strategies are employed to make the tasks expected of the perpetrators seem not only morally right but also morally imperative for the greater good, and the enemy is constructed in ideological terms.

The second category of facilitative factors encompasses various processes of moral disengagement by which the perpetrator attempts to undermine moral concerns about participation. The most prominent example in the literature is that of dehumanization, by which the victims are no longer perceived as human beings; lacking the obligation of human ties, it becomes easier to kill them. Various forms of distancing (e.g., physical, social, emotional) allow perpetrators easier participation, as they lose personal connection to the act or the victim through decreased proximity. Linguistically, the use of euphemistic labels or sanitizing language and the engagement of exonerating comparisons for the act of killing can also make it easier to participate as the perpetrator’s actions are perceived as less morally reprehensible.

The third category of facilitative factors refers to dynamics of the perpetrator group and individuals’ membership in it. Here, the diffusion of responsibility among various members of a large group or the displacement of responsibility to an authority that has charged the perpetrator with a task can convey a sense of detachment from the task being committed—and without the moral responsibility of the task, it becomes easier to participate. Processes of deindividuation allow individuals to lose their own identity and become an anonymous member of the group, thus relieving them of their personal responsibility, but also not allowing others to identify them as perpetrators.

The fourth and final category of facilitative factors looks at the role of time. First, people can come to participate in acts of increasing intensity and violence as they follow a continuum of destruction or as their commitments to the genocide escalate and disallow them any way out without psychologically invalidating their previous action. Second, as people engage in violence it becomes routinized and habitual, and thus it becomes easier to participate in other forms of more lethal violence.

1.1.3 Contextual Conditions

Finally, several contextual conditions are important for the Complexity of Evil model. Contextual conditions are background factors that provide a context conducive or hostile to genocide participation. These factors do not influence the individuals directly to participate, but instead provide a background in which the motivations and facilitative factors can unfold, making some of these particularly salient. As such, these contexts have emerged historically and are shaped by the policies of the state’s leaders. Importantly, contextual conditions are different from facilitative factors both in their macro-level nature and in that they are not tailored to an individual directly but provide a framework within which all participation (and nonparticipation) occurs. Naturally, different individuals can also perceive these factors in different ways, resulting in different impacts; but for the most part, these contextual conditions are at a separate level of the model from motivations and facilitative factors, even as their impact reverberates at the individual level.

The first contextual condition that is important for laying the groundwork for genocide is found in the nature of the state, particularly in the character of the government and its ability to implement policies without any form of viable opposition or resistance, giving it free rein to annihilate the victim group. State actors are endowed with unique forms of authority that allow them to issue orders with law-like character, persuasively make threats of coercion, or rely on existing structures for their implementation. A further contextual condition focuses on societal tensions around ethnicity and discrimination that structure who is part of the societal definition of the ingroup and part of the universe of moral obligation; ethnicity can act as a sorting mechanism that allows ideologies to become understandable and meaningful. Of great importance in the context of genocide are ideologies, which legitimate the exclusion and ultimately destruction of the victim group. The category of ideology also appears in motivations and facilitative factors, and this highlights its importance for the understanding of participation in genocide. However, one aim of this book is to demonstrate what role ideology plays specifically, without referring to ideology only as a blanket concept that purports to explain participation in toto, but instead in how it reshapes the moral framework within which potential perpetrators are acting. A further contextual condition is political instability and war, which allows hitherto powerless elites to seize power, or forces established actors to resort to new strategies, both of which raise the “attractiveness” of genocide as a policy that can rally the ingroup around oneself. Furthermore, the uncertainties created by political instability can impact the perceptions of the individual perpetrator in various ways, encouraging obedience to authorities or closer ties to one’s peers; also, this type of context allows for more unusual opportunities for personal self-enrichment. The economic situation is a contextual condition that can shape an individual’s perception of their past, current, and future potential for a settled and happy life. Further, it can shape the necessity and attractiveness of opportunities to loot and therefore impact people’s decision to participate in genocide. Finally, cultural factors can have various impacts on other motivations and facilitative factors—for example, rendering certain ideologies more acceptable or increasing the acceptability of certain forms of violence.

1.2  A MULTILEVEL, DYNAMIC MODEL

Before we engage in a more detailed and in-depth exploration of the various elements of the Complexity of Evil model, this section will first discuss some fundamental assumptions on which this model is built. In this model, the individual and his or her motivations are the focus of our attention, but the individual can only be understood as he or she is embedded within the broader environment. This environment influences the individual and his or her internal motivational processes in various ways, particularly through the situations and the context. As understood in the discussion of this model, the context is the broader environment in which one can locate an individual. The “violence always remains embedded in broader historical times and in the longue durée of structures and continuities, which require thinking beyond the violent acts and processes themselves” (Bakonyi and Bliesemann de Guevara 2012, 5). The context provides this macropolitical, cultural, socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological backdrop within which genocide unfolds and occurs; these factors are predominantly located at the national state level, although it is plausible that regional variations in the context occur. What is important is that the context encompass all background factors that are decisive in creating a framework that allows one to differentiate between a genocidal context and other, nongenocidal contexts. For example, it is to be expected that the context will be very different across the various cases, with state structures, culture, and ideological propagations in Cambodia, Rwanda, Nazi Germany, or elsewhere obviously differing considerably. However, certain specific elements within these contexts can be comparable—for instance, the way a state takes stronger political control than before or how specific norms of authority are embedded in culture. This is also the level at which certain cultural understandings and norms exist, which can guide people in their interpretation of situations, as well as stipulate certain behavioral responses to them.

Within this broader context, situations constitute the direct environment in which an individual is embedded. While the context provides the framework within which situations exist and influences the situations in which the soon-to-be perpetrators or nonperpetrators find themselves, the situation itself is more in the direct proximity of the individual. In this way, the situation is very often connected to and affected by social dynamics within a group, local geography, and time-proximate events. The situation is located at the micro or meso level and is made up of the direct surroundings of an individual. This encompasses the concrete environment in which decisions are made and actions are taken, and in an iterative and interactive process, the actions of individuals also impact and change the situation, feeding back on themselves and other individuals.

These concepts are not static but obviously interact with each other. Thus, an individual acts within and is influenced by the situation, but also through his or her actions shapes the situation in turn. Equally, the context structures how situations unfold and how they are perceived, but the context is also a product of the many developing situations. The Complexity of Evil model is thus a multilevel, dynamic model. What is explained by the Complexity of Evil model is why a certain individual participates in genocide, but what I mean by multilevel is that it integrates factors not just at the micro level of the individual but also at the meso and macro levels, including situations and the context. The focus is obviously on the individual, but always in interaction with the situation, which is located at the meso level, where organizational factors and the dynamics of social groups play a role. And the situation and the individual are themselves impacted by the macro level, the context. At the same time, individuals’ actions influence and change the situations they are in, and in their aggregation can reify or change the context itself. Thus, the various motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions interact with each other across their various levels, together determining individuals’ actions in genocide, together forming the decision on participation and perpetration, but at the same time also changing each other and impacting the dynamics. For example, someone may decide to participate because of ideological tenets picked up from the media over a long period of time, with the macro level framing perceptions at the micro level and legitimizing certain actions that previously would not have been allowed. Through his or her actions, this individual impacts the situation at the meso level in a number of ways, changing the dynamics within the group by solidifying the clout of the ideology, but also subtly putting pressure on others to participate too. Another example: macro-level developments that see a government seize a greater hold on power will impact meso-level dynamics of the situation as it augments or reduces the authority of certain individuals who are close to or in opposition to the government, respectively; this in turn then impacts how these authorities are perceived by individuals in these situations and the legitimacy attributed to the orders they give. Thus, the changes at the macro level can raise the saliency of the motivation obedience to authority, via the meso level. At the same time, this obedience to authority reinforces the grasp of the government on power even more.

1.2.   Multilevel model of genocide participation

A standard way of thinking about interactions between the macro and micro levels is with James Coleman’s (1990, 8–13) so-called boat, which assists in explaining how changes at the macro level occur by looking at the micro-foundations of these changes. In figure 1.2, I show an adapted version of this idea, one that allows for much more interaction between the levels. In essence, it just shows that the three levels are mutually dependent on each other and that changes at one level can result in changes at another. Together with the sociologist Dominik Pfeiffer (Williams and Pfeiffer 2017), I have written on how the macro and micro levels depend on each other in terms of ideology, drawing on social movement theory. The Complexity of Evil model goes further, though, and tries to really integrate all three levels into a holistic understanding of why people participate in genocide.

Not only is the model multilevel, but it is also conceived as dynamic in that various factors are thought to influence each other consecutively and that at different points in time, different motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions are important. The Complexity of Evil model is quite clear that different motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions influence different people; however, I would like to be quite explicit that I also believe that it is the different motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions that motivate one and the same individual at different times. Thus, over the whole time of an individual’s participation, the motivations can vary. For example, it is likely that the motivations that make a person participate in an act of killing for the first time will be different from the motivations for subsequent acts, particularly as inhibitions are reduced from time to time and the act of killing itself desensitizing the individual in preparation for the next time; some of the facilitative factors even explicitly model these changes over time, such as the continuum of destruction or escalating commitments, or the influence of habituation. It would go beyond the scope of this book to discuss motivational change in depth, but I have developed some rudimentary thoughts on the issue elsewhere (Reinermann and Williams 2020).

What the Complexity of Evil model does not do is to actually specify these changes as inherent parts of the model; the model does not specify which motivations will be predominant in beginning the violence and which for continuing. This is not an oversight or a lack of specification; instead, it is because the Complexity of Evil model is supposed to be applicable to perpetration in genocide in general, not to a specific point in time. The motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions all work at different points in time, all can come to the fore with different individuals at different times, helping us understand a person’s participation at that specific time.

The Complexity of Evil model, as the abstract representation that it is, is a tool for explanation and understanding and can be used as a template for understanding perpetration as it is influenced by the macro, meso, and micro levels and also across various points of time. The model allows all of these to come together to offer insight into whatever “snapshot” of perpetrator reality is of interest (that is, a certain person at a certain time).

1.3  THE CONSTRUCTION OF SUBJECTIVE MEANING AS DEPENDENT ON CONTEXT AND SITUATION

The Complexity of Evil model is designed to explain an individual’s participation in genocide through their motivations, yet this is not possible without locating these motivations within the individual’s context and situation. It is important to allow for the subjective meaning attributed by the individual to the action that he or she is engaged in within this context. This understanding of individuals’ motivations is rooted in the constructivist idea that social action can only be explained adequately by understanding the perspectives and perceptions of the acting individuals themselves. Individuals make decisions in reaction to and under the informational premise of their own perspectives, but I assume that individuals act similarly given similar desires, situations, and contexts. However, with different subjective interpretations of the same situation, two individuals will act in different ways; for example, if one person sees the presence of a victim group as threatening, while the other sees the victim group but does not perceive them as threatening, the former can have the motivation of fear, whereas this is less likely with the latter.

However, some of the processes described in this model are not actually consciously perceived by the individuals participating in genocide, but these subconscious processes are nonetheless important for understanding their perceptions and their motivations. For instance, individuals may not reflect on how certain cultural aspects of their context result in a certain reaction to demands for obedience by an authority, or how some of their ideological premises amplify an emotional reaction such as fear to the situation in which they find themselves. While their subjective interpretation of the context is undoubtedly pivotal for understanding their perspective and for being able to understand the resulting decision for or against action, they may not actually be fully aware of what the precise mechanisms behind this decision-making process are. As a further example, an individual may speak about other people in his or her friendship circle participating in genocide without explicitly conceptualizing this as a feeling of wanting to conform to a peer group. Thus, the Complexity of Evil model needs to be able to usefully classify the different motivations across different individuals and different genocidal contexts.

In this book, it is, of course, instrumental to understand the perspective of the individual in order to understand how the situation was perceived and what action alternatives were perceived. But this is only the starting point. From here, it is necessary to interpret this individual perspective and the subjective meaning that an individual ascribes to his or her situation, the more general context, and then ultimately to his or her action using the categories and concepts of the model. Only with this interpretative step can the fundamental motivations underlying the narratives provided by the individuals be understood and compared with each other. This subjective meaning is pivotal for determining which motivations are activated and which are not, but the Complexity of Evil model provides an attempt to objectify the study of these subjective perceptions and to categorize them analytically.

There are various ways in which the context and the situation can impact the perceptions of the individuals in question, and a helpful discussion of this is provided by Christian Gudehus, who in a chapter arguing for understanding violence as action presents a variety of approaches that help connect individual action (and implicitly perceptions) to the sociocultural worlds in which the actions are embedded (Gudehus 2018; see also Gudehus 2016). Gudehus, for instance, draws on Erving Goffman’s (1974) concept of frames, Norbert Elias’s ([1970] 1978) idea of figurations, and Heinrich Popitz’s (2006) research on social norms to help create a theory of violent action that can help us understand the violent action of an individual and his or her perceptions as embedded in the broader context. Gudehus concludes that individuals’ perceptions are “considerably influenced by these ‘sedimented experiences.’ Yet, at the same time, all of these concepts emphasize that individuals are not determined but rather continuously position and reposition themselves in relation to their environment” (2018, 44).

Another example is provided in an edited volume by Gudehus, Sönke Neitzel, and Harald Welzer, who also use the concept of frames of reference and show how important these are for people’s actions (see introduction by Neitzel and Welzer 2011a). While they are not referring to genocide but to soldiers’ perceptions of their situation during the Second World War, their ideas are certainly helpful for explaining violent action. Such frames of reference order the way the world is perceived and allow one’s perceptions of reality to be generally aided by these frames provided by cultural knowledge (Neitzel and Welzer 2011b, 17). In this way, routines and habits can reduce the need for broad cognitive processing of all details and allow most details about the world to be processed using these frames of what is normal and what is not. These frames are processed at the micro level by Deutungsmuster, a “typified and routinised frame for classifying what is happening, structuring life to an extraordinary degree” (Neitzel and Welzer 2011b, 35). These Deutungsmuster help individuals make sense of the situations and contexts they find themselves in and, using these frames, create subjective meaning for their actions therein. It is important to reflect on and understand these frames of reference because it is impossible to understand the dynamics of the genocidal context when looking at them in retrospect, when the frames of reference during the early 1940s in Germany, for instance, were radically different from the frames of reference today (Welzer 2006, 247).

Kristen Renwick Monroe discusses this in more specific terms of an ethical framework that provides the “cognitive scaffolding consisting of an individual’s self-image, worldview, agency, and the integration of particular values into this self-image. Once filled in by life experiences, each individual’s framework produces a particular way of seeing the world and one’s self in the world” (2011, 8). Monroe argues that the individual’s resulting ethical perspective cognitively classifies expectations about what actions toward others are deemed to be normal.

The essence of these different arguments is that social action can be understood only by reconstructing the individual’s subjective meaning that he or she associated with the situation, the context, and the performed act itself. This subjective meaning can be culturally influenced through certain frames of reference, which stem from the macro-level context, but it is also impacted by lower-level discourses in social groups of friends and acquaintances. Emergent social norms among peers can, but must not necessarily, impact individuals’ action decisions, and it is the subjective meaning that they ascribe to these that is key to being able to tell this.

1.4  MOTIVATIONS AS THE RATIONALE FOR CHOOSING AN ACTION ALTERNATIVE

Having established the importance of understanding the subjective meaning an individual gives to a situation and context and how these levels are connected, we use these foundations to turn to the motivations of these individuals. The literature on motivations differentiates between motives and motivations. Motives can be seen as “classes of action goals” (Kleinbeck 2006, 268)—that is, general characteristics of goals that individuals have and that are stable across time and situations (270). A motivation is the process of connecting an individual’s motives with specific situational incentives, thus creating an impetus and direction for action (Fischer and Wiswede 2009, 97). A motivation is thus the process of setting specific goals and attempting to answer the question of which goals an actor would like to achieve (desirability) as well as how realistic these are seen (feasibility) (Achtziger and Gollwitzer 2006, 281). Thus, a motivation can be seen as the impetus or impulse for action (Atkinson [1964] 1975, 442–443), the definition of the reason for carrying out certain actions and for not carrying out others.

As discussed above, a useful analysis of motivations can be successful only if it refers to the situational and contextual environment in which the individual is embedded. Peter Hedström and Lars Udehn (2009, 34) speak of a “choice between socially structured alternatives.” In an edited volume by Jutta and Heinz Heckhausen, they specify that “the motivation of a person to follow a certain goal depends on situational incentives, personal preferences and their interaction. The resulting motivational tendency is composed of differing incentives weighted by the personal motivational profile regarding action, the result of action and both internal, referring to self-evaluation, and external consequences” (2006b, 6; my translation).

Taking the discussion of subjective understanding developed above, one can more formally incorporate it in this discussion of motivations. Expanding on Hedström and Udehn (2009), I argue that an individual decision is made as a choice between alternatives that are both socially structured and individually constructed. Thus, individuals have certain culturally shaped frames of reference that help them sort out the world and understand what is morally appropriate and what is not, what behavior is expected of them and what is not, and so on. Finding themselves in a certain context, people use these frames of reference to help make sense of their environment and guide their decision-making process in their choice between alternatives that are both socially structured and individually constructed. For example, shortly after the Khmer Rouge took power, they concentrated significant energy on not only identifying internal enemies themselves but also propagating the people under their authority about the meaning of the revolution and the significance of being against the revolution. When someone was then arrested, these people were immediately seen within the frame of a traitor who had lost all moral rights. Given the perception of high coercion, people believed that they would be killed if they were seen to be associated with this person; this association could be inferred from refusing a task aimed against them (arresting, guarding, torturing, killing, etc.). The precise perception was thus individually constructed, and the situation here was structured socially, thus framing the alternatives between which an individual believed he or she could choose.

It is at this stage that motivations come into play. They can guide a person in deciding which alternative to choose. What I term motivations are what Per-Olof Wilkström and Kyle Treiber (2009) call situational mechanisms, which link the individual’s desires and free will (internal controls) to their environment (external controls) and guide the decision-making process. From an analytical sociology perspective, Hedström and Peter Bearman (2009, 5) present the “idea that mechanism explanations identify component parts that jointly produce the collective outcome to be explained … [as] the very heart of the approach.” Following this approach to analytical sociology I do not take mechanisms here to be construed as causal mechanisms but instead as a mode of explanation that brings together different actors or other components and their relations with each other, demonstrating how these together produce a collective outcome. Hedström and Bearman (2009; see also Hedström and Ylikoski 2010, 60) follow a structural individualist approach that resonates with the Complexity of Evil model, as they emphasize the relations between individuals and the structures behind these relations, differentiating analytical sociology from both methodological individualism and pure rational choice theories, which both reduce everything to the individual themselves and neglect their socially embedded relations.

The essence of the discussion is that an individual will only choose an alternative that he or she actually perceives, regardless of how obvious or rational this may appear to an outsider. Nevertheless, in all situations an individual will perceive several, even many, different action alternatives, one of which may, in the case of this book, be to participate in genocide (albeit to varying degrees, again presenting various alternatives). Even when an individual subjectively feels that he or she must make a “choiceless decision” (Bouris 2007; Coulter 2008; Kelman and Hamilton 1990)—hence, a decision without viable alternatives—the individual feels he or she must participate, precisely because of the consequences of the alternative to participating. Which alternative the individual then chooses boils down to whether an individual has a motivation for or against certain options and how these weigh against one another. In the end, and this is the central argument of this book, an individual will participate in genocide only if one of the motivations introduced here is present and pressing enough to outweigh the negative connotations of participation, such as feeling it is morally wrong, the risk of judicial prosecution, and so on.

So why does an individual choose to participate in genocide? To explain why this is the action alternative chosen, we need to understand the motivations for and against participation and why the motivation for participation overrides the other: the fundamental assumption here is that there is a rationality (understood broadly) underlying the decisions made. For the purposes of the Complexity of Evil model, acting individuals are seen as “essentially rule-guided actors and social order as fundamentally based on adherence to common rules of conduct” (Wilkström and Treiber 2009, 77). This is succinctly summarized in situational action theory (SAT), as follows: “For a person to undertake an act of violence he/she needs to perceive violence as an alternative which he/she is motivated to pursue. SAT suggests that once an individual perceives an alternative, he/she will be motivated to pursue it if he/she believes that action will satisfy a desire or fulfil a commitment or address a source of friction. In the former case, he/she is tempted by an opportunity; in the latter he/she is provoked by an interference” (Wilkström and Treiber 2009, 84–85).

Thus, motivations provide a form of rationality for why a certain action is chosen. In essence, motivations result in what Coleman (1990, 14–18) terms “purposive action”: action that is designed to maximize the utility of the actor. This rational choice approach means that motivations define the utility and the costs that the action will bring to the actor and weigh them against each other. However, it is important to emphasize that this form of rationality cannot rest on an objective understanding of utility and cost, but instead on subjective constructions of personal utility and cost, which are strongly guided by subjective preferences and the subjective meaning an individual attributes to the situation he or she is in. For instance, the opportunity for looting always provides an objective monetary utility, yet it will feature as a motivation for certain individuals only when they believe that the utility of material gain outweighs the costs of participation; for others, the costs of being excluded from a social group may outweigh the costs of participation and therefore motivate an individual to participate. This approach of purposive action can be related to the broader understanding of rationality developed by Max Weber ([1921] 1972, 12–13), who differentiates utility-driven, instrumental action (zweckrational); value-rational action (wertrational), which is performed for the sake of following a certain principle; emotion-driven, affectional action (affektuell); and traditional action (traditional) as following fixed habitual patterns.

This means that, first, a person may value certain consequences of their action more than others—some having a preference for social group cohesion, others for the infliction of pain or monetary gain. Second, utility can be defined more easily for monetary causes and is relatively simply applied to motivations such as status, social dynamics, or sadism; however, it is also possible to link these ideas on utility to emotional and ideological approaches, which at first appear contrary to such a rational approach. In the end the individual’s utility is defined as the fulfillment of their ideological goals or as responding to their emotional needs. Every perpetrator will have a diverging cost-utility calculation underlying his or her decision, but it is the same motivational mechanisms that again and again make individuals participate. On the cost side, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of people avoid fighting and killing when in a battle situation (Grossman [1995] 2009; Collins 2009), and this should be all the more valid when they are outside of battle and not purportedly fighting to save their own life. People, for the most part, do not want to kill, and so they will participate only if there is sufficient motivation to do so.

In the end, these different facets come together in one messy decision-making process, with any individual first perceiving his or her environment and thus even perceiving available alternatives and what moral connotations are associated with each. From here, a decision is made using various motivations and then leading to either participation in genocide or not.

1.5  THE UNDERLYING CAUSATION: MOTIVATIONS AS INUS CONDITIONS

Given the systematic nature that the Complexity of Evil model brings to the table, it is important to define precisely the causal nature of the elements. I do not suggest a deterministic perspective or attempt to put predictive values on the different motivational mechanisms that form the cornerstone of the model. The individual motivations can provide a mechanism in which different components of the context, the situation, and a person’s character coalesce to make someone participate in genocide, but this is not deterministic. Instead, the motivations provided here are seen much more as an ex post explanation, in retrospect showing the different scenarios (both motivational and contextual) under which participation can occur.

If the causality is not strictly deterministic, what is the concept of causality underlying the Complexity of Evil model? A more nuanced use of the concepts of necessity and sufficiency can provide a less deterministic and more realistic model. The most useful approach to causality in this context is J. L. Mackie’s (1965) concept of an INUS condition, which fits excellently for the study of participation in genocide. An INUS condition is a condition that is an insufficient but necessary part of a condition that is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the outcome.[7] Less formally, this means that there is no motivation for genocide that is necessary and present across all perpetrators, but that various motivations are to be seen as INUS conditions for participating in genocide if they cause participation in genocide in combination with certain factors. Each motivation is then said to “cause” genocide participation because it is a necessary part of a “pathway” to participation, and without this motivation in this combination, participation would not happen. Implied in this is also that an individual would not participate in genocide if all the motivations were absent, making the presence of at least one of all the motivations necessary for genocide participation.

INUS conditions thus provide a neat way to think about causation in a complex reality. In the following model it is naturally possible that the different motivations interact with each other or that for one individual several motivations are at work; however, for the sake of analytical clarity, the various motivations will be regarded separately. Empirically, of course, multiple motivations are possible. Within the definition of an INUS condition, it is also important that a condition is itself individually insufficient for causing the outcome. While at first glance the Complexity of Evil model would appear to violate this stipulation as I present the different motivations as sufficient causes of genocide, this does not capture the complexity of the argument. There are other factors that are implicitly implied along with each of the motivations, and without which the motivations truly would not be sufficient for causing participation. Examples of these factors could be, for instance, the presence of a moral framework for legitimizing the killing of others, which would combine with the factor of fear, causing the person to participate in genocide. Further, the absence of state sanctions against killing is a further necessary part of a combination for looting to come to the fore as a motivation. These are very basic factors, however, that reflect mostly on the genocidal context or the situations created by this context in which the individuals find themselves, whereas the motivations provide the actual impulse for action. Only with these and other structural or contextual factors can each of the motivations unfold its impact. Nonetheless, the focus of the Complexity of Evil model will be on these motivations as INUS conditions, and while background conditions will be explicitly discussed in chapter 4 in many of the motivations the context of a genocidal situation is implicitly important. While the contextual conditions themselves are not sufficient (given that they are the framework for both participation and nonparticipation), they provide the necessary framework within which participation can even occur. They work together with the motivations in raising their saliency or allowing the decision for participation to even occur.

Besides motivations and contextual conditions, the Complexity of Evil model also includes facilitative factors, which are factors that do not make any claim to causality but that nonetheless impact an individual’s decision to participate in genocide. These are factors that are by no means sufficient for motivating a person to participate, but when they are present, they make the decision easier. An example to illuminate this would be dehumanization. Dehumanizing the victim group makes it significantly easier to kill them, given that most people have fewer moral scruples killing an animal than killing a fellow human being. However, the dehumanization of a victim does not pose a motivation in and of itself for participating in genocide, just as one is not automatically motivated to kill a cat when one encounters it, because it is not a human. The fact that a victim group is no longer perceived as human facilitates killing its members, but does not constitute a motivation to do so.

1.6  CONCLUSION

To bring together the strands of this chapter, the Complexity of Evil model itself differentiates between motivations as the direct impulse to action; facilitative factors, which make participation easier; and contextual conditions, which provide the environment within which action occurs and decisions to participate are made. Motivations themselves can be categorized as either ingroup-focused, and thus driven by dynamics within the perpetrator group; outgroup-focused, referring to some perception of or attitude about the victim group; or opportunistic, motivating an individual for reasons that have nothing to do with the victims or members of the individual’s own group, but purely their own self.

The term “motivations,” as used in the Complexity of Evil model, has been argued here to refer to INUS conditions, which do not deterministically “cause” participation in genocide but instead should be seen as mechanisms that in certain contexts can be the impetus for participation to occur. In this sense, motivations mediate between, on the one hand, an individual’s desires, needs, and preferences and, on the other, the situation and the context this individual is embedded in. Fundamentally, to understand these motivations, it is necessary to comprehend precisely how the individual perceives their situation. Thus, we must reconstruct the subjective meaning that the situation, the context, and the resulting action have for the individual in order to understand why this action was chosen. Within this framework, however, the primary interest is not in reconstructing narratives of the individuals involved but in trying to understand the interests and psychological processes underlying these narratives and then analytically categorize and compare them. By abstracting these motivations from the concrete situations and contexts in which they are embedded, it becomes possible to compare participation in genocide across different genocidal contexts, and within different situations in the same genocide. And it is precisely the aim of the Complexity of Evil model to try to understand why people participate, not just in one certain battalion in the Holocaust or one village in Rwanda, but generally, to find the commonalities and the similarities in the dynamics across contexts, across situations, and across individuals and thus provide an overarching model of participation.

VIGNETTE  II

Sokong

A COERCED KILLER WITH A CONSCIENCE

I WAS A soldier during the civil war and then worked in the rice fields of Ta Khmao. In 1976, I was told that I had a problem, and although I did not know what problem I could have, I remembered that during the war I had run home three times and had been re-educated twice because of this. Also, during the liberation of Phnom Penh on 16 April 1975, I had released a general with his wife and another soldier, instead of arresting them, and allowed Lon Nol soldiers to take weapons lying along the road because I wanted them to have some weapons to protect themselves. But I did not think that the leaders knew what I had done. So I just followed them and they took me to S-21, the prison. At S-21, they did not assign me to do anything but let me sleep for a few days.

I was made the group leader of a guarding unit, and after working in the rice fields to help supply S-21, they assigned me to guard outside the prison and receive prisoners; they did not let anybody go in. I was the group chief there until in 1977 they started to arrest cadres, including some of those who worked at S-21. Then the deputy chief of S-21, Hor, appointed me as temporary deputy chief of a guarding unit with one hundred members.

In this position I transported prisoners, who had already been interrogated, to be killed at Choeung Ek. No one was happy to do this, but they were all under orders. When we were ordered to go, we would go. Without an order, we would not have gone. Nobody ever refused to follow an order. Anybody who refused to follow an order was accused of being an enemy who was against Ângkar. They would destroy this person.

I did not think that the prisoners had really done any mistakes, because also people who worked there were arrested and killed, even though they did not make any mistakes. They were accused of being enemies associating with the CIA, or Vietnamese, or Soviet agents. There were some people who really made mistakes, but I did not know what kind of mistakes they made. But those who worked with me at the military did not make any mistakes. Because I lived with them and knew that they did not associate with the yuon or the CIA. When they were arrested, they were beaten and interrogated.

When arriving at Choeung Ek [killing fields], there was a killing group of about 10 people. They put the prisoners in a building and took them one by one to kill them. They had dug the pits, then killed, and filled in the pit and guarded them. When I arrived, I neatly wrote down the prisoners’ names to document how many were transported from S-21 and how many actually arrived. I was responsible for anyone missing. Only one person ever escaped, but he escaped at Choeung Ek. There was no possibility to escape along the way because there were guards and the trucks were completely closed. This person escaped at Choeung Ek, but I don’t know who released him. He ran with his eyes blindfolded and his arms tied to his back.

I also had to participate in killing. Five people by beating because my chiefs were there and ordered me to do it. I could not refuse. They asked me, “Can you cut off your heart or not? If you can cut off your heart, please show me by killing one person.” Then I killed. After I killed, I handed the metal bar to someone from the killing unit. If we refused, they would say: “Anyone who is against Ângkar, they are the enemies of Ângkar and the cycle of history will roll over them.” If I could not cut off my heart, I would be accused of being their enemy. I did not feel good about it, but if I did not follow them, I would also be killed.

Moreover, many of the internal staff were being arrested. The guarding group and interrogation group were arrested one after another. Three or four people in my group were arrested. But I also helped Brother Chek, who was afraid for his security; I allowed him to go and cut morning glory for the rabbits and he committed suicide. I was accused that I had allowed an enemy to commit suicide. I was also afraid for my own security.

Today he lives in Kandal province.

CHAPTER   2

Motivations

THE COMPLEXITY OF Evil model differentiates between three types of motivations: ingroup-focused motivations, outgroup-focused motivations, and opportunistic motivations. In this section, I will detail each of the individual motivations, drawing on the breadth of interdisciplinary insights on the various topics, as well as on the case study literature and my own interviews in Cambodia. It is in this and the following two chapters that we see the true diversity of motivations, the complexity of understanding why people participate in genocide, and, equally, how ordinary and quotidian most of these motivations actually are.

2.1  INGROUP-FOCUSED MOTIVATIONS

The conceptual focus of this section on ingroup motivations is on dynamics within the perpetrator group and how the relations between the perpetrator group members come to move an individual to participate in genocide. The bulk of the section is, in essence, about social influence. “Social influence can be said to have occurred whenever a person (P) changes his behaviour as a result of induction by another person or group (the influencing agent or O)” (Kelman 1974, 128). Kelman distinguishes between induction that is “deliberate and intentional” and induction that is subtler and indirect, such as being a role model. A further differentiation important in this context of social groups, which I add, is whether the influencing agent is a peer (a person of similar social standing) or a person in a position of some form of authority; the former we can term horizontal influence, the latter vertical influence. A third distinction that I believe is important to make is on how the influence is exerted. Here, I believe a trichotomous classification is most helpful, distinguishing among, first, the tacit influence exerted through the influenced individual’s anticipation of others’ expectations; second, the explicit vocalization of these expectations through the inducing agent (e.g., through the use of orders or the provision of persuasive arguments); and third, influence can be exerted through the threat or actual use of violence. It is important to add that this tacit category does not necessitate any actual intention by the authority or peer but rests solely in the perception of the individual being influenced. Altogether this creates the systematization depicted in table 2.1 of social influence as is interesting for genocide participation.

TABLE 2.1.
Influence of social relations on an individual

Tacit

Explicit

Threat

Horizontal

Conformity

Peer pressure

Coercion

Vertical

Obedience to authority: engaged followership

Obedience to authority: orders

Coercion

While this overview is certainly no more than a rudimentary classification of social influence for genocide participation, it helps put the different types of influence in a clearer perspective and relation to each other than previous research on these dynamics, emphasizing the important difference between conformity and peer pressure, while allowing obedience to authority to span both the tacit and explicit categories. While some small differences may exist between tacit and explicit obedience to authority, with the former not even necessitating an order but with an expedient individual performing as they expect themselves to be ordered, and the latter seeing an actual order, these are significantly less substantial than between conformity and peer pressure. I do not believe these to be particularly salient. Similarly, coercion should work the same whether used by peers or authorities; perhaps their respective means of enforcing threats are different, but nonetheless the mechanism of seeking to avoid negative repercussions is independent of who that source of threat is, as long as it is credible and sufficiently deterrent.

The practical applicability of social identity theory to genocide participation becomes apparent when one looks at the dynamics within the ingroup itself, as studied by Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher. They suggest that a “shared social identity is a source of social power.… [An] internalized sense of ‘us-ness’ creates the potential for a set of people to align and coordinate their actions and to support each other such that individual efforts become summative. Those who are able to define the content of social identities thereby become able to direct the application of collective effort and to gain power through the group. This then helps to explain how the achievement of shared identity generates the possibility of successful social change” (Haslam and Reicher 2012b, 174). This social identity does not create similar goals inherently, but instead provides an “expectation and motivation to agree” (Haslam and Reicher 2012a, 174). For example, while rituals and certain characteristics, such as tattoos or uniforms, provided elementary identification for members of the SS, it was the personal interactions and relations that tied the members to their organization and to Hitler (Kramer 2006, 283). These relations can in turn be exacerbated by a “sense of obligation to the group” (Alvarez 2001, 94). This argument can be taken further yet, and Dan Stone argues that “prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group” (2004, 45). At the same time, participation in collective activities has been demonstrated to increase identification strength with the ingroup (Khan et al. 2016).

Furthermore, in the context of Rwanda, it is the fact that killing occurred in group contexts that enabled people to participate “in specific acts of killing …; these acts constituted the group as a particular kind of social actor with a particular identity, what I call an Interahamwe identity” (Fujii 2009, 175). This group identity was maintained only in the group, and outside the group context no one individually sought out Tutsi and killed them; in fact, quite the opposite was true, as sometimes people even helped and saved Tutsi when they were outside the group (Fujii 2009, 177). McDoom (2013) also speaks of the importance of social influence for participation of individuals in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, referring particularly to the influence conveyed through direct proximity in the neighborhood or by living in the same household. However, he lacks a differentiation similar to the one presented here to understand fully how the social influence actually works, which form it takes, and what mechanisms underlie his research, rather than merely a geospatial statistical analysis.

The importance of identity with the group is not unique to the study of genocide participation, but has also played a prominent role in the study of several adjacent phenomena—for example, explaining rebel recruitment beyond purely economic motives, particularly as a way to understand overcoming collective action problems (Weinstein 2007, 99). Also, Alexandra Scacco (2010) emphasizes the importance of social networks and individuals’ embeddedness herein when demonstrating why individuals with a motivation stemming from poverty decided to participate in riots in Nigeria; while the mere “push” of poverty and “pull” of social networks would appear to be a simplistic explanation for all rioters in her Nigerian cases, it certainly highlights the central importance of social networks. Finally, the study of participation in terrorist cells has also emphasized the importance of networks and social affiliation; of the 150 cases of Jihadi terrorist participation he examines, Marc Sageman (2008; see also Reynolds and Hafez 2019) finds that 68 percent of individuals decided to join because of friendships with other cell members, and 14 percent because of kinship affiliations.

At the same time, it should be remembered that the genocide itself and the surrounding changes to society and politics can trickle down and change the structure of social networks of friendship themselves. Elisabeth Wood (2008) shows this excellently for social networks during civil wars and demonstrates how civil wars can erode ties between groups. Nonetheless, as the focus here is on the individual and their participation in genocide, it is important to remember potential changes to social structures, but ultimately it is the social structures in the social situation of the moment when participation becomes a topic that will matter and that are the focus in the following sections.

Finally, this section also discusses the role of the ingroup in defining a specific genocidal role that is then the foundation for motivating action for an individual as he or she takes on this new role. Also, status is an essentially ingroup-focused motivation, as it is defined in relation to other members of the group and individuals are motivated to gain status within the group through their participation.

2.1.1 Obedience to Authority

Obedience to authority is possibly the most cited motivation by perpetrators (see among many others Alvarez 2001; Brannigan 2013; Du Preez 1994; Gourevitch 1998; Hinton 2005; Mamdani 2001; McDoom 2008; Meyer 2009; Sémelin 2005a; Smeulers 2015; Straus 2006; Welzer 2002), and is one of the most discussed mechanisms for explaining participation in the academic literature. The attractiveness of such a reasoning from the perspective of perpetrators is that by referring to an authority and reporting that they were “only” following orders, participants in genocide purport to reduce their own culpability and give responsibility for their actions to the authority in question. Particularly in a military setting, in which much value is placed on dutiful obedience, perpetrators can portray themselves as a mere cog in well-oiled machinery, which it is their whole ethos to uphold; or in a bureaucratic setting in which authority can be abdicated to the system, too (see Owens, Su, and Snow 2013, 77). Pivotally, authority can survive without reference to threats of physical violence as it rests on a social differential and the acceptance of superiority instead (Popitz 1986, 14), which fundamentally differentiates it from coercion (see section 2.1.4). However, merely the act of following orders does not necessarily signal obedience to the authority issuing them (Kressel 2002, 149). A host of other motivations could be the actual reason for participation, while the order itself is used as legitimization. Given the attractiveness of stating this motivation, it is to be expected that it is overreported by perpetrators; but even if this is the case, there are certainly some participants for whom it is the genuine motivation and thus merits our close attention here as the first motivation to be discussed in the Complexity of Evil model.

The most influential research on obedience, and what most popular accounts of genocide would label the definitive study explaining perpetrator motivations as a whole, is the series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram (1963, 1975) at Yale University in the early 1960s.[1] Milgram’s basic experimental setup saw participants ordered by an experimenter dressed in a white lab coat to shock a confederate[2] who was located in an adjacent room. Framed as part of a learning experiment, participants were ordered to administer successively higher-voltage shocks to the confederate every time he gave a wrong answer,[3] starting at a mere 15 volts but increasing over 30 increments to 450 volts (labeled as “Danger: Severe Shock”).[4] In an intricately choreographed performance, the confederate gave right and wrong answers, and began protesting against shocks as the voltage increased. With growing intensity, the confederate complained of a bad heart and pleaded for the experiment to stop; cries of anguish were audible for the participant to hear. Eventually the confederate grew silent and no longer responded (which, according to the “learning experiment” rules, counted as a wrong answer). While the participants were theoretically free to leave the experiment at any point, any hesitations or desires expressed to terminate participation were reacted to by again carefully scripted prods by the experimenter to help persuade continued participation and create an atmosphere of vertical pressure.[5] The result of the experiment was that a surprisingly high majority of participants (65%) continued administering shocks until the highest possible level of 450 volts,[6] despite the anguish this was seemingly causing the confederate and despite obviously making many of the participants quite distraught.[7] However, the rate of obedience varied strongly when different elements of the experimental setup were changed; Milgram (1975) reported eighteen variations in his later book, although including unpublished variations Milgram had conducted twenty-three (Perry 2013). Milgram’s experiments have since been replicated under much more careful laboratory conditions that home in on only individual elements in order to minimize the distress for participants (see Burger 2009; Burger, Girgis, and Manning 2011).

While the Milgram experiments remain influential today—for example, most psychology and social-psychology textbooks do not criticize the work (Griggs and Whitehead 2015)—the overwhelming majority of current literature is critical of the work for ethical and methodological reasons. Gina Perry’s (2013; see also Griggs 2017; Nicholson 2011) detailed critique of Milgram’s experiments unearths impressive evidence regarding the ethical implications of the work and lays the foundation for her very negative portrayal of Milgram and his motivations. It is a revealing account of the juxtaposition between the “simple” and convincing publication of results and the deeply questionable ethics underlying their development. Methodologically and conceptually there are also plenty of critiques. First, Milgram conducted extensive pilot tests to create an “optimal” environment for inducing obedience before he began conducting the official experiment (Perry 2013; Russell 2011). It is this explorative process (extensively critiqued by Perry 2013) that—although undermining a certain conception of scientific practice that precludes trial and error—allowed for such an impressive coercive system to be perfected, a necessary condition for the successful implementation of the experiment (Russell and Picard 2013). Second, the escalating prods by the experimenter were not constantly applied properly, with the actor often improvising; also, only the last of the four prods actually signifies an order, as the others are more arguments (Gibson 2013). Ironically for the obedience argument, the only prod explicitly demanding obedience actually led to the highest amount of defections, and in Burger’s replication not a single participant obeyed this final prod (Burger, Girgis, and Manning 2011). Third, not only is obedience to explicit orders not the key, but the most effective way to induce compliance was to introduce confederates who unquestioningly adhered to the instructions, while compliance was minimized through the presence of defiant confederates. This very much speaks to the role of conformity above obedience (for more on conformity, see section 2.1.2). Finally, in a survey conducted among participants one year after the experiment, those who reported that they believed the pain was genuine were significantly more likely to be defiant of the authority, considerably undermining the internal validity of the experiment (Brannigan 2013, 11–12).

Furthermore, although it is often argued that the Milgram experiment helps our understanding of perpetration, there are several differences between the experiment itself and its applicability to the Holocaust or other cases of genocide. First, Milgram’s participants were assured that the shocks would not result in any lasting harm to the confederate, while holding such a belief about victims of genocide is obviously absurd (Kressel 2002, 161; Waller 2002, 107). Nevertheless, the sweating, trembling, and stuttering exhibited by many of Milgram’s participants credibly evidence that at least some of the participants believed that their actions were causing harm in that moment (Kressel 2002, 159), with over half indicating in the survey one year after their participation in the experiment that they genuinely believed they were inflicting pain (for a discussion, see Brannigan 2013, 11). Second, “Milgram’s subjects had little time to contemplate the implications of their behaviour” (Waller 2002, 108), whereas participants in genocide are sometimes engaged in their genocidal practices repeatedly for months or even years; the element of surprise and resulting obedience, as suggested to be the case in the experiment, however, is to a certain degree mirrored in the first reaction to an initial order—for example, the initial reaction of the policemen of Reserve Battalion 101 of whom only few let themselves be excused, as “for many the reality of what they were about to do, … had probably not sunk in” (Browning [1994] 2001, 60–61). The initial shock and hasty participation may have served to overcome participants’ primary inhibitions. However, continued participation became easier due to processes such as moral disengagement or desensitization, two important facilitative factors that will be discussed in more depth in due course. Third, in Milgram’s experiments, the physical presence of the experimenter was pivotal, with prods for continued participation necessary in order that the participants did not leave the experiment. However, in genocide, perpetrators are often expected to and actually do commit their acts of killing outside the direct surveillance of the authority to whom they are obedient (Kressel 2002, 161; Waller 2002, 107)—this highlights the key importance of obedience in explaining initial participation, whereas it may be limited in explaining gratuitous participation in due course. A final difference, but one that makes Milgram’s findings seem even more applicable, is that the pressure on individuals in a genocidal context, often at war, in a context of uncertainty and sometimes fear, will be significantly higher than in a Yale laboratory (Du Preez 1994, 107). These critiques are valid, and we should be cautious in applying the details one-to-one with genocidal situations. Nonetheless, the fundamental insight of the experiment regarding the mechanism of why people obey is insightful for our study of why people participate in genocide.

Milgram suggests that the mechanism underlying the obedience to authority motivation is what he labels “the agentic state.” This entails a “seemingly voluntary entry into an authority system ‘perceived’ as legitimate creat[ing] a strong sense of obligation. Those within the hierarchy adopt the authority’s perspective or ‘definition of the situation’ ” (Browning [1994] 2001, 173; see also Staub 2002, 16) and then act accordingly by being obedient to their superior’s explicit or implicit orders. However, there is a stronger consensus today that an alternative interpretation—or alternative interpretations (see Hollander and Turowetz 2017)—of the experiment’s psychological underpinnings is more suitable. Haslam and Reicher (2011; 2012a; see also Haslam et al. 2015; Reicher, Haslam, and Smith 2012) offer the “engaged follower” explanation, which approaches the issue of authority from a social identity theory perspective and argues against Milgram’s interpretation of the agentic state. They argue that individual participants’ willingness to demonstrate obedience to authorities is dependent on the degree of identification with this authority; building on this social identity, the participants will believe that the authority is right. Direct orders will violate a common social identity and thus will lead to more disobedience, whereas action commands justified within a common framework will lead to higher obedience.

This matches with data from the Milgram experiment and its replications: that the experimenter prod that elicited the most participants’ refusal to continue was the only one that was a direct order (Burger 2009). This approach, which emphasizes engaged followership, is also able, to a certain degree, to explain the variation in obedience better than alternative approaches, as this is dependent on the degree of identification with the authority. Other studies attempting to break this down to personality difference between individuals—for instance, regarding empathic concern or the desire for control—returned no significant results (Burger 2009). Furthermore, rhetorical analysis of postexperiment interviews supports these findings by demonstrating that obedience is less an empirical finding of the experiment and more an invocation by the participants, and thus a rhetorical product of the experiments (Gibson et al. 2018).

While obedience to authority is most conventionally thought about with respect to orders, Stephen Gibson (2019) suggests that orders are not always necessary (or even effective, as will be discussed below). Therefore, he suggests removing “the social act of the order or command” and expanding the understanding of obedience, defined as “the submission to the requirements of an authority” (Gibson 2019, 255). I would argue that this definition allows for a more nuanced appreciation of different states of resistance and compliance, going beyond binary conceptions of obedience that are commonly interpreted in Milgram’s experiments (Hoffman, Myerberg, and Morawski 2015).

In the context of the Complexity of Evil model, perpetrators accept (at least to a certain degree) the frames of reference provided by the person or people in authority, and can derive some subjective meaning out of the proposed genocidal action. Furthermore, by identifying with the authority figure, participants in genocide who are obedient to authority indicate that they need “no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform” (Browning [1994] 2001, 173; see also Vetlesen 2005; see also section 3.3.1). Taking this further, an individual’s authority resonates at an attitudinal and not just behavioral level, meaning that the person who is obedient to this authority can also bow to the authority even in situations in which the authority has no control over the person’s behavior, because the person subservient to the authority has taken on the attitudes, values, and judgments of the relevant authority (Popitz 1986, 12). Paul Roth brings his discussion of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann to a very succinct and relevant point: “Evil becomes banal once the actions that produce it lack just this type of Kantian thoughtfulness, i.e., becomes a mere following of ends given by others and not by reason” (Roth 2010, 203). From this perspective, the “banality of evil” is characterized by a simple submission under or integration into the narratives provided by authorities, to such a degree that the perpetrator “thoughtlessly” participates without questioning his or her own role or the morality of this action.

It is important for genocidal elites to be perceived as holding authority within a legitimate system or context in order for the common social identity to be created. Within this system, authority can stem from various sources, such as from expertise or one’s relative hierarchical position (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, 595), or more broadly from the system that the person in authority is a part of. In extensions of the Milgram experiment, many facets of the setup were varied, bringing to light how different aspects of authority could impact participation. For instance, if it was an “ordinary person” giving the prompts to continue, not someone vested with authority, obedience rates dropped significantly. Increasing distance to the authority (simulated by experimenter commands being given by telephone rather than in person in the same room) reduced rates also, while physical proximity to the confederate (by being forced to re-place his hand on the electric plate and being in the same room) also reduced obedience rates. Further, if two experimenters were present and they contradicted each other, obedience evaporated (Milgram 1975).

Authority is not something that rests inherently on some personal characteristics (for the contrary view, see Adorno et al. 1950; Altemeyer 1981), but instead it is socially constructed and relational: “Authority is not something one has but something one receives” (Popitz 1986, 25; my translation). Thus, authority will look different in different contexts, with the authority of an SS-Führer being different from that of a member of Ângkar, which is different from that of a member of the Turkish Ittihad or a Hutu burgomaster (local leader). But in all these cases the nature of the relationship and the consequences for the situation are similar. Authority, while socially constructed, can also become institutionalized. When individuals enter an organization, they abstain from defining their precise tasks, but instead acquiesce to the use of their labor; thus, “a consequential zone of indifference emerges within which they cannot say no to the orders, requests, instructions and requirements of their superiors without fundamentally questioning membership in their organization” (Kühl 2014, 92; my translation). This can also occur outside of formal organizations in localities in which authoritative relations have been negotiated over time. For example, Józef Żyluk speaks of his recruitment ahead of the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne: “I was cutting hay, and the mayor of Jedwabne, Karolak, came to me in the meadow and said to go and bring all the Jews into the square. And so we both went” (referenced in Gross 2003, 76).

Welzer (2002) challenges the assumption that, in general, the “stronger” the authority, the more obedience one can expect. In Browning’s ([1994] 2001) iconic example of Police Reserve Battalion 101, Major Trapp tells his men of the massacres their unit has been commanded to commit in the village of Józefów and, surprisingly, gives those who do not feel up to the task the option to refuse; only about a dozen men come forward to refuse, while the rest of the six hundred men do not. This is conventionally interpreted as Major Trapp’s strong authority hindering the majority from wanting to refuse the order, even though being given explicit permission. However, Welzer postulates that it was possibly the precise nature of Trapp’s weak authority and his leaving open whether people had to participate that actually motivated people under his command to participate. Welzer’s (2002, 244) logic is that Trapp’s weak authority led his men to see that he was obviously troubled by the prospect, but that through his leading by example was showing that it would be manageable; furthermore, as a popular commander he was able to secure their loyalty by showing how difficult the situation was for him. This is a helpful example of how the agentic state arguments are less helpful, but that with a social-psychology-based approach to “engaged followership” we come to understand that most men saw Trapp’s vulnerability as part of the process of creating a social identity within the group. Stefan Kühl (2014, 171) goes further yet, arguing that Trapp’s distancing from his own order signaled not only that it was difficult for him, too, but also that there was no way for the battalion not to implement this assignment and that he needed the support of his subordinates; in this sense he fuses his authority with norms of comradeship (see also section 2.1.2).

It is important to emphasize that the obedience to authority described here is contingent on the mechanisms inherent in this authority, not on fear of the authority figure. When fear is involved, other motivations are more prominent, say coercion when the fear stems from the authority figure (see section 2.1.4).

Authority is a motivation that is particularly sensitive to the wider context in which it is exerted, given that people in authority often derive this authority from the state or certain institutions within the state (for more information on the contextual conditions mentioned here, see chapter 4). People demanding obedience can be expected to have higher degrees of authority in the context of a strong state given that there are already proscribed roles that may be filled with a tradition of authority; as long as the person can credibly frame the order to genocide as consistent with previous orders, this can be seen as “business as usual.” While in most genocides the authority of the government was relatively well established (e.g., the Nazi regime during the Holocaust or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), in other, less totalitarian systems, there was space for this authority to be contested. In Rwanda, for instance, there were conflicts between Hutu local elites in favor of the genocide and Hutu who were opposed. While many in opposition to the genocide were killed, these dynamics may have at least had an impact on how much authority local elites had at certain points of time.

Similarly, in cultural contexts with a relatively monolithic society, there may be little consciousness of alternative options in the absence of dissenting opinions or competing logics, making it more plausible to toe the line demanded by the authority. Moreover, in the context of genocide, uncertainty is commonplace, sometimes leading to insecurity or chaos, and it is only in the light of this contextual condition that participation can be understood (Fletcher 2007, 41). In such an uncertain context, “people cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavioural options” (Zimbardo 2008, 212) and can then plausibly turn to trusted authorities for guidance, allowing them to influence the framework of reference under which decisions about obedience to their commands are made.

While the dynamics of authority described here have been at an analytical level and thus comparable across different contexts, it is interesting to look at how certain genocide cases have culturally specific forms of authority. The underlying mechanisms remain the same, but are dressed in a different costume in different settings.

When talking about why people participated in the killing and violence of the regime in Cambodia, many former cadres of the Khmer Rouge referred first and foremost to the orders given to them (KR01B/C, KR03B, KR15A, KR18A, KR20A/B, KR22A, KR23A, KR24A, KR25A, KR29B, KR30B, KR31B, KR34A, KR41A/B, KR49B, KR50A).[8] In line with this, they hoped that this would absolve them of the responsibility for the consequences of their actions. My interviewees gave their impression of which groups were particularly easy to order, identifying the illiterate and uneducated people (KR01C, KR02B, KR24A) and young people of fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years of age (KR19A, KR49A) as likely to obey the orders of Ângkar. This is reinforced by what Miguel Pina e Cunha and his co-authors (2010, 295) describe as “a system of totalitarian control through terror” that commands “extreme obedience” to the authority of Ângkar. While implementation varied from region to region and local leaders had the capacity to vary in their violence, it is unlikely that this freedom was also granted to their enforcers, these young cadres.

In Cambodia, culturally specific forms of authority are also apparent (see also section 2.1.6 on status). Ângkar is a concept known to all in Cambodia and remains synonymous with absolute authority and the necessity for unwavering obedience. Literally, Ângkar means “the organization” but in interviews was commonly referred to as “the higher” or as “the higher leaders” (KR03B, KR09A, KR16B, KR30B, KR34A, KR49A, KR52A, KR53A, KR54B). The common understanding was that any higher-ranking person than oneself was called Ângkar, but that a person never thought of himself or herself as part of Ângkar. For example, a member of the commune chhlop, the militias of the Khmer Rouge, would refer to the commune chief as Ângkar, as he or she was a person of authority to this chhlop and was his or her superior in the hierarchy. The commune chief would refer to the district chief, who was his or her superior, as Ângkar but would not normally refer to himself or herself as Ângkar, even though this is the way the subordinates would see him or her. Ângkar is always someone higher up than oneself, never is one Ângkar. Ângkar thus had infinite power without oneself being part of Ângkar; one was only ever subject to this power, never the one exerting it.

This usage of the term Ângkar allowed people to displace the responsibility they had to a higher authority. The reach of Ângkar’s authority was so broad and deep that Ângkar was more than just an organization or a party. This is exemplified in one notebook written by a former Khmer Rouge, who, when speaking about Ângkar, referred constantly to the “party, revolution and people” (Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21497). It is interesting that the author sweepingly refers to party, revolution, and people as one triumvirate of institutions, as it indicates that he or she sees the internal cohesion of the party as integral to the success of the revolution and the ultimate well-being of the people. The almost supernatural status afforded to Ângkar is illustrated in the idea that it had “pineapple eyes” (KR02B), basically meaning that Ângkar had eyes everywhere (like the many “eyes” on a pineapple) and would thus see any mistake that a person made—a sort of “Khmer Rouge panopticon,” rendering all behavior and all thoughts subject to judgment by Ângkar (Hinton 2005, 132). In training manuals, Ângkar is referred to as “absolute,” and the necessity of absolutely unconditional obedience toward Ângkar is emphasized alongside the necessity “to love, respect and be honest unconditionally towards the party and the leadership of the party in any situation” (Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21509). As this renders Ângkar all the more authoritative and to a degree more infallible, it increases the onus on following its orders. This infallibility is exemplified well in the practice of arresting and torturing suspected enemies. Interrogations were conducted using torture until the interrogator received the desired answer, including a confession and a list of others in the individual’s string. For instance, if someone was accused of burning a rice field and denied it, it was assumed that this person was lying (KR54B). Torture would continue until the person admitted to whatever he or she had been accused of during interrogation and signed a confession. Ângkar was infallible, and it was inconceivable that someone suspected of being an enemy could be right and Ângkar be wrong. This mentality regarding the efficacy of torture is aptly summarized by this former interrogator: “The interrogation with the punishment also made some people tell the truth and some just answer in order to avoid the punishment. Some did answer properly but some answered this and that which was not true.… I could know because I was trained to interrogate them. So, I could understand who told the truth and who did not.… When the prisoners did not confess, we were obliged to torture them. If we did not do this, they did not answer” (KR30A). More broadly also, authority is rendered more salient in Cambodia as there is a highly risk-sensitive culture regarding resisting authority. People are even more unwilling to break out of authority-conforming behavioral patterns than in other contexts, as they are generally for non–socially conforming behavior, because of the significance of patronage networks for social and economic survival in the Cambodian context. Acting against patronage networks, in general, means losing all access to economic means and security.[9] Thus, also under the Khmer Rouge, people feared that if they did not act in accordance with their superior (who could be seen as a patron), they risked much.

During the genocide in Rwanda, the order to kill Tutsi fast “became a de facto basis for authority,” and “killing became akin to policy” (Straus 2006, 66)—in short, it became “the law” (93). Here it is also the strong state and previous traditions of community labor, called umuganda, that allow the new orders for genocide to be immediately perceived as coming through already existing authority structures (Straus 2006, 82; see also Tanner 2011, 270). This is underlined by the “deliberate effort to use the ‘customary’ as opposed to the ‘civic’ apparatus of the state” (Mamdani 2001, 193). Mamdani argues that the “relevant distinction between the two was that while ‘customary’ power highlighted the obligations of those indigenous to the land, civic power recognized the rights of all those resident on the land.… When it came to pressing ordinary people into a violent political campaign, it was not at all surprising that the génocidaire tendency decided on ‘customary’ power as the agency most suited to cleanse the community of threatening alien influences” (2001, 193–194).

This is not to say that there is a “culture of obedience” or something similar in Rwanda, but instead that practices of authority existed that could be reinterpreted for the genocide and that the genocidal ideology was able to establish itself as a law-like order (Straus 2006, 137).[10] The strong presence of the state at the local level due to its hierarchical and centralized yet extensive nature allowed it to be “meaningful and resonant in Rwandan society” (Straus 2006, 203); at many levels, the political administration “owed their status and power directly to the president, and could be expected to deliver the compliance over those whose lives they administered” (Brannigan 2013, 95). This perspective is underlined by a survey that shows that most actors saw the state as the most influential actor in their lives (McDoom 2008, 265), giving credibility to the authorities ordering genocide and facilitating individual obedience. Luke Fletcher (2007, 38) argues that “authority during the genocide belonged to anyone who sought to seize it,” primarily through control of interahamwe, and thus the means of violent coercion, in a context of strong uncertainty. I argue, however, that while the authority is distributed depending on control of such youth militias, they all appeal to a genocidal ideology within the context of the Rwandan state, and thus refer to “higher” levels of authority, into which they embed themselves.

Also, in the course of the Armenian genocide, the Committee of Union and Progress co-opted the Ottoman state for its exterminatory purposes, so that orders were given to perpetrators in the context of official state structures, furnishing them with legitimacy. Some actions were supervised outside the realm of official authority (Dadrian and Akçam 2011, 291), yet these actors were able to assert their authority situationally. This was exacerbated by the issuing of decrees that were not very precise and left space for varying interpretations (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 104) and with this expanding the salience of authoritative interpretation for individuals to know how to act.

In conclusion, obedience to authority provides a first motivation for participating in genocide. It is the motivation most commonly referred to by perpetrators themselves, as it gives the semblance of reducing their own responsibility. Building on Milgram’s (1975) experiments, Haslam and Reicher (2012a) argue that people are obedient because they share a social identity and become engaged followers. As such, people will be very likely to participate in genocide when they are ordered to by a superior, and this has been seen across the empirical cases.

2.1.2 Conformity

While most people who participate in genocide will initially invoke obedience to authority to explain their actions, in some of the case studies, people have admitted to acting under the perceived pressure of the group (e.g., Browning [1994] 2001, 174). Conformity is defined here, following Robert Cialdini and Noah Goldstein (2004, 606), as “the act of changing one’s behavior to match the responses of others.” The reason for changing one’s behavior is simply that one wants to avoid certain costs such as the negative repercussions of violating bonds of loyalty and trust to friends or comrades;[11] this is particularly salient, as the consequences of acting in a nonconforming fashion may not be temporary but can be permanently negative (Welzer 2002, 246). A thought underlying this mechanism is that “if we engage in behaviors of which others approve, others will approve of us, too,” and thus improve our social standing and retain good relations with peers (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, 598). Criminological work has shown the importance of the fear of being ridiculed or the desire to be loyal to the group (or to be perceived as such) as the main motivators to adhere to the expectations of one’s peers, particularly among young people (Warr 2002, 46, 50).

A theoretical differentiation that is important in the context of conformity is the potential divergence of action and belief. Individuals can conform to their peer groups in both action and belief, thus accepting the group norms for themselves (or what they believe to be the group norms) and also acting on these, what Jens Rydgren (2009) terms internalization. On the other hand, an individual may not accept the group norms but nonetheless conform in action—compliance (Rydgren 2009, 85; see also Schelling 2004, 45; Warr 2002, 6). Theoretically there is also the possibility that someone conforms in belief but not action, which would be interesting from a perspective of studying conformity, but is less interesting here because we are looking to explain conformity of action and are looking at the motivations for participation (that is, for action).

Goldhagen (1996) claims that a majority of German policemen, soldiers, and other functionaries must have been in favor of exterminating the Jews, otherwise the other people could not have conformed to this opinion. Ironically, however, conformity does not necessitate that the other members of the group be avid participants who are raring to go. It just requires the individual under consideration to believe that the other members of the group want to participate, whether or not this is the case. This builds on the importance of the subjective understanding of a perpetrator perspective, as discussed in section 1.3. To a certain degree, the individual will then assume either that the others want him or her to join in also or that he or she will suffer some form of social exclusion if he or she does not. Again, this may be a misled belief, but as long as the individual believes it, it becomes true in its consequences and the individual has a motivation for participating in genocide. This can theoretically lead to a situation in which no one wants to participate, but all group members believe that most of the other group members want to participate, and thus feel the pressure to conform to their group—and in the end everyone participates. This form of mass subjective misperception of the objective distribution of attitudes is called pluralistic ignorance (Newman 2002, 60; 2006, 114).

The most striking example of the power that one’s peers can have on one is provided by some extensions of the Milgram experiment itself. While under the standard experimental design the rate of obedience was 65 percent, this rate of compliance with the experimenter’s orders could be made to vary from between 10 percent and 90 percent depending on what aspects of the social situation were introduced into the experiment design. The highest rates of compliance were achieved if the participant was part of a teaching team with two confederates obeying the experimenter’s orders, leading to virtually all participants also complying. The lowest rates were recorded also in the context of a teaching team, but this time with the confederates rebelling against the experimenter’s instructions (Milgram 1975; for diverging results in a replication, see Burger 2009, 10). These changes to the experiment design impressively show not only the incredible importance of social situations but more importantly how other people’s actions decidedly influence the action undertaken by individuals. The series of Milgram experiments does not undermine the power of obedience to authority, as this does still work in contexts of isolation, but it does show that a much more important factor (at least in the laboratory) is conformity to peers.[12] Roth (2004) sees these results as undermining Zygmunt Bauman (1989), who claims that it is the absence of conformity pressures that makes defiance of authority likely. Roth is correct in claiming that it is the presence of these confederates that radically raises or lowers the chance of someone participating, depending on the actions of the others.

These research findings have been supported broadly and expanded in a range of other social-psychological experiments. In a series of experiments that actually predate Milgram’s and was conducted by Milgram’s mentor Solomon Asch (1956), a participant was placed in a group of seven to nine confederates and asked to evaluate the relative length of three lines, whereby the correct answer was immediately obvious to the participant. While participants would answer correctly when the confederates gave the right answer, if the confederates unanimously gave the wrong answer, about one-third of participants’ responses became distorted toward the erroneous majority response. However, a range of reactions became visible: while 24 percent of participants gave errorless responses (to the twelve erroneous majority responses), a similar amount (27%) answered incorrectly between eight and twelve times, while the remaining half of participants concurred with between one and seven obviously wrong answers; furthermore, the pressure of the majority did not increase over time (Asch 1956). If for many participants there exists an intrinsic pressure to conform with one’s peers—whom, in the case of this experiment, the participants had only just met—there is certainly potential for long-term processes, which sustainably induce conformity, to set in when we are talking about these long-term relationships and group identification. However, when tweaking the experimental design a little, different results emerged: if just one of the confederates broke ranks and offered the correct answer, this “peer support” reduced the rate of wrong answers by participants to a quarter of what they had been (Zimbardo 2008, 264). What this experiment leaves open, however, is whether the mechanism behind the conformity is motivated by a desire to be socially approved by one’s peer group (normative conformity) or whether the participants were relying on their peers for information on the correct answer (informational conformity). Informational conformity occurs when an individual has the desire to act correctly and orientates himself or herself according to peers’ interpretation of reality as perceived by the individual. Normative conformity, on the other hand, is a change in action with the ultimate goal of gaining social approval from peers and is “operative when we conform so that we will be liked and accepted by other people” (Waller 2002, 218–219; for a general discussion of this differentiation, see Cialdini and Goldstein 2004). While both types of conformity are analytically distinct, they, of course, also interact with each other and are in many cases interrelated empirically (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, 606).

Experimental research by Muzafer Sherif (1935) shows that decisions or judgments reached by people within groups differ from those reached by people individually. Sherif’s design had people in a dark room look at a stationary spot of light around five meters away, which due to the lack of reference points appears to move (what physicists call the “autokinetic effect”). The participants were then asked to estimate the degree of movement of the light. One setup had participants first make a series of individual estimations before coming together as a group and making an estimate, while a second setup had participants first estimate in the group and then individually. The first setup saw individual estimations stabilize at different personal levels, and then in the group the estimations bit by bit converged around a group norm; the second setup saw the groups immediately create a group norm, which was then maintained by the participants in their individual estimations. This experiment demonstrates how a judgment or norm that is developed in the context of a group can continue to influence individual decision-making processes even beyond the group setting.

These findings are complemented by experimental results by Serge Moscovici (1976; see also Moscovici and Zavalloni 1969; Nemeth 2012), which show that a minority that is made up consistently of the same people and that consistently dissents over time can persuade individuals to give wrong answers, even if the majority answers correctly and the obvious answer is correct, albeit at a much lower level and only over time.[13] This research suggests a type of normative conformity, given the low informational usefulness of the dissenting minority, meaning that it is compliance rather than actual conversion. Research by Diane Mackie (1987), on the other hand, also proscribes an influential role to minorities in her objective consensus approach. This research suggests that minority influence affects a type of informational conformity, given that normative conformity cannot be acting as it is only a dissenting minority and thus agreeing with the minority will not bring social acceptance; thus, when a participant agrees with the dissenting minority, this will not be compliance but rather internalization and conversion of the minority opinion (for more discussion, see Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, 607). This debate is not directly relevant for the motivations of individual participation in genocide, but it is important when considering what influence bystanders or resisters can have on people’s perception of how feasible it is to avoid participation.

More recently, Lindsey Levitan and Brad Verhulst (2016) have conducted experiments that expand on the findings that people conform to the attitudes and behaviors of those around them, but also that this change in attitude persists for the individual even privately outside the group for weeks and months after the initial act of conformity. This means that even a short interaction with others—the experiment was with strangers, one could posit all the more with friends and comrades—suffices to sustainably change attitudes. Thus, people can then act according to these changed attitudes. This helps us understand not just the first act of participation but rather continued participation, as acting in conformity with others even once changes the individual’s attitudes toward this issue.

Besides this wealth of instructive insight gained by social-psychological experiments, there is impressive case study evidence of the pressure to conform within a group. For example, in Moldovan popular participation in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, some stated that they were “ ‘led by the example’ of other peasants in committing their crimes,” particularly as the violence was performed in groups (Dumitru 2014, 156). A different prominent example in the context of the Holocaust is presented in Browning’s ([1994] 2001) seminal work on the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The policemen who participated sometimes stated that they did not want to leave “the dirty work” to their comrades (Browning [1994] 2001, 184; see also Chirot and McCauley 2006, 57). This does not suggest conformity but solidarity with other group members. However, the logic is deeper, and when discussing nonparticipation, Browning indicates that not conforming with the group action of killing Jews could be interpreted by participating policemen as a “moral reproach of one’s comrades: the nonshooter was potentially indicating that he was ‘too good’ to do such things.” In this vein, most nonperpetrators tried to frame themselves not as “too good” but as “too weak,” thus legitimizing and not challenging their comrades’ “toughness.” Between 80 and 90 percent of the men “proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing.” It was easier to kill the waiting Jews than to go against the group of friends and comrades (Browning [1994] 2001, 184–185), particularly if the men saw the “murderous praxis” as a consensus within the group, as Karin Orth (2002, 105) describes for concentration camps. At the same time, individuals in the various units did not want to be seen as cowards and be exposed as such in front of everyone else (Kühl 2014, 148).

A similar dynamic is offered by Eric Haberer (2001, 399), who suggests that “conformity was an essential element of cohesion and coercion in the life of a Gendarmerie post” and that this was reinforced by the principle of Pflichterfüllung, “the moral obligation of loyalty, comradeship, and discipline.” These bonds of comradeship are especially strong in the context of military or quasi-military groups, which—in long processes of training—have replaced personal identities with identities as “cogs in the military machine” (Alvarez 2001, 93). This idea of loyalty can also function at a higher level of identification beyond the tight bonds of comradeship, as is shown in participation in the Holocaust in Romania, where “killing Jews was tantamount to proving one’s own loyalty to the state, one’s own worth as a ‘good Romanian’ ” (Solonari 2014, 75). Outside of the context of genocide, it has been shown that the major motivation for soldiers to fight is often not the desire for personal survival but a feeling of obligation toward one’s comrades (Grossman 2004, 62); also, what others think of an individual becomes so important that the individual may come to prefer to kill than to desert his comrades (64). Moreover, conformity with the group can provide one with legitimacy for killing others, as Arendt’s account of Eichmann reports that “the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution” ([1963] 1994, 103).

Moreover, in Rwanda, social ties provide one of the key explanations of people participating in the genocide. First, it was only through the social ties in the group that people could make sense of a “highly volatile and threatening situation” (Fujii 2009, 154), and thus conformity occurred cognitively in how the situation was perceived. Then the social dynamics within local friendship groups worked in several different ways: “Prior ties shaped how people saw and reacted to their situation. In certain circumstances, they enabled Joiners to continue to see Tutsi as friends, not targets, and some Hutu as targets, not friends. Ties also served as mechanisms for recruitment and initiation into the violence, binding Joiners to leaders and their killing groups in powerful ways. Once initiated, Joiners continued their participation because killing in large groups conferred powerful identity on these actors, which led the groups to reenact the violent practices that were consistent with the group’s identity” (Fujii 2009, 19).

Group ties in the Rwandan context created targets, making joiners vulnerable to suspicions and thus pulling them hesitantly into the group. While ties of friendship were still important, which ties were most salient depended on context. In front of leaders and other killers, group ties prevailed and joiners would go along with their participation; but in the absence of the group, joiners could act on ties of friendship, helping Tutsi (Fujii 2009, 128). This group identity was maintained only in the group—outside the group context no one individually sought out Tutsi and killed them; quite the opposite, sometimes people even helped and saved Tutsi when they were outside the group (Fujii 2009, 177).

In Cambodia, the dynamics within the perpetrator group were less pronounced than in other cases. Several interviewees refer to the “duty” that people had within society at the time, and that killing was just their duty (KR11B, KR50A), as is also described in the vignette on Sokphary. Even more abstractly, a former bodyguard and messenger for the chief of the security center states that “society ordered them to do it. They did not have any personal arguments with those prisoners, but nonetheless they took those prisoners to be killed. So, what was it about? To me, I think it was because of society during that time” (KR12A); in this, however, society and the regime are seen as one and the same. Beyond this, there is a sense of inevitability to this duty in some testimonies, particularly in that everyone participated in the regime and the assignments given to them and that refusal was not an option for anyone, and also not for people assigned to kill (KR15A, KR20A, KR54A).

Seldom did former Khmer Rouge cadres speak of social dynamics within the perpetrator group as a factor for why people participated in genocide. Here, we see neither the camaraderie of groups of comrades with ties forged through a shared time of common service (Browning [1994] 2001), nor the bonds of longtime friendships and mobilization into perpetration through strong social ties (Fujii 2009; McDoom 2013; 2014a) as was seen as prevalent in the Holocaust and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. This is due to several factors. To begin with, the cadres seldom knew each other before being assigned to a unit, because even if people were recruited or volunteered together, most often they were assigned to different units immediately or after their initial training (among many others KR03A, KR19A, KR30A). Thereafter, in the regular reassignments to new units, people were almost always reassigned on their own, repeatedly thrown into new social constellations (KR03A). People were often placed in units in areas other than where they came from, increasing the feeling of social isolation vis-à-vis the other comrades and also toward the context the individual was in, exemplified in the following quote: “In the revolutionary theory [propaganda] they tried to use the word ‘people’s solidarity’ but in fact they tried to make people hate each other and investigate each other, for example one unit can criticize another unit—if they work close to each other and can hear each other talking they can report on those mistakes, too” (KR51B).[14] Thus, there were no prior social bonds through which peer pressure or the effects of conformity could flow. Furthermore, there was a strong element of distrust between all cadres that inhibited the formation of social ties (KR09A, KR22A, KR26A, KR31B). This constant fear of others and the resultant distrust is exemplified in the following statement by a former guard at S-21, who stated 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” (KR22A). This distrust stemmed from people constantly fearing that their comrades could suspect them of being enemies, mistakes they made could be noticed and denounced. In this climate of fear, people said that they barely spoke to others above and beyond the work that had to be done. People did not talk about the system, their worries, or their feelings, but kept very much to themselves. This distrust was not just at the individual level but also between various units, each trying to get ahead. In this climate of social isolation, thus the powers of conformity take a back seat in terms of motivating people to participate.

The many other examples demonstrate that the power of striving for conformity works across many kinds of groups, be it a group of friends who have known each other for years, a group of highly trained soldiers who have gone through similar professional socialization or have strong bonds of comradeship (see Kühl 2014, 161), or a group of people arbitrarily thrown together but with an identity assigned to them. While the dynamics can be seen across various groups, the desire for conformity within a group will be particularly strong when it is rooted in a strong social identity, as this will provide an incentive to want to identify with the group with whom one shares such a strong identity (normative conformity) or to trust the others in the group and what they say and do (informational conformity). Not only can a strong social identity with other members of the group lead to higher propensity for conformity, but—at least regarding informational conformity—the effects of peers’ actions have a significant impact on individuals’ action, increasingly so in social situations that are new to the individual in a context of uncertainty, one of the contextual conditions to be discussed later in this book.

It is important to note here that conformity to a group is not the same as bowing to peer pressure. In the latter, a group is actively attempting to make the individual participate in genocide (see section 2.1.3), whereas in the former it is a much subtler mechanism in which the pressure or the motivation to change behavior originates in the individual. Conformity means that an individual will psychologically want to or feel the need to be in line with his or her group, by either the informational or normative mechanism, and thus acts in ways that he or she would not act if alone. This desire to be in conformity with one’s peer group provides a central motivation for people to participate in genocide, the motivation to “keep up” with one’s group.

Also, conformity must be differentiated from the concept of authority, as discussed in the previous section. These approaches have similarities in that they attempt to abdicate responsibility to an external actor—in one case, the order giver; in the other, the group of which one is a part and with whom one wants to conform. The key difference is that with obedience to authority, the agreement in norms is explicit, while it is only implicit when agreeing with a group (Roth 2004, 218). Furthermore, obedience to authority is highly valued in the military and police contexts, which many people are situated in when they perpetrate, while conformity with the group can be culturally demanded (in group-centric cultures such as Cambodia) or critiqued (in more individualistic societies). Thus, I suggest that the main difference, and why people are less likely to cite conformity with a group than obedience to authority as an explanation for having participated, is that obedience appears to absolve one from (or at least diminish one’s) responsibility for the actions one has undertaken.

Conformity motivates people to participate in genocide as these individuals internalize or comply by norms of the group as they believe them to be, in order that they not be excluded from these social ties. This idea of keeping up with the crowd, being a good comrade, and acting within social ties is pivotal to understanding the social dynamics in most genocidal groups and thus the situations within which people participate.

2.1.3 Peer Pressure

A similar rationale underlies the motivation of peer pressure, a motivation for participating in genocide that is distinct from conformity, as it works through external pressure exerted on individuals by a peer group, while conformity is intrinsic and makes an individual feel that he or she should participate with the group, even if no one in the group has demonstrated any overt pressure. This differentiation, which is analytically important, is not always made in the literature, so the terms “peer pressure” and “conformity” are sometimes used interchangeably, making a review of the literature more difficult. The main difference is that the pressure comes from different sources that are connected to different incentives and fears should one not comply.

The concept of peer pressure is often discussed as a “horizontal equivalent” of obedience to authority (see, for example, Sémelin 2005a, 257). A key similarity is that the prompt to participate in genocide can in both cases be given explicitly, either as an order by an authority or as demands and comments by individuals from the peer group. This is different from conformity, in which the person builds all the pressure up from within themselves. However, the dynamics behind the mechanism of peer pressure also diverge from those behind obedience to authority regarding the reasons for bowing to the pressure. The idea behind obedience is that people obey because they believe in the legitimacy of the authority and identify with the order. Within the group, on the other hand, it is much more likely that the mechanism is connected to the putative costs involved with noninvolvement, primarily the social costs; that is, people participate because they fear long-term social repercussions, such as being excluded from the group. Nonetheless, physical attack (or threat thereof) or monetary fines are also possible sanctioning options beyond social exclusion (McDoom 2008, 265; for more on this, see section 2.1.4).

These findings are echoed in the study of terrorist pathways, in which the effect of small group pressure on individuals to participate is one of the key motivations for not only remaining in a terrorist group but also actually committing the terrorist acts, particularly as in small groups it is especially easy to sanction deviant behavior (McCauley and Moskalenko 2008, 417). Again, fear of being ridiculed and the desire to be loyal to the group (or to be perceived as such) are helpful suggestions by criminologists as to why young people in particular bow to peer pressure (Warr 2002, 46, 50).

Empirically, there is much support for the notion that peer pressure was leveled against individuals to participate, particularly in Rwanda. Straus (2006) reports that over 64 percent of his respondents cited ingroup pressure as a motivation for genocide participation, and this is supported by other authors studying perpetrators in Rwanda (Fletcher 2007, 33; Fujii 2009; Jessee 2017; McDoom 2008, 265) and Bosnia (Bašić 2006, 159). As the days were strictly organized and people were in their peer groups the entire day during the genocide in Rwanda (Hatzfeld 2004a, 25), this exacerbated the opportunities for peer pressure to be exerted. A further example of the implementation of peer pressure can be seen in ideological radicals or people with opportunistic motivations for participating, who in turn pressure others to join in (for the Holocaust, see Haberer 2001, 401). The advantage of widening the radius of perpetrators is to spread the complicity for the committed crimes more broadly in the surrounding locality; equally, people could be brought into complicity by including them in the distribution of looted goods (Sells 1998, 74).

2.1.4 Coercion

According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries (2020), coercion is defined as “the action of making somebody do something that they do not want to do, using force or threatening to use force” and can present a simple solution to the free-rider problem, “encouraging” people to participate without direct benefits for themselves (Humphreys and Weinstein 2008, 442). Thus, coercion differs from conformity, where peers are followed without any input whatsoever from them. It also differs from obedience to authority or bowing to peer pressure; while both are, like coercion, dependent on an external impetus, actions resulting from obedience and peer pressure are still voluntary, whereas with coercion individuals act out of fear of the possible repercussions for nonparticipation. The essence of coercion is thus the threat made toward individuals in order to force them to participate. The threat of violence that coercion transmits is a form of power that can lead to permanent submission for fear of the enacting of threats (Popitz 1986, 73).

Nonetheless, the borders between coercion and obedience and between coercion and peer pressure are not clearly demarcated. Coercion is a factor that perpetrators commonly cite, explaining their impetus for participation as a decision made without a choice. This perceived lack of agency is more than just the fact of living under a totalitarian system (Jäger [1967] 1982, 83), as it must be rooted firmly in the situation in which a person finds himself or herself. Judicially, for someone to be able to plead superior orders (Befehlsnotstand), as obedience to an order with no possible escape due to coercion, it is necessary to consider the external danger to the perpetrator (as well as the subjective perception of an extreme danger), their own behavior, their motivation, their blame, and the possibility of escaping the order (Jäger [1967] 1982, 84–93). When coercion is present we can speak of constrained agency of the individual. Thus, even when people are part of this coercive system, they can still have their agency constrained by it (Clegg et al. 2013, 327; see also Baines 2009; Williams 2018a). However, within most organizations, not all action is determined and there are spaces for agency and individual decision-making, as it is normally quite hard for an organization to function over time if one does not allow a degree of agency (Kühl 2014, 146). This can also have an ethical component, as argued by Monroe (2011), in that various individuals’ ethical frameworks provide for a perception of not having any other choice (in terms of rescuing, bystanding, and perpetrating), drawing from their self-perceptions of their own identities.

Empirically, the role of coercion receives mixed evaluations. The starkest example of coercion can be found in Cambodia, where coercion worked because of a diffuse feeling of anxiety (see section 2.2.2 on emotions) in which everyone was terrified that the system could turn against them, making fear “endemic” (Clegg et al. 2013, 336) and rendering people obedient to the orders of their superiors for fear of the consequences of noncompliance. The degree of anxiety and fear is captured well in a quote by an S-21 guard named Him Huy: “I dream that my boss, Hor, is screaming at me and accusing me of making mistakes. I am afraid of Hor. I am afraid even to look in his face. I think of Hor as a tiger. Hor was also afraid of Duch” (quoted in Ea and Sim 2001). This quote shows well how fear was transported down the hierarchy from one level to another and how coercion worked well through the threat of declaring someone an enemy. The saying “No gain for keeping, no loss for weeding out” (e.g., KR49A) was common throughout my interviews and demonstrates the ease with which individuals would be discarded if they were seen as a hindrance or no longer useful, making the fears tied to coercion very real.

Given the absolute authority and respect demanded by Ângkar and its human manifestations in the form of one’s superiors (see 2.1.1), it becomes understandable why people felt they had to obey the orders. However, this obedience to Ângkar’s authority is only one side of the story, as it was most often compounded with the very real and credible threat of violence; these consequences, which there could be for noncompliance with the orders, are discussed briefly in the vignette on Sokong. Most prominently, former cadres of the Khmer Rouge said that if people did not obey the rules to kill, then they would be killed (KR01A, KR02B, KR09A, KR20B, KR24A, KR27A, KR31B, KR34A, KR41A, KR49B, KR50A, KR54A), or that they were “fearful for their security” (KR03B, KR19A, KR23A, KR49B, KR53A), meaning that they believed they would be killed. A prototypical statement in this context reads: “But it was the order from the higher and if they did not do it, they were also killed. Therefore, whether they wanted to do it or not, they had to do it. They just followed the order. Some people did not want to do it and some people did not dare to do it” (KR20B) or “For example, they were ordered to kill that person, if they did not kill, they would be killed, too. So, for their safety, they had to kill.… So, they did not want to kill but they were ordered to do it” (KR49B). The extent of the consequences is illustrated by the following statement by a former Khmer Rouge at a security center: “I could not refuse. If we refused, they would say: ‘Anyone who is against Ângkar, they are the enemies of Ângkar and the cycle of history will roll over them’ ” (KR15A). The true gravitas of this inevitable participation is shown by one former collective committee member, who asks, “If we did not follow, where could we go to? Where could we escape to?” (KR20A).

Given this reasonable and widespread assumption that one would be killed for refusing to obey orders to kill, there were a variety of other ways in which people referred to the possible consequences of refusal, including the danger of being accused of being an enemy (KR08A, KR15A, KR18A, KR31B) or even a “traitor of Ângkar” (KR03B, KR34A). A further accusation against people hesitant to kill was that they were not prepared to “cut off their heart” to the enemy (KR15A, KR22A, KR34A, KR55A), insinuating that they were not fully committed to the revolution and thus automatically enemies of it.

In the Ottoman Empire, soldiers who refused to participate in the deportation of the Armenians were shot, providing high credibility to threats of coercion addressed to others (Mann 2005, 164). In Rwanda also, there were many reports of the importance of intra-Hutu coercion, forcing Hutu to participate on pain of death, sometimes by peers, sometimes by groups of young men (Bhavnani 2006, 657; Fletcher 2007, 32; Hatzfeld 2004b, 130; Straus 2006, 140). One woman spoke of her refusal to participate: “When they told us to kill, many people refused. I was one of those who refused. They beat me up so badly with rifle butts that the baby I was carrying on my back, a two-month-old girl, died” (quoted in Smeulers 2015, 247). The topography and demography of the Rwandan countryside reinforced any threats made in acts of coercion, as the undulating hills and the high population density significantly increased the visibility of the population, enhancing the capacity for surveillance and thus reducing any opportunity for escape or avoidance, not just for the victims but also for any renegade potential perpetrators. These conditions lent a higher credibility to any threats of coercion rendered against individuals, and made enforcement of the necessary punishments simpler (Straus 2006, 215). Individuals were confronted either at home or in public spaces such as roads or commercial centers and were faced with the implicit or explicit choice between being punished (oftentimes by death) and participating. Several took these threats to be credible and participated (Straus 2006, 122); sometimes the credibility of threats was increased by beating someone until they participated (136).

There are nonetheless limits to explaining participation in Rwanda through coercion: not all participants claim to have witnessed such intra-Hutu coercion regarding recruitment during the genocide, although all were aware of rumors that people were beaten or killed for refusing to participate (Hatzfeld 2004a, 80). In this vein, a good deal of intra-Hutu violence may be explained by the eliminations of politically more liberal elites by radicals, not primarily through killing conscientious objectors (with the exception of refusals coming from men who were married to Tutsi women or those hiding Tutsi) (Hatzfeld 2004a, 242). Further, anyone going along to the killing sprees would be safe from violence, no matter how hesitatingly they raised their machetes, and so many were able to just tag along and not kill anyone (Hatzfeld 2004a, 243). Finally, Fujii (2009, 166) asks, “Why is there not more evidence of people hiding, shirking, or finding ways out of participating when they could[?]” Exit options, while limited, did exist; this lack of avoidance attempts undermines the centrality of coercion in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The case of coerced participation in the Holocaust is intriguing. Holocaust perpetrators who saw the alternatives to nonperpetration only as immediate execution or incarceration in a concentration camp (Browning [1994] 2001, 170) could be argued to have been credibly coerced into participation. However, this rationalization is empirically extremely shaky given that not one “of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment” (Browning [1994] 2001, 170; see also Jäger [1967] 1982, 120; for current confirmation see Kühl 2014, 123). Nevertheless, it is quite plausible that the men in the situations at the time did not realize that there would not be fatal consequences for their refusal to participate. Thus, they could be said to have acted under “putative duress”—that is, credible but false pretenses, believing there was no alternative (Browning [1994] 2001, 170). While this is certainly plausible in many cases, particularly for non-German auxiliary troops (Haberer 2001, 401), it is not in several situations, such as Browning’s ([1994] 2001, 171) study, in which Major Trapp explicitly opened exit options for his men by stating that no one need participate should they not want to. Furthermore, other adverse consequences of nonadherence to orders could have appeared drastic enough to participate, such as being shamed for this behavior or being reassigned to more difficult tasks on the Eastern front.

Stefan Kühl (2014, 128) points out that the coercive instruments used to motivate people to join an organization are independent of those that prevent people from leaving the organization. This is an extremely important point given that in two of the three cases under close scrutiny here, the Holocaust and Cambodia, the perpetrators were not recruited specifically for their genocidal tasks but were assigned these tasks within positions that were originally designed as something else, such as the reserve policemen in Poland, or they were moved into the positions associated with violence after several other positions within the organization, as was the case for most cadres under the Khmer Rouge. Thus, many actually joined these organizations voluntarily—for example, many of the policemen during the Holocaust, hoping to avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht (Kühl 2014, 129), or young people joining the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to return Sihanouk to power. In principle, if someone refuses an order to participate, this should lead to a full use of internal enforcement and punishment, which can be quite costly for the organization in terms of having the mechanisms for this (including courts, prisons, etc.) and also for the dynamics within the group. Thus, coercive organizations can apply alternative strategies to avoid using these forms of sanctioning by allowing certain freedoms, such as the possibility to let oneself be excused from participation, calls for volunteers, or a decision on which tasks one wants to take on; these freedoms are negotiated between superiors and subordinates in a decentralized way, leading to different amounts of freedom in different units (Kühl 2014, 135). The deal appears to be that individuals accept the formal rules and argue their refusal to participate along lines that do not undermine the formal organizational order or its legitimacy (such as appealing to one’s own conscience, claiming to be ill, or referencing own personal weakness) and do not explain it through pity, sympathy, or even liking for the victim group (Kühl 2014, 138–140). Even in settings in which these freedoms did not exist formally, superiors could—in order to keep their organization running—turn a blind eye not only to people avoiding participation but also to people using gratuitous, brutal violence that was equally not within the formally allowed constraints (Kühl 2014, 137). This is helpful for understanding the leeway possible in the Holocaust, in which the leadership had an interest in maintaining good relations within the organizations, and it is precisely the lack of concern for internal cohesion and group dynamics within the Khmer Rouge and the omnipresent fear of being accused of being an enemy that meant that execution was a real option here.

Coercion takes the social influence of conformity, peer pressure, and obedience to authority one step further and laces the horizontal and vertical influence with threats. It is the fear of the possibly violent consequences of nonparticipation that then motivates people driven by this factor to participate in genocide. In the end it does not matter whether this threat of coercion is credible, as long as the perpetrator himself or herself believes it to be realistic. The degree of actual coercion varies strongly among the cases, but did play an important role across the board. What coercion cannot explain is excessive violence and unnecessarily brutal behavior, as a coerced person has no incentives for going beyond the enforced minimum (see Hatzfeld 2004a, 136; Jäger [1967] 1982, 158); for people exhibiting such passion, other motivations must be considered.

2.1.5 Roles and Doubling

Moving from social influence of various types within the group, we come to another type of ingroup-focused motivation, which has individuals assuming alternative roles that are genocidal. By conforming to a new set of norms associated with this role, they become motivated to participate in genocide. The logic behind this motivation rests on an individual taking on a role provided by the social situation and the social relations he or she is embedded in within the perpetrator ingroup and then changing to conform to this role in ways that are not predictable from dispositions before taking on the role. This transformation is particularly effective when the individual internalizes the values and beliefs of a role. The role then “shuts off the traditional morality and values that govern their lives when they are in ‘normal mode’ ” (Zimbardo 2008, 214). In this way a person can commit actions that for that person would previously have been unthinkable. This transformation is then reinforced by the action one commits, because “when one performs the behaviours appropriate for a given role, there is a merger of role and person in which one often acquires the attitudes, beliefs, values, and morals consonant with that role and its behaviours” (Waller 2002, 221). This would suggest that the manifestation of the role occurs not only by being assigned it but also by accepting this assignment and by reinforcing it through performing the acts expected of this role in a genocidal context.

A helpful way to think of such roles is in terms of genocidal scripts, as proposed by Fujii (2009, 11–19) and discussed in the introduction of this book. Fujii suggests that something like a genocidal script exists at a national level, which constructs “state-sponsored ethnicity” and is then performed at the local level with local leaders acting as “directors” of the script and participants as “actors.” In this sense, individuals take on a role and become perpetrators in the genocidal performance. As in a theatrical production, the actor does not actually become someone else but can slip into the role and has significant freedom in how to interpret the role and how to play it precisely. This is significant as it gives the perpetrator a degree of agency and allows us to understand how some people fill this role differently than others. Taking on this scripted role can look something like this: “When we joined [the Khmer Rouge] it was like we were entering into a tiger zone, so we had to be a tiger like them.… So we needed to be a tiger like them, to be cruel like them. No morality like them. That’s why they were like that.… If we did not work well, they might kill us. So, we had to be immoral like them, cruel like them. Whatever was ordered needed to be completed” (KR03A). This quote, with its vivid metaphor of entering a tiger zone, is a striking description of the feelings a young man (who is profiled in the vignette on Chandara) had when joining the Khmer Rouge and learning what would be expected of him as a new member of the chhlop. It touches not only on how he felt about his surroundings and the new context he was entering, but also on what this meant for him and for his own identity. He believed that it meant that he had to become a tiger like them, and by taking on this new identity, he also had to become cruel like them, surrendering his previous morality before entering the zone. The quote is certainly one of the more striking to be found in my interviews, but one former chief of a hard labor site also said that “as a boxer he must fight in the ring” (KR02A), again evocatively describing the adoption of a role. Other former cadres also speak about the duties that people had as members of a certain specific unit with all the idiosyncrasies of this specific system (KR55A). Others speak of the specific duties that certain units have (KR03C, KR29B), implying that members of that group must take on a certain identity in order to conform to those duties. For example, for a unit of chhlop, the same interviewee said: “And their duty was to ‘clean.’ They were used to the killing, detaining, interrogating, torturing, and giving no food to people as their duties and Ângkar assigned them to do so. The cadres reported to those who held weapons [the chhlop] and they took the people to be killed” (KR03C).

While it is unlikely that all cadres identified with their roles as strongly as these examples, these quotes highlight that some people did develop a clear picture of what taking on a certain role would entail and realized that they would have to take on this role with all the behavioral expectations, as well as attitudinal and norm shifts associated with that. Morality had to change (norms), they had to become cruel (attitudinal and behavioral), and they had to become a tiger. This is more than just taking on new tasks but is constituted by the acceptance of a new role and a new identity to fill that role. Here, socialization processes in the group can be key, as discussed in the literature on how conscripted members of rebel groups come to voluntarily stay in the groups (Gates 2017).

During the Holocaust, few “perpetrators [who] reported for police or military duty, … already had the cognitive makeup of the genocidal killers they became” (Newman 2002, 52–53); instead, they came to the front and were asked to perform within a certain role specification, to be soldiers, to be policemen. Further, the people participating are not normally called on to kill because of who they are individually but because of the role in which they are present there: “Participants in genocide become murderers because they work in a job that requires them to assist in exterminating a group of people” (Alvarez 2001, 90). This is particularly true for participants in the highly structured but relatively less visible Holocaust, and also in such cases as Bosnia or Cambodia, in which paramilitaries or the Khmer Rouge cadres, respectively, were in charge of killing, with individuals killing only in these contexts. On the other hand, in Rwanda there is strong evidence for the important role of the interahamwe; but in most regions, members of the general public were also called on to participate in killing sprees.

In these cases, in which people kill because of expectations that are put toward their roles, a strong state with clear designations of role expectations can certainly exacerbate the dynamics of role identification (Alvarez 2001, 90). This is particularly strong within organizational roles that allow members of the organization to present certain actions within this role as “impersonal” (Kühl 2014, 227). It is especially important if the organization does not expect the person to identify with the action, and the distance created through the role allows the consequences of this action not to be seen as associated with the individual himself or herself (Kühl 2014, 232). For example, when joining the police, an individual is conditioned into a role in which violence in certain defined situations becomes not just allowed but one’s duty (Kühl 2014, 262); an individual who does not fulfill this act of violence when the conditioned impulse is given is making a mistake from the perspective of the organization (284). In this setting, the organization then need only define genocidal violence as within the realm of normal activities for this role and thus applicable to the conditioned response.

Within this context, participants can also come to see their work as “tests of strength” to their role as soldiers or whatever role they are inhabiting (Newman 2002, 53). This is reinforced by Arendt’s general note on how the killing in the East was presented by the political leadership: “It is noteworthy, however, that Himmler hardly ever attempted to justify in ideological terms, and if he did, it was apparently quickly forgotten. What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (‘a great task that occurs once in two thousand years’), which must therefore be difficult to bear” ([1963] 1994, 93). An adherence to “professional standards” as part of a role is not restricted to only the actual killers themselves but is also evident for people who provided logistical support for the Holocaust—for instance, in the bureaucratic service (Bloxham 2008b, 232; Feldman and Seibel 2005, 4), particularly when the individuals wanted to retain their records as efficient and loyal civil servants unblemished and were “enthralled by their status as civil servants.” As such, the person felt obliged to act only as the role dictated, doing what was expected of him or her, rather than act with any sense of responsibility toward the victims (Browning 1978, 180). The epitome of this idea is provided by Arendt’s ([1963] 1994) account of Eichmann. Her idea of the banality of evil to describe Eichmann’s participation in the Holocaust has more often than not been misunderstood as speaking to the blind obedience to authority that is popularly understood for many perpetrators. However, her concept is much deeper and more nuanced, as shortly touched on in the section on authority (see section 2.1.1). Arendt speaks not of blind obedience but of a radical commitment to the role that Eichmann has been assigned. Eichmann is seen as “thoughtless”: he does not reflect on the morality of his actions or his position. Instead he takes on the norms and values expected of someone in his position without reflection of the consequences or the meaning behind it. He then acts enthusiastically and to the best of his abilities within the framework provided by this role.

A further form of role acceptance occurs in the context of gender norms—for instance, when concepts of masculinity that are rooted in cultural discourses are used to structure the way people perceive and interpret their own actions and the situation they are in, as has been studied by Frank Werner (2008; see also Issinger 2016) for the notion of soldierly masculinity in National Socialist Germany. Here, being a soldier was constitutive of being a “real man,” and thus to try to break out of the role of soldier (and not participate in ordered actions) could have meant to also lose the ascription of masculinity. Conversely, women are also ascribed a certain role, and this often constrains the agency that they have, leading to different forms of participation (Gertz, Brehm, and Brown 2018).

The power of roles was most evocatively shown in a further social-psychological experiment, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. In his experiment, Zimbardo randomly assigned participants as guards and prisoners and soon observed that both groups had fully taken on their respective roles. While prisoners fell into a state of submission, guards started abusing their newfound power, so much so that the experiment had to be prematurely halted after just three days. What is particularly striking in Zimbardo’s report of the experiment is that “the most sadistic behaviours we observed took place during the late-night and early-morning shifts, when, as we learned, the guards didn’t believe that we were observing or recording them, in a sense, when the experiment was ‘off’ ” (2008, 216). In this sense, roles are especially helpful in explaining the so-called smile problem—that is, gratuitous violence that reaches beyond the call of duty. Having taken on a role, the perpetrator ceases to be merely an individual forced to participate but begins to conscientiously play out the part as dictated by the role (Roth 2004, 214; Zimbardo 2008, 216). While the motivation for this role is focused on the self, it is strongly contingent on the social situation. The way the role is defined is dependent on the authorities and peers and the social situation within which it is defined; drawing again on the metaphor of the theater, the role is defined not just by the actor but in social interaction with the director and with the other actors too. Further, the propensity to accept a role is stronger when peer pressure is exerted to this end.

The mechanism underlying this can be explained with reference to self-categorization theory, a complement of social identity theory. While social identity theory explains intergroup behavior, self-categorization theory is a “social identity theory of the group,” explaining not how groups come to act in certain ways or why individuals act toward others in a certain way because of group membership, but instead “how individuals are able to act as a group at all” (Turner et al. 1987, 42). Particularly, when individuals define themselves as members of a certain social category, they can learn the “appropriate, expected, desirable behaviours” associated with this category, as well as internalize the norms and attributes of the category, thus making their behavior in line with the category as their membership in it becomes salient (Turner and Reynolds 2012, 406). That is, as individuals come to see their role as salient, they internalize the expectations associated with it and begin behaving as is expected of the role.

Bringing in a slightly different facet, George Browder (2003) argues that a role can be “worn” rather than fully internalized. Through the temporary nature of identification with the role, one can better understand how people are “normal” before and after they participate in genocide, as it is significantly easier to slip in and out of their genocidal role and afterward continue their lives unabated than it is to fully internalize a role. A further concept, somewhat akin to this, is John Steiner’s (1980, 431) idea of sleepers lying “dormant until circumstances or specific events will activate him or her and produce behavioural traits not apparent before.” However, this concept of the sleeper has been criticized for its implication that certain people’s characters or personalities predispose them to at some point become perpetrators, which would go against the wealth of findings about the ordinariness of perpetrators and how almost anyone can become one (Bauman 1989, 166–168; Browning [1994] 2001, 167).

In this discussion of roles, the nuanced idea of doubling was developed by Robert Jay Lifton ([1986] 2000) in an attempt to understand the killing and terrible treatment conducted by SS doctors at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Doubling means that the self is split into two independent parts, and each partial self can still work as the entirety of the person, depending on the situation (Lifton [1986] 2000, 119). In his case study, the practicing doctors would develop an Auschwitz self, who was embedded in a parallel context regarding moral assumptions and outlook—hence, it became possible for the individuals to maintain their “normal” identities as humane doctors, fathers, and husbands outside the camp and within the camp internalize an alternative moral universe that allowed them to function psychologically in a radically different environment. This is what Zimbardo terms compartmentalization and “allows us to mentally bind conflicting aspects of our beliefs and experiences into separate chambers” (2008, 214). In the camp it became normal that the Hippocratic Oath meant nothing, and it was commonplace for the doctors to administer the selection process of incoming people, deciding between life in the camp and immediate death in the gas chambers. It was not that the doctors in Auschwitz did not realize what they were doing; they were not denying reality but instead were denying the meaning of this reality. The doubling was made possible because the Auschwitz self built up a professional role in which everything was rendered technical and the ethical component removed, so that “demonstrating ‘humanity’ meant killing with technical efficiency” (Lifton [1986] 2000, 453). Furthermore, doubling is not a conscious act but instead occurs “largely outside of awareness” (Lifton [1986] 2000, 419).

However, while the two selves are autonomous, they are also connected, as the Auschwitz self builds on facets of the other previous self (Lifton [1986] 2000, 419). The Auschwitz self “was inclusive and could connect with the entire Auschwitz environment” and thus also facilitated avoiding guilt for the “dirty work” committed by this self (419). Nazi doctors did not avoid guilt through doubling by the elimination of their conscience but instead by a “transfer of conscience.” This transfer of conscience occurs in either a process of derealization, of “divesting oneself from the actuality of what one is part of, not experiencing it as ‘real’ ” (442), or of disavowal, an outright rejection of what one perceives. “The requirements of conscience were transferred to the Auschwitz self, which placed it within its own criteria for good (duty, loyalty to group, ‘improving’ Auschwitz conditions, etc.), thereby freeing the original self from responsibility for actions there” (421). This doubling is supported by several facilitative factors. Through the use of euphemistic and sanitizing language, the doctors were able to disassociate their actions from their “normal” moral framework (Lifton and Markusen [1990] 1992, 212), thus morally disengaging from the victims. At the same time, though, there are strong elements of moral justification for the Auschwitz self part of the identity.

Finally, a different but related way of thinking about this is with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. There is no way in which to do this concept justice here, but I mention it merely to refer to research on the related topic of motivations for and understandings of participation in the Cambodian insurgency after the end of Democratic Kampuchea, conducted by Daniel Bultmann (2015).

The field of insurgency reproduces social differentiations that existed prior to its own formation. Many positions in the field are homologous with older hierarchies, e.g., with an old military and political elite forming its upper ranks, their patrimonial clients within the mid-range leadership, and a displaced peasantry within the rank and file. This shows that social differentiations survive even massive societal changes, with political networks being reconstituted and militarized. Second, however, at the same time, a field cannot be explained solely by reference to a prior social structure being reproduced; its own historical and symbolical formation must also be considered. Each field has a different history and symbolic universe that values resources differently. Therefore, some groups are able to rise in status, such as due to an increased symbolical value of combat experience within a society at war, and an insurgency in particular.… People incorporate schemes of perception, thought, and action during their socialization, which are applied, repeated, and thereby habitualized under similar but ever-changing conditions. In doing so, schemes of behavior and thought become socially differentiated.… Schemes function as a tendency or disposition to act in certain ways that are “embedded” in the habitus. (Bultmann 2015, 3, 15)

This section has bundled a variety of ideas on how an individual can take on a role and then be motivated by new values and attitudes associated with that role to change his or her behavioral patterns. To understand the saliency of the role, it is important to understand that the roles are socially constructed within the perpetrator group; and taking on the role is important for the individual also, so that he or she does not lose his or her membership in the group with which the new role is associated. If an individual were to break out of this role (e.g., as a “good Hutu” or a policeman or a tiger), he or she would no longer be allowed to be part of the group and would risk social exclusion.

2.1.6 Status and Ego

A further motivation for participating in genocide—and again importantly embedded in the social setting—is presented by an individual’s status, both as a motivation to gain a higher status and through threats to this status. It has been shown that at a macro level, “societal devaluation is common across many low social status groups and produces a sense of threatened social worth. Threatened social worth may lead those of low status to be more vigilant towards social threats, thereby increasing the likelihood of hostile attributions and endorsement of aggression” (Davis and Reyna 2015, 728). This logic can, to a certain degree, also be applied to the individual level. Mark Warr posits that status threats are the only factor of peer influence that actually provides direct provocation for young men to commit crime: “Rather than merely generating conformity in behavior, status threats (including actual as well as potential ridicule) can provide direct provocation for criminal conduct. Among males, challenges to status often call for direct physical confrontation to maintain identity or ‘save face’ (Felson 1993). They require an appropriately violent response, a response that, if not put forth, diminishes the status of the hesitant party in the eyes of those who witness or hear of the event” (2002, 56).

The idea behind this is that participation in crime is an effort to gain increased status in a relatively stable social dominance hierarchy or protect one’s current status from potential or existing threats (Warr 2002, 52). This is equally applicable to genocide. In existing social groups people may want to gain status relative to their peers, and will thus participate in order to climb the hierarchical ladder.

The concept of status here should be understood broadly. Status is oftentimes only discussed implicitly in social groups, and furthermore, while being perceived as status or face or hierarchy by most members of the group, may not be labeled in any of these terms. Status is meant to include a whole range of ideas, such as heroism among warriors as a motivation to participate in genocide or the idea of shame and avoiding losing face in cultures in which these resonate (Hinton 2005). People may also participate in order not to appear cowardly (Valentino 2004, 58).

In studying participation in contentious collective action in the example of political marches, Gwyneth McClendon (2014) shows that anticipated social esteem from the ingroup is the key motivator for participation. Furthermore, there can also be intense competition within the ingroup to determine the best member of the group, “with the best member of the group being defined as the member who adheres best to the group norms and who is most successful in contributing to the main aim of the group” (Smeulers and Hoex 2010, 449), thus tying into the previous section on roles.

According to the concept of threatened egotism, individuals who have “favourable views of self that have been disputed or impugned by others” (Baumeister 2002, 248) or “felt these views were being questioned, undermined, or attacked” have a stronger tendency to react to provocations with aggressive behavior (Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 218). While there are theories that predict that low self-esteem will lead to aggression, Baumeister (2002) identifies that it is not actually the level of self-esteem that is important, but instead the threat to self-esteem. When self-esteem is threatened, this can provoke hostile and aggressive behavior.

The idea of status, face, and honor is discussed at great length in the anthropologist Hinton’s (2005) seminal book on the Khmer Rouge, the only piece of work before mine to explicitly look at motivations for participating in the Khmer Rouge violence in any great depth. Cambodian society is organized along strong hierarchical lines and with this a belief in natural status inequalities by which subordinates must give honor, respect, and obedience to social superiors (Hinton 2004). These status differences[15] are not seen negatively in Cambodian culture (Hinton 2005, 186) and manifest themselves throughout many facets of society and everyday life—for instance, linguistically, as there is no word for “you” but instead a whole host of words that all have different connotations of status and hierarchy (184). While the Khmer Rouge, as part of its radical Communist doctrine, attempted to eradicate all forms of status hierarchy (187–190), it actually replaced the old system with a new one in which the Khmer Rouge was on top, followed by the “base people” (prachiachun djah), peasants of long standing, and at the bottom the “new people” (prachiachun thmey), those who had been expelled from the cities.[16] This concept of status and hierarchy is reinforced as the concept of losing face is very strong—one must act according to one’s social position in order not to lose face and thus honor (Hinton 2004). In this context, the concept of obedience has significantly more positive connotations than it does in Western language usage.

A short excursion on how face is gained in Cambodian society is necessary, in order to understand how the concept of status endured during the regime:

First, face is predicated on the evaluations of others. One often hears Cambodians discuss their assessment of the “value” (veay/aoy tâmlei) of different people. Most people are constantly concerned with how others evaluate them and thus carefully consider the social implications of any action. Second, face is performative. Because each person holds a certain position in the social order that is subject to negotiation and evaluation, he or she feels pressure to perform given duties and roles in accordance with social expectations. Lurking in the background of any public interaction is fear of the exposure and shame that results when others do not respond in accordance with the “line,” to use Erving Goffman’s term, that a person is asserting.… A third key dimension of face concerns contextual variation: the extent to which face is at stake differs according to the social situation. In any given interaction, the degree to which one fears exposure and shame depends upon a consideration of who is present, the familiarity and social distance between the actors, and the type of social situation involved.… Finally, individual variation exists in face sensitivity. While most people act in accordance with social expectations, some lack sensitivity to issues of face, honor, and shame, and therefore are said to have a “thick face” (much kras). (Hinton 2005, 253–254)

It is particularly pertinent that many of the young cadres were of “an age when Cambodian youths often become particularly sensitive to the evaluations of others and desire to gain face and honor” (Hinton 2005, 267).

Just as there were differential status allocations in the new system with new people, base people, and cadres (in ascending order), so were there various levels of status within the Khmer Rouge itself, with people higher up the hierarchy (KR11A, KR12A/B) or fulfilling certain tasks such as killing (KR26A) having higher status, as Ângkar was said to admire its members (KR03B, KR19A), and people who were integral to destroying the enemy were praised highly during the regular meetings (KR51B). Several interviewees spoke of people participating in the violence in order to gain face, to improve their status (KR12A, KR20A), or to ingratiate themselves with their leaders, as does the vignette on Sokong (KR15A). Thus, status and honor remained attainable social goals and important to people in their interactions with others. This is interesting in terms of motivations for violence, as ideology under the Khmer Rouge then prescribed that killing was honorable, as is elaborated on by Hinton: “Although the criteria by which face and honor were achieved had changed, Cambodians continued to be highly concerned about peer evaluations. Negative evaluations could result in execution. More broadly, Khmer Rouge ideology linked honor and killing. Everyone had to demonstrate the purity of their revolutionary consciousness and their unquestioning loyalty to the party” (2005, 34). Hinton also reports about a female Khmer Rouge who arrested her own husband when she caught him stealing food, stating that she was not killing her husband, but the enemy. Hinton explains that “such acts of violence, although chilling, made sense within the logic of Khmer Rouge ideology, which made it honourable to kill. Those who had a progressive revolutionary consciousness were given face and honor” (2005, 263). Furthermore, as part of the concept of losing face, one must act according to one’s social position in order not to lose face and thus honor (Hinton 2004). This plays into the motivations discussed previously in sections 2.1.2 and 2.1.5 on one’s duty toward society, as well as taking on a specific role and then embracing it fully. The idea of breaking out of this duty or the role one has been assigned is particularly problematic because of the danger of losing face if one does so.

Similarly, in Rwanda, Jessee (2011, 294) reports the story of a former perpetrator called Alexandre. As Alexandre interpreted the genocide as part of a larger civil war, he believed that his killing of Tutsi must be seen as an honorable act for which he could gain status.

The final ingroup-focused motivation is that of status, which is in the ingroup category because status is constructed through social dynamics in the perpetrator ingroup. Without this group there would be no concept of face, hierarchy, or any other form of status. Status becomes important not only in wanting to gain it but also when it becomes threatened, primarily by others in the ingroup.

2.2 OUTGROUP-FOCUSED MOTIVATIONS

The previous sections discussed ingroup-focused motivations, in which the locus of interest was purely on the ingroup, with any violence originating from dynamics within this group and relations between perpetrators. In this context, the victim group was irrelevant because the motivation for action stemmed solely from the social dynamics of the group. This section now turns to motivations that are explicitly focused on the victim group. These are motivations that see members of the victim group as necessary targets for certain reasons, be they ideological, hatred driven, or fear induced. Who the individual victim is, is irrelevant, as it matters only that he or she is a member of the outgroup, a member of the group being targeted for extermination.

2.2.1 Ideology

“Deep hatreds or fervent ideological convictions are not necessary to explain the behaviour of most perpetrators” (Valentino 2004, 31; see also Moshman 2005, 185; Mueller 2000, 50; Browning [1994] 2001, 73). This sentence would strike many as unusual, and it goes against the popular conception that ideology is the single most important motivation that explains most participation in genocide. Yet, the academic review of ideology could not be further from the popular conception. While it is common knowledge and a consensus that anti-Semitism was widespread throughout German society in the 1930s and 1940s (as in many other European countries), there has been a fierce debate on the nature of this anti-Semitism. Goldhagen (1996) makes the most vehement case for an “eliminationist” anti-Semitism that entailed that nearly all Germans not only hated the Jews but also wanted their complete destruction (see also Confino 2014), although his approach has been heavily criticized. Others have argued that while anti-Semitism did exist, this did not stipulate the killing of all the Jews (e.g., Haberer 2001, 398). In Rwanda, too, prejudices against Tutsi were widespread in the population, but they are not the primary differentiating factor of why some people participated and others did not, because prejudices and nationalist feelings were no more prevalent among participants in the genocide than they were among those who did not participate (McDoom 2008, 255). “Hatred here is not a fundamental given defining from the outset how ‘natural’ relationships will be between groups. It is instead a constructed passion, a product of the willful action of its zealous promoters and by the circumstances encouraging it to spread” (Sémelin 2005a, 16–17). Although ideology does not provide a one-size-fits-all explanation for genocide, there are certainly people that are ideologically motivated to participate in genocide because of these motivations, thus making it necessary to include these “true believers” in the Complexity of Evil model, albeit as only one motivation among several.[17]

There is no common definition of ideology to be applied to the study of genocide. Despite two comprehensive reviews of the state of the art a decade apart (Gerring 1997; Hamilton 1987), no central ground has emerged. In his review of a wide range of social science definitions of ideology, John Gerring (1997) found not only that there are very different approaches to this concept, but that many of these are actually contradictory. And in the decades since, the field has still not come to terms with this, leading Jonathan Leader Maynard (2014, 821) to state that for the study of atrocities, “it is not clear that leading theorists actually share a common understanding of what ideology means.” Nonetheless, Leader Maynard has done the field an excellent service and has brought the literature on ideology studies to the study of atrocities; he defines an ideology as “a distinctive system of normative, semantic, and/or reputedly factual ideas, typically shared by members of groups or societies, which underpins their understandings of their political world and shapes their political behaviour” (2014, 824; see also Leader Maynard and Mildenberger 2018). This definition allows ideology to vary along a scale according to how distinct and organized it is. This conception of ideology is “rich and multifaceted” (Leader Maynard 2014, 824) and goes well beyond “just” the core beliefs and principles or the central hate rhetoric, to encompass narratives, stereotypes, past experiences, values, and meanings; it is a broad understanding of the belief structure and its meaning for a society in historical context.

Leader Maynard (2014, 828) differentiates between three “causal pathways” of ideologies: motivations, as understood in this book as the impulse for committing violence; legitimations, which make the violence “seem permissible prior to/during commission”; and rationalizations, in retrospect. The author combines these three pathways to produce the more general concept of ideological justification. In this book, it is primarily the motivations that are of interest; however, the others feed into the broad context and can be seen as an important contextual condition and also a facilitative factor. Many of the facilitative factors described below are encompassed under the broader term of “ideology” but are not actually motivations in the strict sense used here, in that they are not INUS conditions for genocide participation. Further, there are four main ways in which ideologies can be communicated, and most ideologies will be communicated using several of these, mutually reinforcing each other: “first, everyday social interactions; second, long-term institutionalised practices of explicit education such as state schooling or institutional training programmes; third, medium-run propaganda programs such as sustained media campaigns, or organised public protests aimed ‘upwards’ at leaders; and fourth, short-run calls to violence such as incitement speeches, SMS instructions, orders funneled through institutional hierarchies, and escalatory radio and television broadcasts” (Leader Maynard 2014, 827). The ideas embedded in the ideology, created by actors whom Sémelin (2005a) would call identity entrepreneurs, are not just accepted by “unusually gullible” people in genocidal societies. Instead as ordinary people “like all of us, they are dependent on key ‘epistemic authorities’ (political leaders, intellectuals, church and community elders, news media, or simply other individuals) for the vast majority of their political knowledge” (Leader Maynard 2014, 827). Thus, in this relationship of “epistemic dependence,” people will rely on people who are deemed trustworthy for reliable information on beliefs and an interpretation of the context with these beliefs (see also section 2.1.1). This epistemic dependence highlights that “the very effectiveness of genocidal ideologies is dependent on their ability to play upon a variety of emotion-laden local understandings” (Hinton 2005, 23), and can thus be more effectively communicated through traditional and existing networks; further, to be receptive to ideological input, “people have to be positive about the items beforehand, and, most importantly, it has to be compatible with their everyday convictions” (Kipp 2007, 605). At the same time, ideologies must be localized—that is, rooted in bodies of knowledge that resonate with local understandings. “Otherwise, these ideas would remain both incomprehensible and unattractive to people whom ideologues seek to convert into followers. Ideologies are palimpsests in which new concepts—at once transforming and transformed—are sketched upon the lines of established cultural understandings” (Hinton 2005, 23).

In the end, all ideologies and the ideological environments they constitute “contain a broad amalgam of ideas, some of which are conducive to violence, and some of which problematise it” (Leader Maynard 2015, 70). But what is the actual content of the ideologies? Leader Maynard’s (2014) most significant contribution lies in the answer to this question, as he systematizes ideologies into six justificatory mechanisms: (1) dehumanization, (2) guilt attribution, (3) threat construction, (4) deagentification, (5) virtuetalk, and (6) future bias. Dehumanization refers to the representation of victims as subhuman or inferior to the perpetrators. Guilt attribution entails “accusing victims of great past or present crimes, … generating the desire for vengeance and framing victims as legitimate targets of repression” (Leader Maynard 2014, 830). The attribution of guilt typically occurs without a strong evidentiary basis, increasing the importance of epistemic dependence, and is at the collective level, rendering all individual members guilty. Threat construction is a mechanism that simply means that the victims are portrayed as posing an imminent threat to the perpetrator group, thus framing any killing as self-defense (Leader Maynard 2014, 831); this is a mechanism in which much of the debate on elite-framed ethnic fears could be located (for a critique, see Fujii 2009). Deagentification means that the killing itself is presented as “lacking meaningful agency or responsibility in causing atrocities to occur,” not necessarily at the individual level (people still acknowledge they were the ones with a weapon in their hand) but for the genocide as a whole, which is thus seen as “inevitable” and “necessary,” taking away any personal agency for having made the event occur (Leader Maynard 2014, 831). This is pivotal to the understanding of many perpetrators’ perceptions of having little control over their personal and political destiny. Virtuetalk is constituted by positive representations of the perpetrators and of the act of killing, connecting it with culturally positively connoted values; further, through the use of a euphemistic lexicon of sanitized words, killing can be represented in less morally problematic terms (Leader Maynard 2014, 832). In this sense, virtuetalk can redefine an individual’s personality or the meaning of certain traits, such as masculinity, genocidal roles, the virtue of violence and its necessity. In this redefinition, an individual could massively lose status if he or she were then to ignore the new definition of these qualities, certainly motivating participation. Finally, future bias refers to the utopian side of ideology and “the perception of known moral harms in the present—the deaths of victims—as outweighed by massive future goods which have not been discounted for their uncertainty” (Leader Maynard 2014, 832), thus stipulating that the killing is worthwhile, even though the utopian society will probably never actually become reality. This is reflected in Arendt’s ([1963] 1994, 93) description of how Himmler justified the necessity of the Holocaust using the “notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (‘a great task that occurs once in two thousand years’), which must therefore be difficult to bear” (also discussed in section 2.1.5). Many arguments of ethnic hatred and fundamentalist ideologies would be included in this mechanism, as their killing is portrayed as necessary and positive and for the future benefit.

Because Leader Maynard labels them all justificatory mechanisms, he does not differentiate between which are motivations and which are legitimations or rationalizations. I propose that only guilt attribution, threat construction, and future bias present ideological motivations, in and of themselves, while dehumanization, deagentification, and virtuetalk are facilitative factors (see sections 3.2.1, 3.3.2, and 3.1.1, respectively). Future bias best captures the utopian thought structure underlying some radical ideologies that proscribe the killing of another group. An individual who accepts the premises underlying such an ideology can be motivated to pursue the killing of the victim group for its own sake in these ideological terms. Threat construction and guilt attribution, however, are slightly more nuanced as they stipulate why the victim group is to be killed beyond certain utopian visions. Both mechanisms rely on a strong outgroup identification that first constitutes the victims and to whom fears of threat or attribution of guilt can then be linked. These two mechanisms are also reminiscent of the primary factors of Sémelin’s (2005b, 247) analysis: imagined fear (corresponding to threat construction) and the need for vengeance (corresponding to guilt attribution) (see also section 3.1.2).

It is important to note that ideologies are not necessarily adopted in the same way by all individuals within the relevant society, as they have different prior experiences that can lead them to have different “mental models” of the same ideology (Hinton 2004, 26–27). Leader Maynard (2018) discusses this in a recent contribution and develops a scale of internalization states that individuals can have of a violence-justifying ideology; he also demonstrates how it necessitates only small shifts in these internalizations across many people—for example, toward acceptance of such an ideology, in order for society to radicalize sufficiently for genocide to be accepted.

Intersectional differences along gender, class, ethnic, socioeconomic, education, or religious lines can also impact how a person not only perceives the situation but also whether and how they adopt the propagated ideology, as well as broader cultural knowledge. This cultural knowledge varies not only interpersonally but also between different social contexts (Hinton 2005, 28). “By linking their lethal ideologies to pre-existing cultural knowledge, genocidal states provide perpetrators with an array of compelling discourses” (30).

The empirical discussion on ideology is immense and controversial. There is evidence that some ideological fanatics did indeed participate in the Holocaust (Haberer 2001, 401; Mann 2000, 331),[18] and the argument has been made for ideological participation in genocide in Darfur (Hagan and Kaiser 2011; for a critique, see Mann 2011, 45). Most authors would agree that anti-Semitism in the National Socialist system was responsible for the worse treatment of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps compared with other prisoners (Orth 2002, 98). However, most acts of perpetration cannot be understood merely through the lens of ideology, as most groups had relatively few fervent ideologues and it is unclear how ideology manifested itself precisely in the action (Browning [1994] 2001; Fletcher 2007, 27; Fujii 2004, 100; Haberer 2001, 398; Mallmann 2002, 122; Mann 2005, 167; McDoom 2008, 255–257; Mueller 2000; Solonari 2014, 67–68, 82; Valentino 2004, 31). Whether overt anti-Semitism is displayed during the killing is a different question than whether this was actually the motivation behind it. Intent may well have played a role for some but not for all, even if there were local-level actors pushing for the killings (see, e.g., Gross 2003). Likewise, ethnic relations (which are often the basis for an ideological platform) are seldom described as hateful before the genocide, but instead it is only in the course of the genocide and the victimization that such contempt arose (Fletcher 2007, 30; Lieberman 2006, 298; Sereny [1974] 1977, 233). In line with this way of thinking, Hinton (2005, 244) proposes that those who dealt with the extreme violence on a daily basis “responded to the existential threats they faced through enormous self-investment in the Khmer Rouge belief system.” Thus, the ideological stance of low-level cadres could actually have been produced as a reaction to the brutal violence to help abet oneself, rather than being the cause of the violence. Leader Maynard (2014, 826) hypothesizes that ideological motivations possibly play a larger role in motivating policy initiators than direct or indirect killers, those of interest here.

Ideology thus does provide a motivation for participating in genocide, although its empirical prevalence as a motivation is less significant than is commonly asserted outside of academia. Ideologies do, however, play an important role and will be revisited as an extremely important facilitative factor; ideologies are pivotal for creating a framework within which the genocidal action becomes portrayed as legitimate and necessary. For the most part, ideology is not the actual motivation for why low-level people participate, but just a legitimating principle that makes this participation easier.

2.2.2 Emotions

One psychological approach to genocide perpetration is to see participation as a reaction to emotions—for example, with fear or anger providing a motivational impulse to join in. Emotions are primarily seen as mechanisms that can mediate between an impulse of some sort, be it stereotypes or structural changes, and action. Fundamentally, an emotion is defined by Roger Petersen (2002) as “a mechanism that triggers action to satisfy a pressing concern.” The emotion accomplishes this by raising the saliency of one desire over other competing desires and in this way can explain motivational shifts (Petersen 2002, 17–20; for an alternative model of group-based emotion, see Goldenberg et al. 2016). The emotion is triggered by structural change and when activated can then feed back into the beliefs an individual holds and how new information this individual receives is processed. For example, in a situation of deteriorating security (a structural change), an individual’s desire for safety can be increased and prioritized over other desires; this then creates the emotion fear. The emotion fear in turn reinforces beliefs the individual may have about how threatening the other group is, and new information the individual receives in this situation may be framed in security terms (Petersen 2002, 22). In essence, emotions provide a micro-level mechanism of understanding how an individual reacts to shifts in the context, such as uncertainty or upheaval, as these events provoke emotions that change an individual’s preference structures and then necessitate violence against a specific target group in order to react to these new preferences.

In one social-psychological approach to the topic, emotions act as a mediator between stereotypes toward another group and the behavioral tendency; other groups that are perceived as stereotypically cold and incompetent become hated by an individual and from this follow harm tendencies (Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick 2007). An alternative social-psychological approach, the intergroup threat theory, emphasizes the nature of realistic and symbolic threats to the ingroup and to the individual, whereby realistic threats concern material resources (including bodily integrity) and symbolic threats the self-esteem of the ingroup and the individual, respectively. In this approach, threats have cognitive impact in that they can form stereotypes, changed perceptions or biases about the outgroup, attitudinal impact on how one believes the outgroup should be treated, and also emotional impact, potentially eliciting fear, anxiety, anger, or resentment, among others. These can then, in turn, elicit behavioral responses, including aggression toward the outgroup (Stephan, Ybarra, and Rios 2016).

In terms of group-based emotions, for understanding the emotional response to a group event, it is important in how far the individual self-categorizes himself or herself as part of a group to which a situation is occurring (Goldenberg et al. 2016). Other authors ascribe great importance to the role of elites in framing these situations with reference to symbols that help spark the emotions (Kaufman 2006). Problematically, a “negativity bias accounts for our tendency to remember episodes of threat and fear more strongly than longer periods of calm and peaceful relations with other groups,” thus providing strong ammunition for elites to evoke emotions (Chirot and McCauley 2006, 65).

Primarily instrumental emotions (where beliefs precede emotion) are interesting as the target group is then selected in order to satisfy the demands; with noninstrumental emotions, the target group is irrelevant (Petersen 2002, 30), which would not help explain participation in genocide, as the individual would be equally likely to shoot a comrade as to shoot a member of the victim group. Should one be able to channel a noninstrumental emotion like rage, it could be interesting, however. This section identifies six key emotions that can help explain participation in ethnic violence: fear, resentment, hatred, anger (what Petersen terms rage), disgust, and appetitive aggression. Before going into these, a few more general words on emotions must be penned.

McDoom (2012) is right in criticizing two fabricated dichotomies between emotion-based and structural opportunities–based explanations, on the one hand, and between individual rationality and emotionality, on the other. Both rationality and emotions matter at the individual level, as do opportunities and emotions in explaining action. Nonetheless, several problems remain with emotion-based explanations (McDoom 2012, 121): first, the precise causality of emotions in conflict in general is unclear, with it remaining nebulous whether emotions are a cause or a consequence of conflict, or both; second, variation in the intensity of emotions between groups is not theorized; third, an arbitrary distinction between rational elites and emotional followers is untenable; fourth, elite rationality and their propensity to manipulate strategically is given too much weight, as they may also be constrained by group-based emotion. To overcome these problems, McDoom (2012) suggests that emotions are particularly important in shaping support for violence, but that material opportunities can better explain actual participation. I believe that this attitudinal-behavioral differentiation, while analytically interesting, is too simplistic. As I will elaborate on, emotions can have very real consequences in terms of the action they provoke, and do not remain purely determinative of attitudes toward the target group.

An interesting empirical example of the importance emotions can have is provided by Stefan Klusemann (2010), who analyzes the micro-situational events that led up to the genocide in Srebrenica, drawing on video recordings. Here, within a context that allowed the violence, people are motivated to participate in the violence because of the micro-situational, emotional momentum that enabled people to overcome their natural inhibitions to perform violence in face-to-face confrontations.

2.2.2.1 FEAR.   Fear is a potent driver of violence, as people feel they must protect themselves, their families, their comrades, and their possessions from a threat; fear as an emotion prepares an individual to attempt to preserve his or her safety in the face of threat. Again, it is of no import how realistic the threat actually is, but solely how individuals perceive this threat. Fear of one’s own death or fear for the safety of one’s family has been shown to be of great import in explaining individual participation, particularly in the ethnic violence of the Balkans (Sundhaussen 2001, 47) and during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (Fujii 2009, 121; Sémelin 2005a, 247; Straus 2006, 122). In Rwanda, people participating out of fear or anger were consistently shown to be the most violent perpetrators (Straus 2006, 150). Fear can cause many different responses, ranging from flight to fight, but killing becomes motivated by fear when it is established by genocidal elites as a “dominant strategy” (Fujii 2004, 100).

It is important to determine who is being feared (Fujii 2009, 121). First, there is fear of the victim group, whom elites can portray as threatening and (particularly in the context of uncertainty and war) who people may fear will kill them, if they are not killed first. While this concern seems ridiculous when the victims of genocide are mostly not armed fighters but unarmed men, women, and children who pose no objective threat, through processes of collectivizing the enemy group, people can come to fear all members of the group and thus want to eradicate them all in order to ensure their personal safety. In Rwanda this fear of death at the hands of the RPF mingled with a fear of a return of the exiled Tutsi to reclaim their former territories, meaning existential problems for Hutu living on seized land (Fletcher 2007, 28). Also, even infants can pose a threat when one anticipates potential retribution for the killing of their parents in years to come, as was argued by the Khmer Rouge.

Second, people can fear other members of their ingroup if they were not to cooperate. An example of this is provided by women who refused to help or even denounced Tutsi friends during the genocide in Rwanda, who said that as women they were fearful of their Hutu compatriots if found not to be cooperating (Hogg 2010, 84). This fear is then the impetus to participate in the sense of coercion (see section 2.1.4).

Fear can take on a third form when the source of fear is not a specific individual or group but instead is a more diffuse fear of the system and of others within this system. This is what Hinton (2005) terms anxiety when talking about the fear that the guards at S-21 experienced when they were constantly confronted with the possibility that they would be denounced for minor infractions and found to be traitors. This anxiety, however, does not provide an actual motivation to kill, but should be seen more as a contextual condition within the category of uncertainty.

While fear is one motivation cited by perpetrators themselves for their participation in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, McDoom (2008) does not find that perpetrators feel any more threatened than nonperpetrators, nor do they have more security fears or judge ethnic distance to be greater than nonperpetrators. However, although both groups may have had equal rates of fearfulness, this does not rule fear out as a motivation for genocide for these participating individuals, as the fearful nonparticipants were perhaps just people who were not recruited or whose reasons not to participate were greater than their motivation to participate.

In a context of uncertainty, fear as a reaction to threat is particularly heightened, as people will not know the precise nature of the threat. The aim of individual perpetrators is then to ensure “ ‘security’ in a context of acute insecurity” (Straus 2006, 172), even if one cannot be certain that this fear is justified. This is theorized in the concept of the security dilemma (Posen 1993; Lake and Rothchild 1996; Rotberg 2004; Snyder and Walter 1999): when a state can no longer guarantee the security of its constituent groups, the groups can start arming themselves in defense. Because there is no way of credibly signaling defensiveness, other groups can read this as arming for offense. This, in turn, can provoke an arms race and potentially the outbreak of violent hostilities between the groups, as elites on both sides struggle for power and frame their narratives of what is happening along ethnic lines; there may also be incentives to strike first in the absence of credible commitments by the other side that it will not attack. In this context, fear may cause identification with the ingroup and be a precursor to violence; however, in a spiral downward, this violence reinforces the fear itself (see also Mann 2005, 424; Snyder and Jervis 1999). Even in the absence of antagonism or major violence, “by initiating violent tit-for-tat sequences, thugs bring about the construction of more antagonistic group identities, making it rational to fear the other group and see its members as dangerous threats” (Fearon and Laitin 2000, 871). Further, in situations of uncertainty, people will tend to believe what the group tells them to believe. Thus, any form of conflict can be utilized by some elites to frame intergroup relations as security threats (see section 2.2.1) or to foment fear of the victim group in order to retain their power as the only legitimate authority able to protect the group from the source of threat (Figueiredo and Weingast 1999). In essence, when an enemy is politically constructed as a threat, this can be framed as a survival issue for the regime and then individual survival tied to the survival of the regime, meaning that people fear for their own lives because of the presence of such a dire threat.

2.2.2.2 RESENTMENT.   “Resentment is the feeling of being politically dominated by a group that has no right to be in a superior position [and] is the everyday experience of these perceived status relations” (Petersen 2002, 40–41). The idea behind this is that humans think in terms of their group-based hierarchies, which are structured by domination and subordination, and that this group status is important to individuals as they identify with the group and it is important for their self-esteem (see also 2.1.6). As structural changes occur, these hierarchies and the associated status can shift; if the new status is seen as part of an “unjust” hierarchy, the emotion resentment emerges (Petersen 2002, 43). Again here, it is not about whether the status differences are actually unjust, but how they are perceived by an individual.

A key concept related to these hierarchies of domination is that of social dominance theory. In this theory, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto develop a model to explain why “dominant groups possess a disproportionately large share of positive social value, [and] subordinate groups possess a disproportionately large share of negative social value” (1999, 32; emphasis removed). In a nutshell, the authors succinctly summarize the theory by writing that social dominance theory “argues that group-based social hierarchy is driven by three proximal processes: aggregated individual discrimination, aggregated institutional discrimination, and behavioral asymmetry [between individuals’ repertoires from the different groups]. These proximal processes are regulated, in part, by legitimizing myths. The extent to which an individual endorses legitimizing myths depends on whether he or she generally endorses, desires, and supports a system of group-based social hierarchy or not. We call the generalized orientation toward group-based social hierarchy social dominance orientation” (39).

Applying this concept to ethnic violence in general, and here specifically to genocide, “aggression is more likely when it is able to reorder the status hierarchy in a desired direction” (Petersen 2002, 52; for an empirical challenge, see Dumitru 2014, 155). This means that resentment can become a motivation for genocide when a person believes that he or she is “righting the wrong” group hierarchy, “paying back” individuals from a group that has previously unjustly dominated, or seeking retribution of other individuals who have dominated them personally. This is also dealt with, to a certain degree, as an opportunistic motivation, in which personal or political feuds or the resentment of material wealth could play a part (see section 2.3.2).

2.2.2.3 HATRED.   Hatred is understood by Petersen (2002, 63) “as a historically formed ‘schema’ that guides action in some situations” and thus does not need to be seen as an “ancient hatred,” which is often suggested in the literature. This type of hatred is elaborated on in the section on ideologies. While hatred must not be rooted in a century-old cultural despising of certain others, innate to all individuals of the group, it does rest on historical grievances, which can be (and are) framed and manipulated by elites. There are a range of “symbolic frames” that can be used by people as schemas for understanding their environment and guiding action; some of these are negative toward other groups and can thus create an emotional reaction of hate (Petersen 2002, 63). This mechanism by Petersen is significantly weaker theoretically than that of fear, as it cannot clearly differentiate between when someone will adopt hatred and when he or she will not, but merely stipulates that a personal hatred can emerge sometimes with these schemas.

At a more concrete level and according to Robert Sternberg (2005b), hate is made up variously of three elements: negation of intimacy, passion, and commitment to a decision. First, hate involves the negation of intimacy—that is, the attempt at distancing (as opposed to seeking closeness in intimacy)—and is characterized not only by a slow development of such feelings but also by a slow possible decrease. Oftentimes the target evokes repulsion or disgust, and this is closely connected to processes of dehumanization (see section 3.2.1). Second, passion implies a connection to other emotions, as passion “expresses itself as intense anger or fear in response to a threat. Anger often leads one to approach, or fear to avoid, the object of hate” (Sternberg 2005b, 39). The third component of hate is commitment to a decision, which means that individuals with hate want to ensure that their own devaluating and dehumanizing thoughts about the target population are adopted by all members of their own group (Sternberg 2005b, 39). From this differentiation, Sternberg (2005b) develops a taxonomy of hate, in which categories can overlap and are designed to be nominal and not ordinal (that is, analytically different), but not presented here as a scale:

Cool hate:   Disgust (negation of intimacy alone)

Hot hate:   Anger-fear (passion alone)

Cold hate:   Devaluation-diminution (decision-commitment alone)

Boiling hate:   Revulsion (disgust of negation of intimacy + anger-fear of passion)

Simmering hate:   Loathing (disgust of negation of intimacy + devaluation-diminution of decision-commitment)

Seething hate:   Revilement (anger-fear of passion + devaluation-diminution of decision-commitment)

Burning hate:   Need for annihilation (disgust of negation of intimacy + anger-fear of passion + devaluation-diminution of decision- commitment).

David Moshman (2005), on the other hand, emphasizes the endurance of hate as an attitude rather than just a momentary emotional reaction, picking up on the “commitment to a decision” element of Sternberg.

2.2.2.4 ANGER AND RAGE.   Anger directed toward another person can motivate one to want to kill the other; anger at a group can motivate one to want to kill members of this group. Petersen sees rage as a noninstrumental emotion: an emotion that does not attempt to change relations between groups and often stems from relatively unconscious sources such as diffuse frustration or culture or personality (2002, 75–78). As it precedes cognition, people experiencing rage often have the desire to lash out irrespective of the target. Anger is the more instrumental cousin concept of rage, which Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley (2006) see as resulting from frustration that leads to aggression, or from insult (either by disrespect or by damage aimed at me or my group). The power of insult motivating anger is explainable through the shame and humiliation that such an insult can bring in a “public loss of esteem or status” (79). Studying the psychology of lone-actor terrorists, Stephane Baele (2017) showed that these individuals are responding to a combination of high anger and high cognitive complexity.

2.2.2.5 DISGUST.   A further emotion that can motivate people to kill others in a genocidal context is disgust. The idea behind disgust is that “anything which reminds us that we are animals elicits disgust” (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 2000, 642; see also Rozin and Fallon 1987). To avoid disgust, people attempt to humanize their animal selves through cultural stipulations of what is the “proper” way to eat (which animals are appropriate and which are not) or to have sex (not with animals or most other humans) or what constitutes appropriate hygiene. Anything that reminds us of our vulnerability and death can also elicit disgust, such as seeing the dead or injuries and blood (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 2000, 642). Classification of victim groups as animals through processes of dehumanization (see section 3.2.1) is obviously not going to make perpetrators think that these people really are animals. However, this dehumanization process makes it easier to kill them, precisely because of this link: one perceives them as animals eliciting the same emotion that animals or reminders of our own mortality and animality do—disgust. This feeling of disgust is genuine, even though the foundations of viewing the other as an animal clearly are not, and thus precipitates violence.

2.2.2.6 (APPETITIVE) AGGRESSION.   The idea that aggressive people are prone to violence is banal at best, but in a model such as this one, it is important to understand the mechanism underlying the motivation. Psychological research on the topic suggests that hunting behavior can be attractive to human beings and that, if inhibition to killing others from one’s own species is not learned or is overcome, the killing and struggling of the victim remain fascinating and attractive and can become an appetitive cue (Elbert, Weierstall, and Schauer 2010). This form of hunting is emotionally arousing because “neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, such as serotonin, endorphins, testosterone and cortisol signal euphoric emotions, reduce depressive behaviour and alleviate pain. Bonding and social rites such as initiation activate the same neuronal circuits and may therefore prepare for the hunt as well as for violent fights” (Elbert, Weierstall, and Schauer 2010, 103).

This “controlled-instrumental” appetitive form of aggression is complemented by a more spontaneous, “reactive” form of aggression that seizes the impulse of anger and translates it into violence. However, more systematic forms of violence are associated less with reactive aggression based on the emotion anger but are more closely associated with the appetitive form of aggression, which is goal orientated and fascinating (Elbert, Weierstall, and Schauer 2010). Some people even find attacking others sexually arousing (Elbert et al. 2013, 40). Higher levels of appetitive aggression have been measured in those who joined armed groups at a younger age, signaling that socialization in an armed group can reduce inhibitions and lead to a higher propensity toward cruelty (Weierstall et al. 2013).

An empirical example of this motivation can be seen in a letter written by SS-Unterscharführer Teith to an associate in Saarbrücken, saying “I wish every colleague to have an opportunity to clear out a ghetto. One cannot describe well enough these experiences, these figures which once soiled our cities. This work gave me—and don’t think I am a sadist—a lot of joy!”[19]

This motivation is particularly important in explaining not first-time participation but continued participation over time, as people come to enjoy the violence and the suffering of the victims and the emotional reactions this aggression provides them. In this sense, there is significant overlap between appetitive aggression and sadism (discussed in section 2.3.7).

Emotions as they are presented here act as a psychological mechanism for explaining behavioral changes that are caused by changes in the situation or context an individual is acting within. Thus, different types of changes can elicit different emotions and thus prompt different types of actions.

2.3  OPPORTUNISTIC MOTIVATIONS

In the triad of categorizations, after delving into motivations that focused on the ingroup and the outgroup, the focus is now on opportunistic motivations of the perpetrator. These are motivations of which the primary impetus for participating does not come from considerations of the other members of the perpetrator’s own group or out of relations with them, nor does it focus on the victim group or the perpetrator’s relations to the group as a whole. Nonetheless, of course, the victim can feature in some of the opportunistic considerations, not as the victim group in and of itself but as a specific victim who happens to be part of the group (e.g., when settling scores that predate the genocide). Likewise, relations to other perpetrators can play their part (e.g., when talking about local power struggles). For the most part, however, the motivations focus on some aspect of the perpetrator or the situation in which he or she finds himself or herself, which is independent of interpersonal and intergroup relations.

This section is closest to a rational choice perspective, particularly when it talks about material and immaterial benefits that individuals hope to and do garner from their participation. Genocide provides a multitude of opportunities to pursue self-serving interests under the guise of ideologically framed participation. While the opportunities available may diverge between cases, all genocidal contexts provide several different ways in which an individual could be “tempted” to participate for personal benefit. These opportunistic motivations were a topic frequently raised when discussing why people participated in genocidal violence in Cambodia during my interviews, although they were seldom mentioned at the beginning of talking about the issue.

Opportunistic motivations have also been demonstrated extensively for participation of different groups in civil war (for an introduction, see Keen 1998); also, war and genocide can be attractive for already existing criminal groups in order to expand their criminal networks or structures (Bašić 2001, 201). Baumeister (2002) sees material gain as a secondary motivation in the Holocaust but states it is not a plausible primary cause, as there would be other ways in which one could pursue these goals. This is quite correct for the overall genocidal context. But within this genocidal context with the given opportunities, it is perfectly plausible that some people will participate in order to “easily” have access to looting opportunities for material gain (Fletcher 2007, 29). This section details some of the key opportunistic motivations for participants in genocide.

2.3.1 Economic Opportunism: Looting and Stealing

The most obvious of the opportunistic motivations is that of economic opportunism, the material enrichment off the back of participating in the genocide (Bloxham 2008a, 199; Fein 1990; Gross 2003, 110; Kuper 1981, 87; Latham 2000, quoted in Üngör and Polatel 2011, 10; Sémelin 2005a, 242; Smeulers 2015, 249; Solonari 2014, 64; Üngör and Polatel 2011, 163; Valentino 2004). This is most often in the form of the appropriation of victims’ possessions by the perpetrators, thus materially enriching themselves. Such “economic seizures,” as Mann calls them, have been a common part of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more generally war throughout history, but “appealing disproportionately to low-level perpetrators once the cleansing is underway” (2005, 32). The most common form this can take is looting, which can be defined as “a specific form of highly situational political violence involving the appropriation of goods, and often occurring in concentrated bursts and against a backdrop of violence or tension” (Mac Ginty 2004, 861).[20]

These opportunities for looting have been described most evocatively by John Mueller (2000) in the context of Bosnia and Rwanda, where he talks about small groups of opportunistic plunderers. In Bosnia these groups were made up of ordinary criminals and former hooligans who were paid in loot that they collected from their victims’ homes (Mueller 2000; see also Kressel 2002, 31). Also, in Rwanda “looters returned from the houses with money, with meat, with furniture and with corrugated iron.… In addition, some of the region’s best real estate was suddenly becoming available” (Fletcher 2007, 33; see also Fujii 2009, 97; McDoom 2008, 287; Sémelin 2005a, 242; Straus 2006). The looting in Rwanda was organized in a very structured fashion (Fujii 2009, 161), and whoever did not participate in the killing was not allowed to loot (Hatzfeld 2004b, 130).

Equally, during the occupation of Eastern Europe and in the context of the Holocaust, robbing the population was commonplace (Nolte 2004, 154; see also Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß 1988, 78); and as a “community of looters,” perpetrators were able to help themselves to any Jewish possessions they wanted (Black 2011, 34; Mallmann 2002, 123), particularly when they were searching recently emptied ghettos for hiding Jews (Rein 2006, 396). In this context, it was not always legal for the people to plunder and loot like this, but outside the formal order, it was seen by some as a form of “bonus” for their active participation (Kühl 2014, 197). Furthermore, in Polish pogroms against Jews, local participants were often joined by groups that moved around specifically in order to plunder (Gross 2003, 90). To facilitate the looting, it was common for perpetrators to force their victims to undress before their execution in order to divide up the clothes; others would also go through the piles of corpses to salvage anything of value (Gross 2003, 101; Solonari 2014, 61). It was, however, strongly dependent on the circumstances, and there were differing levels to which people could engage in such looting. For example, in 1941 in Bessarabia it has been argued that local peasants actively corrupted the local officials and gendarmes in order to be allowed to kill and then rob the Jews (Dumitru 2014, 155). This is well described by Alexander Prusin (2010, 159), who describes how “ ‘ordinary’ onlookers … often mutated into zealous murderers—not necessarily because they were convinced anti-Semites, but because becoming anti-Semites accorded unprecedented opportunities for personal enrichment and exercise of power.”

Not only can stealing people’s property, possessions, or money be classed as an economic motivation, but so can purchasing these things at desperation prices (A. Jones 2006, 264)—for instance, Jews selling their property or possessions at extremely low prices because they needed to liquidate their assets in order to be able to flee the country before the Second World War broke out, or Armenians mobilizing cash to take on their deportation journeys (Göçek 2015, 221). For example, an Ittihad inspector for the province of Edirene, Abdülgani Bey, “had the cassimere and textile shop of the Kazazyan brothers, which was worth one hundred thousand lira, given to his own son Hayrullah in exchange for one thousand lira, and he had the abandoned property [of the Armenian deportees] given to other followers at very low prices” (Dadrian and Akçam 2011, 319). In a slightly different variation during the Armenian genocide, a widow called Sophie Tahmarzian was adopted by Mehmed Ali Bey, director of taxation in Trabzon, “in order to further facilitate stealing of my trousseau and my husband’s property.… All my property and my deported husband’s thus became his” (Yeghiayan 1991, 434). In this case the perpetrator was also able to frame himself as a rescuer, saving the victim from deportation by adopting her. Further, the killing of people to whom one owed money and thus the possibility to free oneself from debt has been shown to be a powerful motivation to peasants during the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide too (Latham 2000, quoted in Üngör and Polatel 2011, 10; Prusin 2010, 159).

A third type of economic motivation is participating in order to receive financial recompense for the killing, or to avoid being fined for nonparticipation. For example, in the Armenian genocide, some Ottoman gendarmes are reported to have been paid ten piasters per victim in hunts for Armenians (Balakian 2010, 293). On the other hand, fines for nonparticipation existed in some regions of Rwanda (Hatzfeld 2004a, 79), although in many others individuals refusing to participate were killed on the spot.

There are a multitude of further opportunities for material gain on the fringes of genocide. For instance, in the genocide of the Armenians, guards accepted bribes from individuals to postpone deportation (Balakian 2010, 124), to be allowed to use the toilet, or to be allowed to rent carriages for transportation (at an already grossly inflated rate) (132). In Nazi-occupied Romania, furthermore, corruption was rampant in the bureaucracy, so some Jews were able to buy themselves free from deportation (Ioanid 2000). In all these examples, people had incentives to be perpetrators because they were invested with the discretionary authority on how to fulfill their task and could then use this for their own financial gain.

Finally, it is sometimes possible to gain access to free labor in the context of genocide, by “rescuing” the potential victims and then using them as free labor. For example, in Armenia some women were not deported but instead handed over to perpetrators as slave laborers for their households, while some men were used on building sites (Dadrian and Akçam 2011, 315). Similarly, during the Holocaust, Jews who were necessary for the war effort could be saved from deportation in order to work in the relevant factories, such as in Oskar Schindler’s iconic case. In the end, the interpretation of whether this is rescuing or profiting boils down to the intent the perpetrator has when accessing the victims for their labor, with Schindler purportedly having better intentions than other people who profited from the free labor (Crowe 2004).

Some argue that there is a demonstrable link between material deprivation or difficult life conditions and genocide participation (Staub 1989, 15; Verwimp 2005; on the importance of poverty for rioting, see Scacco 2010), for which looting would be suggested as the causal link. However, this is by no means necessary. Willa Friedman (2011) argues that local economic data from Rwanda demonstrates that theories of relative deprivation are not helpful for explaining participation, but that opportunity cost theories are, which specify that an individual who has little other way to improve his or her life and welfare can be motivated to participate in violence. Further, stipulating that material deprivation must be necessary for looting to occur neglects the broad array of reasons people can decide to loot (see Mac Ginty 2004). Material deprivation could lead to “absolute need looting,” as Roger Mac Ginty (2004) categorizes it, but there are also many other reasons people would want to loot beyond covering their most basic needs. McDoom (2008) studies the effect of deprivation on perpetrators in Rwanda and finds that although Rwandans did suffer deprivation, perpetrators did so no more than nonperpetrators, measured by land holding, occupation, education, and several further factors. Nonetheless, difficult life conditions here give the opportunity to plunder such salience as a motivation (see Solonari 2014, 76, on the widespread poverty in Romania and its effect on the importance of looting) and to a degree can even provide a legitimation strategy for perpetrators, as they can argue they are doing this solely for the interests of their family (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 163).

2.3.2 Power Politics and Personal Feuds

A further motive for participating in genocide is to “get ahead” politically or to resolve personal feuds that, as such, have nothing to do with the genocide itself but for which the genocide can play a useful part. Although not from the genocide literature, Stathis Kalyvas’s (2006) work on the micro and meso dynamics of civil wars is instructive on this issue. Kalyvas demonstrates for the Greek civil war that “individuals and local communities involved in the war tend to take advantage of the prevailing situation to settle private and local conflicts whose relation to the grand causes of the war or the goals of the belligerents is often tenuous” (2006, 364–365). While the motivations themselves need not be relevant to the overarching conflict per se, local cleavages are “framed in the discursive terminology of the master cleavage” and alliances are formed between actors at the macro, national level and local actors who are in charge of mobilizing participants (364, 366). This logic is not entirely applicable to genocide, as there are generally not two party labels to ascribe to, given the one-sided nature of the phenomenon. However, local leaders can frame themselves as working the genocidal cause in accordance with the national-level ideologies and thus discredit some or all of the rivals around them. On a less political level, genocide can also be used to pursue “personal hatreds, vendettas, and envy’ ” (379), either by discrediting people from the perpetrator group (and maybe even having them killed) or by being able to kill an enemy from the victim group with impunity under the cover story of participating in genocide. While theoretically it is the hallmark of genocide that the victims are targeted purely because of their group membership, it does not rule out that at the individual level certain people are killed by certain perpetrators because of prior conflicts.

These types of motivations have been commonly reported in Rwanda. First, at the local political level, in the time just after the presidential assassination, there was political infighting among Hutu in many areas. As killing Tutsi became the new state policy, local politicians who were able to ally with hard-liners received backing and legitimacy from the center (Straus 2006, 66) and were thus able to discredit and eliminate some of their political rivals who were more moderate Hutu politicians (Mamdani 2001, 218; Straus 2006, 79). In the fading Ottoman Empire, “local elites depended on the centre to secure a power base, and the centre depended on the local elites to carry out genocide. This dynamic gave rise to a mobilization process in which men participated in mass killing in exchange for economic and political benefits granted by the regime” (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 166–167).

Further, people can—out of private conflicts—denounce others who might otherwise have been safe, something that was sometimes done even by sons toward their own fathers in Rwanda during the genocide in order to inherit land. Using the occurrence of mass violence in Rwanda, Jessee (2015, 68) tells the story of Devota, who, even though she knew it was wrong, killed a man because he had refused to lend her money a few months earlier. Similarly, Mart Bax (2000) claims that the dynamics of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia can be primarily traced back to personal vendettas between Franciscan friars and diocesan priests. These acts of denunciation adhere to what Patrick Bergemann (2017) terms the volunteer model of denunciation, which allows the regime particularly efficient social control over its citizens as it relies on their self-interest to find targets.

In Cambodia, a story that I heard several times was that of using genocidal violence to continue personal feuds. In the words of a former Khmer Rouge cadre: “These people had personal conflicts since before civil war battles and so accused these people to have them killed. For example, a Khmer Rouge soldier had a personal conflict with his villager before he ran into the jungle [to join the Khmer Rouge]. After the victory, the Khmer Rouge soldier searched for this person who had had conflict with him by making a fake accusation of wanting political revenge for being in the jungle for so long and then took him to be killed” (KR01B).[21] Although this killing has ideologically nothing to do with reasons propagated for the violence (in this example, political revenge for the hard years in war with Lon Nol), it is using these acts of revenge that are part of the genocide as a cover for people fighting personal battles that predate the genocide and even the civil war. Interestingly, one interviewee takes this occurrence of “local people killing each other” to emphasize that the higher leadership did not know about the killing, in an attempt to take some responsibility for the genocide off their shoulders.

Still on a personal note, but with more general connotations, people were also said to participate in killing as political revenge (KR01B/C, KR06A, KR20B, KR31B). In particular, such revenge was supposed to target former members of the Lon Nol administration and people who were soldiers in the regime as revenge for the hard living conditions people suffered during the civil war. For example, it was cited that people hated the Lon Nol administration because previously it had halted food transports to territories held by the Khmer Rouge (KR01B), and because people who lived in the areas controlled by Lon Nol during that time had been forced to work long, hard hours, were treated badly, and did not receive good food (KR06A). This is also discussed by Hinton, who argues that “Khmer Rouge leaders directly and indirectly called for their followers to take vengeance upon the ‘class enemies’ who had formerly ‘oppressed’ them” (2005, 46); the Khmer Rouge sought to incite anger particularly at the relative poverty of the rural population (59, 82). This idea of “class rage” plays to the culturally local idea of disproportionate revenge, in which one avenged previous slights to one’s face with a significantly worse reaction (47); in order to “prevent the cycle [in which the other then takes revenge again] from continuing, it may be in the avenger’s interest to make a preemptive strike that will mute this desire by fear or death” (69).

2.3.3 Career

A further opportunistic motivation to participate in genocide is in order to receive advantageous, or at least avoid disadvantageous, consequences for one’s career advancement. This is not applicable, particularly, to violence enacted by informal groups at the neighborhood level but more to genocidal violence within military, paramilitary, or police organizations. Members of these organizations have specific interests because of their membership; some will seek to advance their careers, but most will seek to at least avoid demotion or dismissal (Alvarez 2001, 107).

In Cambodia, former cadres claimed that some people participated in the killings either because this would aid them in receiving a promotion (KR02B, KR03A/B, KR19A, KR31B, KR51B) or because disobeying orders to kill would lead to people not being promoted (KR53A).[22] Most explicitly this is described by a former leader of a chhlop unit who said that it was easy for people to be promoted if they voluntarily killed, but that this was not the only way to be promoted and there were other qualifying criteria that could help ensure successful career progression (KR03A). Furthermore, he stated that “if they were cruel, they could receive a position as a unit chief or a big unit chief” (KR03B).

Interestingly, careerism was never stated as a motivation in Browning’s ([1994] 2001, 75) study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, but some who refused did say that they were able to because they did not want a career in the police, and career advancement perspectives were also mentioned as a reason why they believed others had participated. In a previous study of Foreign Office bureaucrats, Browning (1978) argued more strongly that ideology and obedience played only a small part in their role in the Final Solution, and that it was more about advancing their career. Similarly, recruitment as a concentration camp guard, for instance, opened up a new avenue for women to seek upward mobility, which was traditionally possible only through marriage (Bock 1998, 92). Also, so-called Trawniki men, those adjunct forces drawn from conquered territories, and other local supporters in violent roles have been shown to be highly motivated by the promise of cushier office jobs for work well done (Black 2011, 37). Similarly, local officials in the administrations now under German rule were keen to demonstrate their support for and loyalty to the new regime in order to maintain their positions (Solonari 2014, 76). This is also demonstrated in German-occupied Romania, higher up the pecking line, where Major Traian Drăgulescu, who himself was married to a Jewish woman and was not known as anti-Semitic, conveyed orders given to him further down the line of command for “fear of losing his job, of not being promoted or—worse—being sent to the front” (Solonari 2014, 60); however, he did not enforce these orders, meaning that his subordinates’ responses varied strongly from area to area in their implementation (60).

During the Armenian genocide, soldiers who were found to disobey deportation orders for the Armenians were shot; however, the same rules did not count for their officers. Yet it would have impacted officers’ careers so detrimentally that many were motivated to participate despite their scruples (Mann 2005, 164). Also, low-level gendarmes at the time were promised promotions in ranks if they did not “miss their mark” (Balakian 2010, 293). Before and during the Armenian genocide, the central Committee of Union and Progress leadership replaced local officials with individuals who were more loyal to them (Dadrian and Akçam 2011, 307; see also Balakian 2010, 78, 109), giving a strategic incentive to all officials to toe the line and demonstrate their loyalty in order to advance their careers. Furthermore, it has been shown that career aspirations were central to diverging grain procurement levels, and thus contributed to the great famine that was caused as part of the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China (Kung and Chen 2011; Kung 2014).

2.3.4 Perks

An important opportunistic motivation for killing is that the act of killing itself can be rewarded with certain “perks,” or that the killing can ensure continued membership in the group to which perks are automatically distributed. By “perks” I mean some form of material or immaterial benefits that an individual receives either as a positive incentive for a job well done or as a benefit for being in a particular position. For instance, in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, cadres were provided with minimally better food and accommodation than their fellow countrymen and women and thus had an incentive to kill and remain cadres, rather than face the threat of starvation. Similarly, for World War II soldiers in the prisoner of war camps in which the conditions were dire, participating in actions gave them access to better food and clothing and thus served as a strong motivation to “volunteer” (Black 2011, 7); also, by “receiving free rations, medical care, shelter and clothing, the Trawniki men could spend all their pay on other goods, services, and leisure activities, such as alcohol, girlfriends, prostitutes, movies, snacks, and cigarettes” (14).

While some Cambodian interviewees claim that there was no tangible benefit from being in a killing group of the Khmer Rouge (KR15A, KR50A) and that cadres also had a lack of food, similarly hard work, and an equitable danger of being accused of being the enemy (KR50A), others do speak of several perks that cadres in the killing groups were party to. For example, it was felt that cadres of the Khmer Rouge who were prepared to participate in the genocidal system had more comfortable living conditions, had enough to eat, and had to do less work (KR02B), and at the same time the food was better (KR26A). Executioners were also able to—albeit officially not allowed—eat the livers of their victims (KR03B, KR12A), an important source of nourishment and culturally coded source of strength. One individual emphasized the easy work at a security center compared with elsewhere: “I did not think about anything but I felt happy because I came to work in this place where the work was not hard [nor tiring]. Anyone, I think, who came to work in an easier place than before would be happy, because we were young. I did not care about what the place was about” (KR12A). More specifically about the killing group, he tells: “They were a special unit. There were different groups. There were those who were responsible for guarding prisoners. They took those prisoners to work, like to make fertilizer, to plant rice, to clear the forest all day. But for the eight people [of the killing group], they did not do anything. They just waited until whenever prisoners were taken to be killed” (KR12A). Given the horrendous living conditions under the Khmer Rouge, it may be a misnomer to name these factors perks—“survival opportunism” may be more fitting. However, in the presentation of their motivations, these factors were talked about by my interviewees more in the context of perks than of fundamental survival strategies. Other groups within the system of the Khmer Rouge also enjoyed genuine perks. For example, one former Khmer Rouge who was a messenger and was in close contact with the killing group said that one of the main benefits of his position was that he had access to a car and motorbike, which during that time was extremely rare (KR12B).

During the Holocaust, some concentration camp guards would throw the hats of prisoners into the forbidden zone around the camp and force the prisoners to retrieve the headgear. The point was that they would then shoot the “fugitive” and be able to receive a prize in the form of money, promotion, or extra days of leave (Jäger [1967] 1982, 29; see also Kühl 2014, 180).

2.3.5 Membership in the Perpetrator Group

Several further opportunistic reasons for participating in genocide are referred to at some point in the literature and should be mentioned here. However, these factors, unlike any of the others in this model, are not tangential to the motivations for participating in acts of genocide, but instead to motivations for being part of a group of perpetrators. The motivation to participate in the genocidal violence here would be an opportunistic desire to be part of the group, not for social or social-psychological reasons but instead for the rights or privileges this membership entails. In the first two, freedom from prison and safety, membership in the group bestows on the individual a position that enables one to avoid another, worse fate; the third factor mentioned here, sex, refers to the opportunity that an individual is afforded as part of the group to rape or take as a wife a member of the victim group. These are motivations to be in the group, but as a member of this group of perpetrators it may be necessary for the person to participate in killing in some form. Hence, these motivations could be classed as “second-tier” motivations for participating in genocide, as the participation in genocide is merely a means in order to maintain membership in the group.

2.3.5.1 FREEDOM FROM PRISON.   In the Armenian genocide (Balakian 2010, 78; Mann 2005, 167), Rwanda, and Yugoslavia (Mueller 2000, 49, 61), it is reported that convicted criminals were allowed to leave prison before the end of their sentences if they agreed to participate in the genocidal killings. Furthermore, they were promised loot as payment, underlining the already strong opportunistic incentive provided by the prospect of freedom. In Armenia, for instance, these former criminals received one week of training at the Ministry of War before being sent to their posts as cadres of the Special Organization (Teskilat-I Mahsusa) in order to participate in the extermination of the Armenians (Altınay 1919, 23, quoted in Dadrian 1991, 121; see also Balakian 2010, 78).

2.3.5.2 SAFETY.   A prime argument in civil war literature for joining either a government or rebel military faction is that one will be safe from civilian-targeting violence by the other side if one is recruited into military service for a rival—that is, an individual has to weigh to what degree “insurgent collective action is risky relative to nonparticipation” (Kalyvas and Kocher 2007, 179; see also Humphreys and Weinstein 2008, 441). However, following the logic of genocide as one-sided violence, this argument does not work. It is not a motivation to kill, but just to be recruited. On the other hand, it can be a motivation for a member of the victim group if, and only if, the social dynamics of the group mean that the victim can then be rescued from being killed. To my knowledge this highly strategic motivation for participating has been reported only very scarcely in the literature (Fujii 2009, 141; Hatzfeld 2004b, 97), even though for the relevant Tutsi individual he was ultimately killed anyway. Nonetheless, it was this safety that motivated him to participate in genocide. In Cambodia, too, some people felt that being a member of the units that killed promised greater safety for themselves (see vignette on Chandara) and their families (KR02B), particularly if their background included some form of engagement with the Lon Nol regime that they could hopefully gloss over by being particularly enthusiastic cadres of the newly in power Khmer Rouge regime.

2.3.5.3 SEX.   In some contexts, it was seen as impure for perpetrators to have sexual intercourse with members of the victim group, as in Germany, where a significant amount of legislation was passed governing to what degree someone was allowed to be Jewish to be fit for an Aryan. In Rwanda and Bosnia, however, there are reports of men raping women systematically, sometimes stating that this was in order to inseminate the women with Serb or Hutu boys, given that the lineage was passed down in a patrimonial fashion; other times, these rapes were solely for pleasure or humiliation in front of the families of the victims. While some Tutsi women were raped as part of genocidal festivities or drinking sprees, and then killed, some Hutu took the women on, somewhat akin to sex slaves, and thus allowed their lives to be spared, and others even took them as full partners (Hatzfeld 2004a, 104; Nolte 2004, 155–156).

In the Armenian genocide, sexual violence was “primarily a gender-specific way of degrading and killing, and … [was sanctioned] for reasons of securing popular male participation in the extermination process … reminiscent of how the distribution of Armenian wealth and people was used to secure loyalty” (Bjørnlund 2009, 30). This humiliation is also demonstrated by the common practice across other genocides of making women undress before their execution to humiliate them and arouse the perpetrators (Westermann 2016, 12).

These practices of rape gave male perpetrators an incentive to participate, as they had unmitigated access to sexual activity and can “be seen as a result of a thoroughly brutalized environment that left room for local initiatives when it came to the methods of killing and humiliation, initiatives that satisfied individual needs, not only for self-gratification but also for variation” (Bjørnlund 2009, 29). At the individual level and beyond mere sexual craving, the raping allowed some men to gratify their sadistic or dominating desires and provided mutual recognition of masculinity (Bjørnlund 2009, 29). However, many Armenian girls were converted to Islam and married to local Muslims (Göçek 2015, 221; see also Elal 2016). Henry Theriault brings these perspectives together slightly differently: “The pleasure of rape is not sexual, but rather is experienced as sexual because the perpetrator gets sexual pleasure from violent domination. Sexual enslavement of Armenian women and girls, including through coerced or forced marriages, allowed perpetrators a related avenue of dominion that could be extended out in time” (2007, 30).

This option for easy sex, or even for finding a permanent partner, could have been a strong motivation for some men to be members of the genocidal group and thus—to perpetuate this membership—participate in the genocide. At the same time, gang rape communicates certain norms about masculinity and virility, while at the same time increasing social ties between the perpetrators, violently socializing the men into the group (Cohen 2017).

2.3.6 Thrills and Excitement

A further motivation that is enough to provide an impulse for participation but that figures only on the fringe of academic debates on genocide is the excitement or the thrill that people can get out of committing a crime or doing something forbidden. This thrill can help overcome boredom. In search of something arousing and different, people may look out for “exuberant, risky, physically stimulating activities” (Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 215), particularly people who are thrill seekers and who have low self-control and thus do not think ahead to the consequences (217). While the person is participating in genocide, the harm committed to the victim is secondary, and the key to participation is the excitement of participation, oftentimes in the context of a group of friends or comrades.

Furthermore, this is something that can help explain continued participation or even increased violence in due course: “Killing and abuse can become routine, and one way of breaking the monotony, showing off, or distancing oneself from the act is to invent ‘games’ ” (Bjørnlund 2009, 29). This should be differentiated from sadism, as it is not the pleasure found in hurting or killing another person but the excitement or thrill of doing something forbidden, even if the actual act itself is repulsive to the participant. Empirically, this phenomenon is known from general criminology (Katz 1988, 53; Warr 2002, 82) and from studying participation in the First and Second World Wars (E. Jones 2006, 245; Neitzel and Welzer 2011b, 99) or in rebellion movements (Askew and Helbardt 2012, 801; Nussio 2020). There is also evidence for the excitement felt in hunting Jews during actions in the East (Du Preez 1994, 87), the enjoyment of chasing Tutsi (Hatzfeld 2004a, 54), or the fun of seeing how many Armenians a single bullet could penetrate (Rygaard 1935, 165, referenced in Bjørnlund 2009, 29).

2.3.7 Sadism and Power

Departing slightly from the simple assumption of other opportunistic motivations that the expected utility of participating is larger than the expected costs of participating, we now come to sadism. Sadism is “the derivation of pleasure from inflicting harm” (Baumeister 2002, 254) or “the joy of having taken control of the experience of victimhood by inflicting it upon another. Above all, sadism is about control” (Alford 1997, 28). It is classified here as an opportunistic motivation because it is the pleasure in the actual act of harming or in the control over the other that motivates participation and thus provides a utility to the perpetrator, rather than the identity of the victim being at its core.

The psychological logic behind sadism is drawn from opponent theory, which suggests that after any form of aversion (here committing horrific acts of killing), one’s body attempts to restore itself to one’s normal self, and this restoration process is a pleasurable feeling. While it would go too far to go into the bio-psychological details of this (for an introduction, see Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 213; Dutton 2007, 138), the restoration process and the pleasurable feeling associated with it can become addictive, making the individual continually want to inflict harm on others in order to subsequently enjoy the pleasurable feeling of the restorative reaction (Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 213–214). This process does not occur for all people, however—in fact, for very few indeed—and a possible mediating factor for most people could be guilt or empathic distress (Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 213; Dutton 2007, 138). Therefore, it is possible that some of the perpetrators of genocide felt a strong aversion to their deeds to start with but began to enjoy them increasingly over time, and so sadism gradually became a motivation. Interestingly, in the Milgram authority experiments, obedience was radically reduced if participants were told that the confederate wanted to be shocked, as this would make the confederates masochistic and the participants sadistic.

While the presence of individual sadists is documented across various cases (Hatzfeld 2004a, 140; Hinton 2005, 235; Segev [1988] 1992, 46–47; Smeulers 2015, 250; Valentino 2004, 40), most agree that the number of sadistic perpetrators is actually tiny (Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 254; Mueller 2000, 55; Pohl 2004, 163) and, more importantly, that perpetrators were not selected due to their sadistic potential (Kühl 2014, 62). Nonetheless, it is a motivation that can provide sufficient impetus for participation to merit inclusion in the Complexity of Evil model.

Others suggest that sadists will be selected out of genocidal killing groups because they are more difficult to control, given that they derive pleasure from the pain and killing itself, and are largely independent of who the victim is (Bauman 1989, 20; Zimbardo 2008, 290). Empirically, selecting out is demonstrated by Browning ([1994] 2001; see also Bauman 1989, 20) for the Reserve Police Battalion 101, in which he posited only 1 out of 500 men was sadistic. Popular reports of genocide often emphasize this factor much more strongly, highlighting perpetrators laughing and enjoying the killing. However, this discrepancy could be derived from the fact that genocide is often evaluated from the victim perspective, which may misinterpret some gestures as sadistic (Baumeister and Campbell 1999, 212). As with all other motivations, sadism alone cannot explain any genocide in its entirety, but it does provide an explanation for some people’s participation; and furthermore, it helps make sense of some of the gratuitous violence and cruel practices committed by perpetrators (Baumeister 2002, 256).

A second argument in this section is that not only is sadism the enjoyment of inflicting pain, but the enjoyment of exercising power over someone else may also be a motivation for someone to participate in genocide. Central to the work of Sémelin (2005a) is the idea of omnipotence. He argues that “the act of massacring is the most spectacular practice which those in power have at their disposal to assert their ascendancy by marking, martyrising and destroying the bodies of those identified as their enemies” (Sémelin 2005a, 6). Furthermore, Wolfgang Sofsky (1993) talks about the “absolute power” that guards in concentration camps have over the prisoners and that this can fuel the bestiality of the killings. Lifton nicely complicates this a little when he talks of omnipotence and impotence, highlighting that Auschwitz doctors were located in a space that afforded them absolute power over their patients, but at the same time had no power whatsoever to change the situation in which they found themselves as the realization dawned on them that they were no more than “a powerless cog in a vast machine” ([1986] 2000, 447). Finally, it has been argued that the escalation of shocks in Milgram’s experiments does not represent sadistic motives (or any other here presented, for that matter) “but rather … the energizing sense of one’s domination and control over others at that moment in time” (Zimbardo 2008, 300).

A recurring theme in my Cambodian interviewees’ narratives about the killing groups or individual members of those groups is that of cruelty and that there were cruel individuals within the group (KR03B, KR28A, KR31A). Often it was the unit chiefs who were cruel (KR03B), presumably because these are the people who are promoted accordingly, as discussed previously. The “perk” of being able to eat the victims’ livers is not only related to the nutritional value attached to this practice (particularly in the context of such extreme malnourishment during the Khmer Rouge regime) but also related to “the belief that eating the liver enabled people to cut off their heart. It was true that people ate people’s liver.… They ate human liver because they wanted to prevent themselves from being shocked by killing people. Then they could kill people. They wanted to change themselves to be able to kill people without pity. They were cruel. They were really cruel.… [Eating liver made them] more cruel.… When they ate more, their eyes became red. When people saw them, they were afraid of them.… It was only executioners who ate human liver” (KR03B). Thus, people ate livers specifically to be crueler, to emotionally decouple themselves from the act of killing and more specifically from their victims (thus cutting off their hearts). It is ironic, but it was possible to exert cruelty as a means to make future killing easier, as one wanted to kill to eat the liver so that it would be easier to kill in the future.

2.4  CONCLUSION

This chapter has delved into the heart of the topic of why people participate in genocide, differentiating between motivations that stem from the dynamics in the perpetrator ingroup, others that are focused on the victim outgroup, and those that are focused on the opportunistic motivations of the participating individual. This way of categorizing the various motivations is appropriate as it emphasizes the importance of the group, both the perpetrator group and the victim group, and intergroup dynamics between them.

It would have been possible to group these motivations differently—for example, motivations that derive their power from the lure of actually participating and those that motivate through the individual wanting to avoid the consequences of not participating. Motivations, which drive toward the participation itself, are primarily opportunistic motivations by which people can fulfill their sadistic pleasures, fulfill a need for excitement, loot, or get ahead in their careers or in their personal relations, as well as ideological motivations by which the individual wants the victims dead because of their membership in the victim group. Also, the motivation of gaining status or taking on a role is one focused on actually wanting to participate. On the other hand, social dynamics within the perpetrator group are primarily about avoiding the consequences of nonparticipation and being excluded from the social group or good relations to an authority or peers in the motivations of conformity, peer pressure, and obedience to authority; further, avoiding the dire consequences of coercion falls within this category. Emotions can fall into either category—for instance, anger motivates one to participate, while fear gains its traction through the anticipation of the dangers to one’s group and oneself through not participating.

VIGNETTE  III

Sokphary

A FEMALE UNIT LEADER WITH A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR HER SUBORDINATES

I JOINED THE Khmer Rouge when Sihanouk called us to do so over the radio. I wanted to bring back Sihanouk, but after a few months I realized that the Khmer Rouge were not going to do this. I worked in a hospital between 1971 and 1975 before I married my husband. We are married until today, but at the time it was a forced marriage, probably because we were a little older—I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight and my husband was thirty. So Ângkar arranged for us to be married in a wedding of altogether ten couples, most of us Khmer Rouge cadres. After the wedding, I did not meet my husband for one year as we avoided each other and there was no feeling of love. Many people did this when they were forced to marry. After a year, though, Ângkar forced us to live the life of a married couple. They even pointed a gun at me, threatening me if I were to refuse.

In 1975 I was then appointed as deputy chief of a female unit at the commune level and made chief when I was able to show my ability to educate my unit members in talking about the politics of Ângkar. Our main task as a unit was to build a canal, and as chief I sometimes worked with them, but mostly I just moved from one subunit to another and supervised their work. As chief I had the respect of my unit members and was able to educate them on how to survive. They were very grateful to me because I did not force them to work too hard and helped them to survive, and still until today they tell me that they love me for this.

In my unit we ate only a bowl of rice and vegetable soup without meat, so sometimes we had to steal food because we were hungry. Sometimes I would order members of the unit whom I trusted to find fish and then we would secretly eat one or two of these fish at night. If they had been caught, I would have been killed, but fortunately, none of my members were ever caught stealing food.

Normally the unit chief would report to the chhlop, but during that time also all unit members were indoctrinated to spy on each other, and this is how the chhlop would find out about mistakes and enemies. Also the chhlop would come to spy on units, and when they arrested them later, they would “transfer” them to other units. This happened to another chief of a unit of one hundred members, Lai. She was transferred and never returned; I can only assume she was killed.

Some in my unit were taken away by the chhlop and killed, but of the one hundred members of my unit I was able to save all of them but two. In other units I heard that the unit chief was cruel and that many of the unit members were killed—this means that they did not protect them like I did. In some cases, I could save my people; for example, if they were working too slowly and were then accused of being lazy, I could defend them and say that they were actually doing their best, and this would save them. But for two of them I could not defend them because I knew that if I defended them I would be accused myself. It was beyond my abilities to do anything to help them. For example, one of my unit members repeatedly became ill; she was not pretending, she was genuinely ill, but she was accused of not trying to work hard for Ângkar. I tried to defend her at first, but eventually I gave up when I realized that it was pointless and I would not be able to save her and that I may also be accused myself. I think that the chhlop members killed because it was their duty to do so. It was part of the social order to do so.

I worked in my position as unit chief until I had my first baby in 1978, then I could no longer fulfill my tasks and was disposed of as a unit chief. I think they wanted to get rid of me because I had supported my unit members so much and defended them. Then I became a normal person and lost my privileges. I was spied on and feared for my security.

Today she lives in Kandal province and is still married to the man she was forcefully married to under the Khmer Rouge.

CHAPTER   3

Facilitative Factors

HAVING DISCUSSED MOTIVATIONS for participation in genocide, I now turn to those factors that themselves are not sufficient for causing someone to participate in genocide but that can make participation more likely in the presence of one of the motivations. These factors have an impact on the participation decision, although none of them would suffice alone. Although many of the factors discussed here have been mentioned as causes or reasons for participation in genocide throughout the literature, I believe it is important to carefully differentiate these different types of factors—indeed, I believe this is one of my main contributions to the literature. Thus, many of the factors here will be familiar to the scholar of genocide, and it does not relegate the importance of the factor by stripping it of its causal effect. Instead, I hope that it brings more clarity into what impact we can reasonably assume the factors have.

Besides the following long list of facilitative factors that increase the motivation for and likelihood of people participating in genocide, there are also a number of factors that can inhibit participation, thus reducing an individual’s likelihood of participation. These facilitative and inhibitive factors work against each other in making an individual with a motivation to participate more or less likely to engage in actions of perpetration. Predominantly these inhibitive factors are just the opposite of some of the facilitative factors presented here: proximity rather than distance, personal agency and prominence rather than group participation and anonymity, strong moral norms dictating pacifism or the value of human life, weak leadership, the presence of dissenters demonstrating the existent possibility of nonparticipation, a real risk of judicial prosecution, and so on. All of these are implicitly included in the Complexity of Evil model, and there is little analytic value in repeating them turned upside down, so this chapter will focus on facilitative factors.

3.1  IDEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK

As suggested in the previous chapter when discussing ideologies, I argued that ideologies play a relatively small part as motivations for people to participate in genocide; however, they certainly have a strong impact on participation. What I mean by this is that ideologies are seldom the motivation, the actual impulse for action, particularly not for low-level perpetrators as being studied here; instead, ideologies provide a framework within which it becomes necessary and good to kill the victim group (Eisner 2009, 53). This role of ideologies in reframing the genocidal violence as morally legitimate and essentially necessary for the survival of the perpetrators renders ideologies significant for understanding the big picture of participation, even if they are not prominent as a stand-alone motivation. This will only be possible when “the ideology in question resonates deeply and existentially with psychological dispositions” of the individual (Vetlesen 2005, 50). Instead of necessitating disengagement between the individual morals and the stipulated activities, as discussed in the following section, an individual’s desires, needs, and anxieties can be harnessed through a moral justification of the act of killing expected of him or her. This occurs commonly as a gradual moral transformation that little by little makes the killing seem morally right (Staub 2014, 503). This moral justification seeks not only to make participation appear necessary and justifiable, but for less ardent supporters it can at least provide a way of communicating that the actions are permissible and acceptable. This is particularly important for those individuals who have opportunistic or ingroup-focused motivations and see the ideology not even as encouraging but as allowing them to participate in order to pursue their other motivations.

As Kjell Anderson (2018) argues, these rationalization strategies are tied strongly to the evolved moral framework and their interlinkage with the state that propagates them. Anderson (2018, 8) suggests that in genocide, “legitimate authorities may endorse criminal behaviour. The conflict between previously held moral beliefs and the evolved moral context is resolved through perpetrator rationalizations. These techniques of neutralization allow perpetrators to revise and reframe previously held moral rules so that they are consistent with perpetrators’ own actions in the evolved moral context. This moral context is inculcated through state power.” This points to the importance of the changed moral context and its impact on the individual actor’s own moral codex and the realm of what appears as possible and legitimate action (Anderson 2018). Furthermore, ideologies “provide individuals with a sense of identity, inspiration (including hope), certainty, and rationalizations for morally repugnant acts. Ideology conveys the perpetrators’ place in history” (74). Adopting Sykes and Maza, Anderson (2018, 173) argues to differentiate between a reversal of morality (justifications, discussed here) and reductions of moral cost (excuses, discussed here as moral disengagement). It is important to emphasize that this is not a deterministic process, but that the moral context provides a changed incentive structure that different individuals will react to in different ways depending on their personal dispositions (Anderson 2018, 93).

However, this ideological framework is not just provided externally at the societal level but also constituted through an individual’s ethical framework, exemplified in Monroe’s identity theory of moral choice, which suggests that each person has an ethical scaffolding that is filled with life experiences and values:

Our individual ethical frameworks in turn produce an ethical perspective through which each of us views, processes, and makes sense of events and their relation to us in a manner that particularizes the psychological influences on moral choice. The resulting ethical perspective is both a general tendency to see the world and one’s self in it and a specific way of viewing a given situation at any one point in time. Moral acts are produced by the last part of this psychological process, in which our ethical perspectives determine whether and how we will act by establishing both a menu of choice options and a sense of how another’s suffering pertains to us. (2011, 248–249)

This perspective is helpful as it delineates how individuals can come to accept categorizations of other human beings in ethical terms that relate to their self-perceptions and identities. The resulting perspectives guide their interpretation of the world around them as well as what choices they believe are available to them. And given the longue durée of these ethical perspectives, many of these processes will occur subconsciously (Monroe 2011, 283).

In both the section on moral justifications and that on threat construction I will devote more space to the case of Cambodia than I have done in other sections, as the justificatory strategies are multifaceted and the construction of the victim group as an enemy occurred along multiple lines and was absolutely arbitrary, making it an interesting case to study in some additional detail for this facilitative factor.

3.1.1 Moral Justifications

One central moral justification for eliminating a victim group is blaming the victim, the belief that the victims brought their annihilation on themselves, that they deserve their deaths for some reason (Waller 2002, 212). This justification is particularly effective when the blame attributed to the victim group is combined with a rhetoric of threat, portraying the victims as imminently dangerous (see section 3.1.2). Thus, one becomes morally exonerated for killing the victims, as it can be framed as self-defense or dictated by the difficult circumstances (Bandura 1999, 203). Being prepared to kill members of the other group becomes morally positive when it is “necessary for the safety and security of one’s own group” (Waller 2002, 186), and thus facilitates participation for other reasons, or can be a motivation in and of itself (in the Complexity of Evil model it would be classed as fear). By portraying the killing as necessary and in the service of a higher cause, the otherwise heinous act becomes acceptable; sometimes it can even go beyond being justifiable and become “an outright moral imperative” (Waller 2002, 186). In this context, David Harrisville (2018) emphasizes for the Wehrmacht soldiers who committed atrocities the importance of repeated justification of various facets of their actions by which the individuals managed to reframe the context of the war as “righteous” and their actions within this as necessary; in this way, they were able to cultivate a self-image of themselves as “decent men, loving family members, and respected members of a soldierly community by embracing military values and through their interactions with comrades and relatives” (Harrisville 2018, 129).

Further, moral justification can occur when the killing is stipulated as morally necessary or virtuous through a propagated ideology—particularly, moral justification can be gained if it is framed religiously as divine legitimation (Sémelin 2005a, 256). While the organizational framework for genocide can be erected relatively easily through the state apparatus, it is important that the ideas behind the genocide and the concurrent morals resonate with the population, or at least with the subset of the population who will be participating in its implementation. As this is normally not the case, it is important for any government or other authority to not just legalize but also legitimate the genocidal killing and thus provide a justificatory framework with which the perpetrators can identify and to which they can refer. The process of legalization is important, too, however, as it also contributes to the overall legitimation (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 58).[1] Alex Alvarez (2001) identifies six “techniques of neutralization” that fit well in this framework of justification: denial of responsibility, in which perpetrators can say they had no choice; denial of injury through euphemistic language (see section 3.2.4); denial of victim through placing blame firmly on the victim’s shoulders (see section 3.1.2); condemning the condemners—for instance, other countries critical of treatment of Jews that were nonetheless hesitant about raising immigration quotas for Jews during the Second World War; appeal to higher loyalties toward the nation; and denial of humanity (see section 3.2.1).

In the study of social dominance theory, the idea of legitimizing myths was developed by Sidanius and Pratto (1999). Legitimizing myths “consist of attitudes, values, beliefs, stereotypes, and ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for the social practices that distribute social value within the social system” (Sidanius/Pratto 1999, 45); the “use of the term myth is not meant to imply that these beliefs are epistemologically true or false, but rather that they appear true because enough people in the society behave as if they are true” (104). While in the original context this focuses on group-based social inequalities and equalities and practices of social domination, it is easily applied to the ultimate group-based domination, that of annihilating the socially dominated group in genocide. Legitimizing myths justify social inequality, here the position of the victim group. The potency of such legitimizing myths manifests itself, in the context of this book, in how the myths impact the individual and help justify the genocide. The higher the degree of consensus in the society, the more the myths’ potency is enhanced, particularly if they are accepted by the victim group also (106). A legitimizing myth is also particularly potent if it is “strongly associated with and well anchored to other parts of the ideological, religious, or aesthetic components of a culture” or appears to represent a high degree of certainty or “truth,” often suggested through religious or scientific validation (47).[2]

Once the killing has started, this attribution of blame to the victims is exacerbated by the so-called just world phenomenon, which refers to a human tendency to believe that the world is just and that because of this “people get what they deserve and deserve what they get” (Waller 2002, 213; see also Staub 2002, 22). Thus, if a group is suffering and being killed, it must have done something or have a certain character that legitimizes this killing. While obviously tautological, it is nonetheless a psychological mechanism that helps facilitate moral alleviation. In essence, this is a mechanism with which to protect ourselves from the fear that something similar could ever happen to us; by believing that the victims are entirely to blame for their ordeal, it allows the perpetrators to feel safe (Waller 2002, 217).

In Cambodia, the system was, to a certain degree, self-perpetuating and reinforced perceptions of enemies. Anyone who was arrested as an enemy had to have committed the mistakes they were accused of and must be guilty (KR29A, KR29B), because Ângkar was never wrong and thus as soon as they were arrested, the arrest must have been correct. A former S-21 guard puts it like this: “Those who were arrested from outside to put inside this prison, all had committed mistakes. Before they arrested those people, they had information about [their membership in] the string. They did not just arrest people who had done nothing. It was known from confessions.… All prisoners had made mistakes. They interrogated those people. Sometimes, they interrogated one person and they could arrest two more people from the confession” (KR24A).

This means that people who were certainly not CIA operatives were arrested on these charges and then tortured until they gave the names of others in their string, thus falsely admitting their guilt themselves but also incriminating others who were also not CIA or other operatives. These people were then arrested with the same degree of certainty that Ângkar was right, and the process began anew.

These moral justifications are often provided as a narrative by the genocidal elites that the individual participant or groups of participants can accept within their own moral framework. This works particularly well when the discursive space is monopolized by these thoughts and alternative moral interpretations do not exist (Fujii 2004, 101). If there are counterdiscourses that claim immorality of the actions, it becomes much more difficult for the individual to morally justify the action and cognitive dissonance is likely to appear. In Armenia, the propagated importance of the Islamic faith (see also section 4.1.3) played an important role, first in legitimizing the massacres, but also at a local level religious authorities “played a pivotal role in motivating and legitimizing the massacres” (Dadrian 1995, 150; see also Balakian 2010, 146) by providing religious absolution for the crimes committed. As the annihilation of the Armenians was declared a religious war (jihad), it legitimized killing people as a normal act of war, or even declaring it to be a “sacred religious obligation” (Balakian 2010, 145).

A further form of moral justification is to show the danger that the victims are purported to pose in order to emphasize the necessity and legitimacy of eradicating them. In distancing herself from the debate of dehumanization as a necessary condition for genocide occurrence, Rhiannon Neilsen (2015) has introduced the concept of toxification. More than dehumanization, toxification explains the urgency and necessity of killing the victims, while both dehumanization and toxification can explain how it becomes permissible and legitimate to kill the victims. Neilsen differentiates two types of toxification. The “toxic to the self” variation has “perpetrators become convinced that the victims will, without fail and given the chance, murder the perpetrators.… Perpetrators subscribe to a kill before being killed zero-sum logic” (87). “Toxic to the ideal” is the more abstract form by which victims are seen as “toxic to the furtherance of human civilization, the perpetrators’ ideational reality or utopia, or the body politic.… Victims are branded as necessarily fatal and equaling death for the body politic and/or the perpetrators’ society and future that signals the need for extermination” (87).

Toxification has been shown to be prevalent at the macro level as a framing ideology in Rwanda and the Holocaust (Neilsen 2015, 87–89), as well as in Cambodia (Williams and Neilsen 2019); and while this may also resonate at the micro level and be perceived as morally justifying, there is almost no evidence of it having the impact of a full motivation (Williams and Neilsen 2019). Toxification is referred to by my interviewees, however, seldom referring to explicitly toxic terminologies. An exception is, for instance, a former militiaman who subsequently was made head of the collective committee who described discourses about enemies at the time as referring to an “internal illness” (KR20A), and a former military messenger and secretary who said that others in his unit would state that “the enemy will destroy the internal revolution; they were the virus in the revolution” (KR51B). Another person remembered the word “parasite” being used to refer to Buddhist monks and educated people, as they themselves contributed nothing to the community and lived off the work of other people (KR53A). This medical jargon was continued in how to deal with these enemies, as a former village chief and soldier from Kampong Thom explained the logic of “killing enemies in order to prevent it from infecting us” (KR31A). In notebook entries of two former Khmer Rouge cadres there is a warning of “a poisonous trick of the enemy” (Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21571) and the demand to “make the enemy be a rat surrounded by people who destroy it” (Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21598). Most references relevant to the concept of toxification, however, referred more broadly to the idea of lethality to the ideal, exemplified in the use of the terms “internal enemies” and “national traitors” of the revolution or of Ângkar (see also section 2.2.1).[3]

As discussed in section 2.2.1, the ideologies of the Khmer Rouge were not a reason why most people joined the organization originally, and they also do not constitute a real reason for almost all to engage in violence for the regime. Nonetheless, ideologies play an important part in the genocidal process as they create a framework within which, first, the actions of the Khmer Rouge are defined as morally justifiable, even morally positive; second, the role of being Khmer Rouge has positive connotations and thus the tasks are morally not reprehensible; and third, the victims are portrayed as justifiably killed, they are constructed as enemies, and they are seen as people whom it is not only permissible to kill but legitimate and necessary to kill. In line with this, some interviewees speak about a different morality at the time and that in this system they did not think it was wrong; this is then reinforced by a positive perception of the Khmer Rouge and a thinking that the revolution and the Khmer Rouge was “correct because there were no robbery, no suppressing class and no corruption” (KR31B).[4]

The Khmer Rouge managed this by creating a context in which its new moral code became absolute, and as described in section 2.1.1 the will and moral of Ângkar and its resultant orders came to take on law-like characteristics (KR12A, KR19A, KR07A). Former cadres of the Khmer Rouge do not specify that people participated in killing because they themselves wanted the victim group dead, but nonetheless they did say that killers exhibited a belief that it was good and right to kill these people (KR03B, KR31B) and further that they “loved the revolution” (KR51B). What does come up regularly in narratives about the Khmer Rouge regime is that there was a strong indoctrination (or education in the terminology of the time) for an alternative moral code that encompassed strong “anger” at the internal enemies who were to be killed (KR02B, KR03B, KR11B, KR19A, KR20B, KR49A, KR51A, KR53A) or that they were “educated to be cruel people” (KR03B). Again, it is the illiterate (KR02B, KR53A) and the young (KR49A) who are deemed most impressionable to such indoctrination.

Most significantly for the topic of ideology and moral justification under the Khmer Rouge, certain elements of the Khmer Rouge propaganda were just accepted by the cadres as being true. Most prominently, and of most importance here, are the following two examples of this acceptance: first, the Khmer Rouge’s definition of the Vietnamese as enemies and particularly the danger that they posed to the population if they were to win, and the viciousness to be expected by them was accepted (on enemy construction, see section 3.1.2). In a detailed analysis of Khmer Rouge nationalism, Keo Duong (2018) shows how the anti-Vietnamese chauvinistic nationalism propagated by the regime is linked to and tied back to long-standing anti-Vietnamese stereotypes and historical grievances and is then readily accepted by the cadres of the Khmer Rouge. A second example in which the propaganda of the Khmer Rouge was accepted is that of the construction of internal enemies, as described in section 3.1.2. Some cadres I interviewed did not condone the killing in the Khmer Rouge time, but many of them did accept the categorizations of people as internal enemies, the danger they posed, and the general paranoia, as discussed above. These people accepted the Khmer Rouge’s definition of the situation and its concept of the enemy, and this justified and legitimized the killing as it was occurring around them. It was, however, not their own motivation to become members of units tasked with killing, nor within these positions their motivation to fulfill this role and kill the victims.

One mechanism that strongly influenced people’s perceptions of the regime and their acceptance of some of its worldview was that of regular meetings, in particular so-called self-criticism meetings. Meetings were a standard part of everyday life, and people had to participate actively. According to my interviewees, there were daily meetings on work assignments and achievements of the day, a relatively mundane and organizational format, although even here there would often be ideological input. Furthermore, once or twice per week (some people report these to be more often) every member of the Khmer Rouge had to attend self-criticism meetings in small groups, normally of around three people. In this type of meeting they had to report to their fellow cadres the mistakes they had committed since the past meeting, and also report on the mistakes they perceived the others to have committed. It was a very fine line between finding mistakes to admit to that were grave enough to show that one is taking the meeting seriously and knows that one is fallible, but definitely not so grave that one would be punished for having committed the mistake.

Each group had to demonstrate that it had made mistakes, as “during the meeting if no mistakes were reported very often, they would say that this group did not look for the enemy or sided with the enemy and that is why no mistake was found. During that time the revolutionaries really loved the revolution” (KR51B).[5] Thus, it is maybe unsurprising that many people invented the mistakes they told in order to ensure that they were of an appropriate gravity (KR51B). Commonly mentioned small mistakes in the interviews were laziness or that one had not worked properly (KR49A, KR51B, KR52A), that one had gone to the toilet for too long (KR51B), that one had broken a rule (KR49A), that one had broken tools belonging to the collective (KR49A), or that one had eaten alone outside the framework of collective meals (KR49A, KR51B); however, some of these mistakes would also have a cost for some people, particularly new people (their lives under certain circumstances). After the criticism, cadres were supposed to accept the mistake they had committed and work to change their lifestyle (KR49A, KR52A), all in an effort to “build oneself” in the image of the ideal revolutionary (KR52A). These mistakes were then reported back to the leader, and, depending on the situation, the number of mistakes, and the relationship between the individual and the leader, mistakes of varying gravity could have differing consequences, with people close to their leaders often being able to get away with worse or more frequent mistakes (KR49A, KR51B). Given that it was the leader’s discretion that decided the fate of those who made mistakes, the leader could transfer them within the unit to more menial tasks, such as cooking (KR49A). The leaders could let their authority play and exert their influence in these situations, reinforcing the impression of the omnipotence of Ângkar. Underlying these self-criticism meetings was a belief within Ângkar that everyone committed mistakes, except those who were already dead (KR51B), and that it was necessary to identify who was intentionally making mistakes in order to undermine the revolution as opposed to those who were genuinely making mistakes. This constant dealing with the mistakes one had to claim to have committed and an interminable search for enemies had an effect on people’s perceptions of the regime, and to varying degrees they accepted the regime’s view of the world.

Common to all of these presented debates is that ideology itself draws not just on its content when we discuss its influence on people, but also from the “influence of social factors giving meaning to ideological labels and direction to ideological group members” (Devine 2015, 511), as do the actions of individuals render these ideologies meaningful (Anderson 2018). Thus, ideologies are transported and discussed in social relationships, and they are interpreted discursively and relationally. So even here ideologies can have different meanings in different social settings, and the social group becomes important in the salience that an ideology can take on.

In this context, the role of indoctrination and who is transporting an ideology is important. In Rwanda, the media have often been argued to be pivotal to the transportation of Hutu Power ideology (Fujii 2004; Yanagizawa-Drott 2014), but here, too, the message propagated by the media was negotiated differently in different local contexts (Straus 2007b). While in Nazi Germany indoctrination was widespread and common—we need think only of the Hitler Youth and the Volksempfänger as two well-known examples—it is worthwhile noting that many of the perpetrators, particularly those in the reserve police battalions, were not exposed to National Socialist propaganda during their formative years and were thus possibly not as strongly influenced by the propaganda (Kühl 2014, 64). In Cambodia, however, there existed explicit policies to target children because they could most easily be indoctrinated (Ea and Sim 2001; Etcheson 1984, 160; Williams 2018a). On the other hand, Guenther Lewy discusses that

correspondence from the eastern front shows us how successful Nazi propaganda had been in spreading anti-Semitic teaching. Most of the writers of these surviving letters were lower-ranking officers or common soldiers who expressed their loathing of Jews in simple but graphic language. These sentiments undoubtedly were genuinely felt rather than produced on demand. Nazi censorship was concerned with incidents of criticism, not with the absence of Nazi phraseology. The letters reflected the conviction that the Jews represented a dangerous subhuman lot, and this demonization legitimized their murder. (2017, 48)

In the end, the aim of this indoctrination is to create a framework within which the discrimination and targeting of the victim group appear legitimate. Kühl chooses Niklas Luhmann’s concept of a Konsensfiktion (a consensual fiction) to explain the widespread tacit acceptance of anti-Semitism, stating that when one encounters others, there exist mutual expectations of the acceptance of this Konsensfiktion and that it necessitates explicit registration of dissent, if one does not subscribe to it; otherwise the expectation remains that one buys into this Konsensfiktion (Kühl 2014, 102–104). In this context, one cannot then expect that discriminatory slurs would be welcomed by all in any context, but it was safe to expect that no one would protest them (209). Tied to this is the gradual emergence of a context within which it is possible and legitimate to talk about the ever stronger discrimination of the Jews and even the tolerance of state-led but illegal assaults (108). Thus, indoctrination could have the effect not of actually motivating the perpetrators but shifting the meaning of their participation into an indifference that made it seem as part of their “usual” repertoire of tasks within their roles (114).

3.1.2 The Threatening Enemy

The idea of a threatening enemy as an ideological framework that can facilitate participation is tied in with the concept of imagined fear already mentioned in the previous chapter on ideologies as a motivation (see section 2.2.1). Sémelin (2005a, 16) describes how the “imaginary rhetoric first aims to transform the collective anxiety which has more or less permeated the population into a feeling of intense fear with regard to an enemy they set out to depict as being highly dangerous.” This depiction of the imaginaire will only work if it is grounded in reality, not only building on manufactured propaganda but relating it to reality in order to, in turn, distort this reality with the imaginary (21). At the same time as being rooted in reality, an ideology is required to “forge—or to recreate—a new reference vocabulary harking back to ideas as much as to symbols and myths” (59). Thus, if an external ideology is imported, it becomes very important for this to be adapted to the cultural context, as well as to this country’s history and symbols (59). This becomes particularly salient when it is laced with discourses of purity and impurity (197).

Taking this further, on the issue of threat construction, specifically McDoom (2012) proposes that in a context of uncertainty an ideology can unfold along a four-point model in reaction to a security threat. First, in the face of a growing threat (or the perception of such a threat), the boundaries between groups will become activated, and thus a conflict can become perceived as ethnic, racial, class based, or any other sorting criterion; this boundary activation is named as an “us-vs.-them” mentality by Waller (2002). Second, in the context of a rising threat, the relations to the other group are framed against negative historical narratives and cultural beliefs, and derogative or fearful references about the outgroup increase (Staub 2002, 19; see also Sémelin 2005a, 95; Sternberg 2003). This “xenophobia” (Waller 2002, 155) is connected also to a desire for social dominance over the outgroup and is particularly effective in creating meaning for the acts when it enables a “fusion” of historical memories with nationalist assertions of atrocities today (Lieberman 2006, 300). Third, in the course of this negative branding of the outgroup, its members become perceived as an increasingly homogenous and deindividuated mass; consequently, as the group is perceived as a threat, even unarmed members of the group are seen as a threat. And fourth, given the rising threat by the outgroup, the demand for ingroup loyalty rises. This ideological process of outgroup devaluation and increased identification with the ingroup leads to a strong differentiation between the groups and can be seen as a precondition for many of the facilitative factors described below. This process reflects well the evidence provided in a range of studies on violence generally (Fearon and Laitin 2000), and in testimonies from Rwanda (Fletcher 2007, 31), Armenia (Göçek 2015, 225), and Cambodia (Hinton 2005, 59), which show that hatred was a product of the genocidal situation rather than actually predating it.

By comparing the killing with the threat of what could purportedly happen to oneself and one’s family if the genocide did not occur one can justify it; this advantageous or exonerating comparison relativizes the horrific scope of the actions being committed (Bandura 1999, 196; Waller 2002, 190). This discussion of threat construction within genocidal ideology resonates with work on the power of collective threats in mobilizing to collective violence in the context of civil wars (see Shesterinina 2016), and, further, can draw and has drawn much from the theory of securitization, most explicitly when discussed by Arne Johan Vetlesen (2005). Vetlesen argues, following the Copenhagen School who have laid the conceptual foundations of securitization theory, that the assertion of a threat can be made on behalf of different groups (state, nation, religion, economy, etc.), and depending on what form this takes, the resultant appeal can elevate this to “an existential issue whose resolution will be decisive for the destiny of all those in the group … associated with the [threatened] object” (2005, 168). As an existential issue, “extraordinary measures” become necessary to protect the object under threat (normally the group), thus legitimizing political actors to act outside the political framework and granting them unlimited power to deal with the threat—“it is by labeling something a security issue that it becomes one” (Vetlesen 2005, 168). Vetlesen (2005) argues that genocidal ideologies build on the idea of securitization as they mobilize politically along this distinction between threat and security.

I would now like to discuss—again in slightly more depth—the Cambodian case, as the Khmer Rouge identified enemies in many different forms. During the civil war and at the beginning of Democratic Kampuchea, the enemy was defined as anyone who was tied to the Lon Nol regime as a soldier, policeman, or bureaucrat. After September 1976, the focus then turned to “microbes” within the party itself, referring to them mostly as internal enemies. People were labeled as traitors of the revolution, traitors of Ângkar, or national traitors (KR03B, KR06A, KR07A, KR24A, KR26A, KR29A, KR29B, KR30B, KR41B, KR48A, KR51A, KR51B, KR51 Notebook, KR53A, KR54A, KR54B, KR55A); as agents of the CIA, the KGB (Komitet gossudarstwennoi besopasnosti [Committee for State Security]), or the Vietnamese secret service (KR06A, KR09A, KR15A, KR20A, KR31B, KR34A, KR41A, KR41B, KR47B, KR48A, KR51 Notebook, KR51A, KR51B, KR53A, KR54B);[6] as political prisoners (KR49B, KR54A); or as people from the free world (having negative connotations of going against the collective revolution) (KR51B). Enemies were divided up into various categories including imperialists, royalists who support Sihanouk, bourgeoisie or capitalists, and reactionaries (KR03B, KR07A, KR31A, KR34A, KR43A, KR49A, KR53A); other groups include the monks and intellectuals who do not normally figure in lists of enemy classes but are regularly referred to as enemies. The good revolutionary groups are the farmers and the workers, and to a certain degree the anuthon, the middle class who is “not a suppressing class, but was also not suppressed; they can be self-supporting” (Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21566); that is, they can support their own lifestyle without preying on the farmers and workers. Also, people could be members of various different enemy groups and also seen as foreign agents too. Thus, the various enemy groups were identified as different, but it was relatively irrelevant to which group one belonged, as they were used interchangeably for the idea of an enemy. It was also assumed that the enemies were working together in a concerted effort to topple the regime, particularly that the enemies were trying to use all manner of “tricks” to fight against Ângkar.[7]

Most narratives of former cadres include a form of what Keo Duong (2018) has termed chauvinistic nationalism, which entails a strong anti-Vietnamese component, making a connection to anything Vietnamese sufficient to make one an enemy (KR21A, KR41A, KR47A, KR47B, KR51 notebook, KR51A, KR53A, KR54B); also, anyone who was of ethnic Vietnamese origin or even looked Vietnamese was likely to be killed (KR31B, KR34A, KR48A). The anti-Vietnamese word yuon, which has racist connotations, was widely used throughout almost all interviews, and suggestions that someone had connections to anything Vietnamese was used to denigrate them and to construct them as an enemy.

Furthermore, there was also a conflation of a person’s political position and them making mistakes (KR54A, KR54B)—most tangibly, any form of political or administrative role or being a member of police or military in the previous Lon Nol regime meant that one was qua definition an internal enemy and needed to be killed (KR01A, KR01D, KR02B, KR03B, KR06B, KR08A, KR14A, KR20A, KR20B, KR51 Notebook, KR43A, KR46A, KR49A, KR49B, KR55A). Even having family ties or other social relationships to people who had these positions under Lon Nol sufficed to make one suspicious of being in a “string” of enemies (KR14A, KR52A), perceived as a covert and treacherous liaison against the revolution, often associated with either the CIA or the former Lon Nol regime (KR14A, KR54B).

However, beyond belonging to the “wrong” group by birth, occupation, or political attitude, it was more common for people to be labeled as enemies because of the mistakes they had committed and how these are then interpreted as “political mistakes” and thus as counterrevolutionary (KR01D, KR05A, KR09A, KR13A, KR15A, KR16B, KR18A, KR19A, KR20A, KR21A, KR24A, KR27A, KR30B, KR31A, KR34A, KR41A, KR46A, KR48A, KR49A, KR51B, KR52A, KR53A, KR54B, KR55A, KR57A). For instance, even the act of stealing a small amount of food, such as a potato or some roots in the forest, would be interpreted as eating alone and undermining collectivization, thus making one a traitor of the revolution or of Ângkar and in the worst case leading to one’s execution (KR13A, KR24A, KR54B, Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21591). Others who were assigned to plant rice but did not know how, as they came from town, were accused of being capitalist, reactionary, or feudalist and were subsequently killed (KR34A). Other banal mistakes that sufficed for one to be classed as an enemy include listening to the radio (KR16B), breaking work tools (KR13A), going to a forbidden area (KR16B), not following proper protocol (e.g., carrying only one pen with you if you were supposed to carry two as a certain leader) (KR31A), being lazy (KR24A), or having sleepy team members (KR27A).

In the end, however, it depended on the relevant authority and his or her discretion as to whether a mistake would be interpreted as treachery (KR09A, KR15A, KR51B). Nonetheless, these leaders were also under pressure to fulfill certain quotas of enemies found, otherwise they themselves were in danger of being accused of being an enemy (KR20A). But people who committed only small mistakes were sometimes just re-educated (KR52A), particularly if they were full-rights cadres (KR53A). Significantly, more serious mistakes included so-called moral mistakes, meaning indecent sexual affairs, which—again depending on the strictness of the relevant authority—could include speaking to a member of the other gender (KR16B, KR53A).

Besides belonging to a specific group or committing mistakes, people could also be constructed as enemies if they appeared as educated (KR01D, KR02B, KR07A, KR34A, KR43A, KR49A, KR53A, Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21566) or if they lodged any form of protest against the regime (KR19A, KR20A, KR24A, KR54A). This ties in with the aforementioned obedience to orders and the fear that if one were to disobey or protest, one could incur the wrath of Ângkar (see section 2.1.1). Only through unquestioning obedience could one avoid being seen as against Ângkar. This went so far as to mean that loyalty to Ângkar superseded all other personal relations and that anyone seen as the enemy was immediately removed from one’s trust. As already mentioned in section 2.1.6, Hinton tells of “a female cadre who arrested her husband after discovering he had been stealing extra food. When the man asked his wife how she could execute her own husband, she replied, ‘I’m not killing my husband, I’m killing the enemy.’ … She had been brainwashed to love and be loyal only to the Party” (2005, 263).

However, not everyone had equal probabilities of being killed. As stated above, it depended on the discretion of their superiors; but all else being equal, people who were higher up the hierarchy were more likely to be killed (rather than just re-educated) than people lower down (KR52B). Furthermore, new people were more likely to be classified as enemies or their actions interpreted as mistakes than base people (KR34A). People with so-called bad backgrounds—that is, people who had relatives in areas controlled by Lon Nol during the civil war, or people with relatives who previously used to work for Lon Nol—were also likely to be classified as enemies (KR14A, KR19A, KR24A), as were people who were repeat offenders having made the same small mistake multiple times (KR08A).

Cadres were not motivated to participate because of these ideological constructions of the enemies (many did not even support the killing), but they did accept the categorizations provided by the regime and the resulting danger that these categorizations entailed. Thus, many accepted that probably not all the people they dealt with were actually CIA or KGB agents or some other form of national traitor, as also explained in the vignette on Sokong, but that at least a substantial number of them probably were enemies (KR20B, KR24A, KR30A, KR30B, KR48A, KR49B), with many of them still believing today that they were enemies. This is evidenced in the vignette on Sopheak, a former interrogator, who said: “I believed that some of them were real national traitors while some were not. But mostly those prisoners I interrogated they were really the national traitors” (KR30B). Others did not believe that all of the prisoners were genuinely enemies but that at least some of them must be (KR15A, KR29B, KR41B), while others rejected the notion at least partially (KR16B, KR31B, KR51B, KR53A) or felt that they were enemies but that this did not merit them being killed (KR24A).

But what makes these enemies particularly worthy of dying? Primarily this would be answered by cadres referring to the danger that these enemies posed for the revolution. At a more abstract level, they are referred to as the “virus” (KR51B), “infectious” (KR31A), or an “internal illness” (KR20A), which makes them dangerous to the revolution (see 3.1.1 on toxification). This danger is often not made explicit, but it is assumed that people defined as internal enemies are dangerous for the revolution; and it is taken for granted in many narratives that this necessitates their killing. Even the fact that there appears to be little justification for the killing suggests that the indoctrination regarding the danger posed by suspected internal enemies was successful.

3.2  MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

Under normal circumstances people avoid behavior that violates their moral standards. People try to act within their own moral framework in order to avoid cognitive dissonance when their acts do not fit their moral construction of how they should be acting. This form of cognitive dissonance is particularly likely when subtle pressure has caused behavior that is outside the participant’s moral framework, what Leonard Newman (2002) terms “induced compliance,” because the less explicit pressure put on a person, the less excusable the acts would seem to be (Chirot and McCauley 2006, 54; for an alternative interpretation in which cognitive dissonance is tolerable long term for individuals, see Rydgren 2009, 88). In the Complexity of Evil model, this would be found particularly in the motivations such as conformity or obedience to authority. This cognitive dissonance is inherently problematic as it undermines “the integrity of the self” (Waller 2002, 224), and thus individuals attempt to resolve this tension and reduce the discrepancy between behavior and attitudes. The discrepancy can be reduced by either changing behavior or redefining the moral framework, or by trying to disassociate the action from the moral framework. Most often—particularly in the genocidal situations at issue here—it is difficult to change one’s behavior, and so it is psychologically attractive to alter one’s attitudes and moral framework rather than adapt one’s behavior (for a short introduction, see Newman 2002, 54; Sambini 1995; Staub 2002, 22; for an experimental examination, see Stets and Carter 2011, 192). Furthermore, this process is supported by the tendency of people to actively search for information that positively represents their behavioral decision (Schelling 2004, 53); thus, people’s transformation of their moral framework is exacerbated and underlined by a stream of affirmative information.

The easiest way to disassociate one’s behavior from one’s moral framework is to just not think about the morality of one’s actions. While this sounds banal and unrealistic, several perpetrators have said that they did not think at all about the rights and wrongs of participating during that time. An example of this phenomenon was reported to me in a couple of interviews (KR12A, KR20A). As a former bodyguard and messenger for the chief of a security center puts it: “I did not think about whether it was right or wrong during that time because I was young. Today, I know what is right, what is wrong.… I don’t know why I didn’t think about this. I did not feel pity that they were killed even though they had made no mistake. I asked other friends, they also answered the same. They did not think about this [right or wrong] in serving the regime. If the killers thought about this, they would not have killed people. Everyone was like that. Even one’s own parents were also killed. Children killed their parents and relatives, too” (KR12A).

Others who expressed that they had felt that it was wrong went on to speak about the unsolvable nature of their situation in that they may have felt it was wrong but could not speak about this without being accused of being an enemy, nor could they realistically run away (KR18A, KR31B). Erwin Gathmann says of his perpetration during the Nazi regime, “I have to say that we did not think about it all back then. Only in later years did one really even realise what happened back then.”[8]

In this section, several facilitative factors are grouped together that ease moral disengagement—that is, mechanisms that help a potential participant in genocide reduce the tension between his or her moral attitudes and the actions he or she is committing, either by distancing the act from moral judgments or by reframing the act as positive within the framework. These forms of detachment are often gradual and aim at placing the victim group outside the “boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply” (Waller 2002, 186; see also Fein 1990, 37–39; Staub 2002, 24). Moral disengagement is particularly strong when moral attitudes not only change but also change such that an individual is then positively encouraged to continue acting in such a way. This in turn can reinforce the new moral attitude, strengthening both the behavior and the new moral framework. It is key that this process happen gradually, thus allowing the individual to resolve small amounts of cognitive dissonance bit by bit and thus gradually become able to commit acts previously deemed to be horrific with relative ease (Bandura 1999, 203; see also section 3.4).

3.2.1 Dehumanization

Referred to frequently across the genocide literature, the dehumanization of the victim group is a process that can be observed in most genocides, albeit to differing degrees (Haagensen and Croes 2012). Dehumanization is defined as a “process by which the perpetrators come to perceive their victims as ‘not human’ or ‘subhuman’ ” (Lang 2010, 225) and as such is one of the most extreme forms of ingroup–outgroup discriminations. By portraying the victims as nonhumans, it is easier for perpetrators to imagine them as excluded “from the universe of obligation” (Fein 1990, 37–39) and thus “outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility” (Browning [1994] 2001, 73). Seeing someone else as human “activates empathetic emotional reactions through perceived similarity and a sense of social obligation, … [making it] difficult to mistreat humanized persons without suffering personal distress and self-condemnation” (Bandura 1999, 200). Thus, with a lack of human ties, normal treatment usually given to other human beings was no longer necessary and it was easier to kill the victims. By divesting the victim of human qualities and believing that they do not “possess the same feelings, thoughts, values, and purposes in life that we do” (Zimbardo 2008, 222), people are able to overcome their empathy. By no longer feeling for others as they would normally, it becomes possible to treat them in ways they never could before without intense personal distress to themselves. Anderson differentiates dehumanization as objectification, meaning “the rendering of individuals as passive objects without human characteristics or merit,” and dehumanization as animalization, “comparing individuals to ‘lesser,’ animal forms of life” (2018, 73). Along a different trajectory, Rowan Savage (2013) discusses genocidal dehumanization as a “discursive strategy” within the context of the modern state, although he suggests a stronger causal role than is argued for here.

An example of the dehumanization of the victims is touched on by some of the former members of the Khmer Rouge, who described how the victims were killed like animals (KR01A) or “killed like chickens and ducks” (KR27A). Given the agricultural lifestyle of almost all cadres before the Khmer Rouge, slaughtering chickens and ducks was part of everyday life, thus meaning that people had absolutely no qualms about doing this. Thus, reducing the victims to the status of ducks or chickens removed the morality of the act of killing. Going further, enemies were sometimes referred to as “the number 1 fertilizer” (KR51A). Moreover, prisoners at S-21 were linguistically dehumanized as “personnel referred to the prisoners using terms from the ‘objectifying self-orientation’ register (for example, ânh, âhaeng, a-/mi, vea, si) that connoted their animosity, superiority, condescension, and contempt.… Khmer Rouge publications, speeches, and documents frequently refer to ‘enemies’ using the vulgar pronoun vea. By marking its enemies in this dehumanizing manner, the DK regime helped to morally legitimate violence against them” (Hinton 2005, 191).

A mechanism that mediates between animals and this moral devaluation suggested in the literature on emotions is disgust (Rozin and Fallon 1987; Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 2000), and this is explained in greater detail in section 2.2.2.5. While the classification of victim groups as animals obviously does not make perpetrators think that these people really are animals, the dehumanization process makes it easier to kill them, precisely because of this link via disgust. A participant perceives the victims as animals, or accepts the animalistic framing provided by other people, in both cases eliciting the same emotion that animals or reminders of our own mortality and animality do: disgust. This feeling of disgust is genuine, even though the belief that they are animals is not, and thus precipitates violence, even though the foundations of viewing the other as an animal clearly do not. Thus, in an extreme form, dehumanization can even cause participation in genocide through the mechanism of disgust, but in many more cases it will at least make it easier for people to participate because the social ties to the victims are reduced.

The power of dehumanization becomes clearer when looking at empirical examples. Dehumanization is achieved primarily in two ways: first, by treating the victims in such a way that they become like animals, and second, by referring to them consistently by animal names. Speaking of Bosniaks in Serb captivity, but reminiscent also of descriptions of Nazi concentration camps as well as Khmer Rouge security centers, Michael Sells describes living conditions that can rob victims of their humanity and thus—in a malicious circle—facilitate their maltreatment by guards: “Captives would be held for months in extremely cramped quarters without toilets or sanitary facilities. Women spoke of the shame of being forced to wear clothes stained with menstrual blood. Weeks of starvation diet, lack of water, and lack of hygiene would turn captives into filthy, emaciated shadows of the persons they had once been” (1998, 75).

These horrific conditions made the victims thin, smelly, and in no way recognizable as their previous selves, increasing the difference from the guards and facilitating their perception of dehumanization. Similarly, in Rwanda, Tutsi were chased through the marshlands and the woods as if in a hunt, with the Hutu sometimes even using traps and ambushes, and thus the Tutsi became like animals (Hatzfeld 2004a, 51). Also, in the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians, “dehumanization was seen as a very tangible result of the death marches. Observers noted that the very appearance of the Armenian deportees had become less-than-human, which, in turn, is likely to have worked to convince escorting gendarmes that they were in fact justified in the first place to treat Armenians as ‘cattle’ or ‘sheep to the slaughter’ ” (Bjørnlund 2009, 22).

Second, dehumanization through animalization can occur linguistically, excluding the victims from the circle of humanity by labeling them as animals (Sémelin 2005a, 38), such as inyenzi (cockroach) for Tutsi in Rwanda, Judensau or Judenschwein (Jewish sow or pig) for Jews in Germany, or cattle or sheep for Armenians. Approaching it from the opposite side: German units were often very reluctant to hand over Jews in their employment to be killed, as (besides economic motivations for keeping them alive and working) they had built up emotional ties to them and could not accept the dehumanized narrative to be applicable to these people also (Haberer 2001, 400).

The process of dehumanization has been studied in detail in social-psychological experiments by Albert Bandura (1999). In his experiments, groups of college students were supposed to shock other groups of college students. To simulate dehumanization, the “victim” groups were primed, and the word “animals” was used to describe the other group (dehumanized state), while a different group was labeled as “nice guys” (humanized state). The dehumanized situations led to significantly higher shocks than both the “nice guys” group and the neutral control group; furthermore, the “nice guys” group was treated better than the neutral priming. Treatment differences between the groups became more and more pronounced in successive rounds. Given that the experiment was done in groups, a diminished sense of personal responsibility is acknowledged by the author (Bandura 1999, 200), and I would add that the dynamics of social conformity are strongly at work here too. Nonetheless, in the experimental setup, the lack of personal responsibility and social conformity pressures are constant throughout, with only the dehumanization varying, making a credible case for its impact on punitive action. However, what remains unclear is whether the participants harm the people more because they are dehumanized, or whether as such they would like to harm all, but are constrained by humanized images, thus being free to act as they actually want to in a dehumanized condition.

However, several critiques have been levied against the broad applicability of dehumanization in explaining genocide. First, dehumanization is to a certain degree used as a catch-all concept that goes beyond its analytical scope; for example, Neilsen (2015) suggests distinguishing dehumanization from toxification (see section 3.1.1), while Goldhagen (2009, 319–330) differentiates between dehumanization and demonization; both authors’ alternative concepts emphasize the threat posed by the victim group as key.

Second, dehumanization misrepresents the key function in which genocidal violence is actually about essentially human interaction in which the “perpetrator’s sense of power over another human being” (Lang 2010, 225) or their feeling of “superiority” (Theriault 2007, 29) is key to providing meaning to the violence. Along these lines, Theriault argues for the cruelty exhibited in the Armenian genocide that

death-through-torment is possible precisely because of the human status of the victims. To understand cruelty on the ground and as an intended feature of the overarching plan of the Armenian Genocide, it is essential to recognize the pleasure perpetrators derived from the ordeals of the victims.… The pleasure derived from their suffering is directly proportional to the level of humanity perpetrators ascribe to the objects of their violence.… This is not meant to suggest that the process of deportation did not in objective terms strip victims of their human status and features. Violence and degradation as well as physical deterioration through starvation and disease certainly combined to render deportees less and less human at the functional and psychological levels.… From my perspective, it is not the endpoint that should be the focus, but the process itself, through which genocide perpetrators consume the humanity of their targets by converting it into their own pleasure, in what might be termed a “genocidal exchange economy of suffering.” If victims were left at the end of the process without humanity conceptually and literally—they usually died or were murdered at this point—their recognized humanity was at the core of a process the goal of which was to destroy it. (2007, 30)

While Theriault (2007, 30) argues that the “pleasure of rape is not sexual, but rather is experienced as sexual because the perpetrator gets sexual pleasure from violent domination” (and this domination necessitates their humanity), there must be more to this explanation of rape as violent domination does not explain why perpetrators are normally described as choosing the pretty women to rape.

Third, and strongly tied to the second critique, the idea that the victim group is animalized can only be understood metaphorically by the perpetrators, as sexual acts with members of the victim group are common, but sexual acts of these people with animals are not. It is unlikely that perpetrators see the victims as humans when they rape them and animals when they kill them (Dutton 2007, 124). Also, dehumanization cannot be seen as a motivation in and of itself, as most people do not have a history of brutality toward animals (124)—dehumanization makes it easier to be brutal but is not the motivation for it. In this vein, dehumanization is not primarily about emphasizing animality but instead is more about portraying people as worth less and as outside the “universe of human obligation” as explained at the beginning of this section.

3.2.2 Devaluation of Life

A further way to morally disengage from one’s actions is to devalue the life of the people whom one is killing. In my interviews, several former cadres spoke of a devaluation of life in general during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, quite explicitly saying that “life had no value” (KR03A) or that human life was like animal life (KR03A), as was also reported by Chandara in his vignette. This ties in with the previous section on dehumanization. Certain sayings were common in interviews—for example, “To keep you is no benefit. To weed you out is no loss” (KR11A, KR24A, KR31A, KR49A, KR51B) and “It is better to kill ten innocent people than to let one guilty person go free” (KR20A), showing that the rhetoric of the regime that reduced the value of life reached the low-level cadres and fostered a discourse in which the annihilation of the enemy trumped the value of innocent life.

Furthermore, a topic that did not come up in interviews but has been discussed elsewhere is the effect of Buddhism and the belief in reincarnation on people’s propensity to participate. In Western culture, due to a Judeo-Christian theology of having only one life followed by an afterlife, this life can possibly take on higher value than in other societies. Thus, in Cambodia many people believe in the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, by which after his or her death, an individual returns to life as a newborn baby or as an animal or even a plant or inanimate object. Due to this circularity of life, it can be argued that while killing someone is bad, it is not so terrible if that person is reincarnated (Ponchaud 1989, 174). While the Khmer Rouge abolished religion, closed the pagodas, and defrocked the monks, the Buddhist beliefs lived on, even if not spoken about, in some people, particularly older people (KR51B). Thus, for some people who were brought up in a Buddhist way of thinking, this will have taken some degree of the grave consequences away from killing. On the other hand, Buddhism also strictly forbids killing, so beliefs of this sort may actually have had an inhibiting effect.

3.2.3 Distance

A further factor that facilitates the moral disconnect between the perpetrator and the action is increased distance between the perpetrator and the victim. Most obviously this distance can be physical, and the more distance between the perpetrator and the victim, the easier it becomes to kill the victim (Grossman [1995] 2009, 104). If perpetrators cannot see the victims (as was the case in the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps), it makes it a lot easier for them to carry out the killing process. For instance, during the Holocaust, because of the horrors of up-close shootings, with executioners being splattered with blood and brains, it was decided to reorganize the killing. Gassing vans were introduced in order to make it easier for the perpetrators (see Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß 1988, 71), although these were still too proximate and thus quite distressing for the perpetrators as they could hear the screams while the people died and then saw the bodies covered in vomit and excrement (Lewy 2017, 60). Subsequently, death camps were introduced, “where the murder was impersonal, chemical, less bloody, and largely out of sight of regular soldiers” (Chirot and McCauley 2006, 52). Here, it was easier to maintain distance by inserting Zyklon B pellets into the chambers through pipes in the walls; this is also what Grossman (2004; see also Bandura 1999, 199) labels mechanical distance, by which contact between the perpetrator and the victim can be avoided and thus killing can be made psychologically easier. This distance is facilitative because “when people can see and hear the suffering they cause, vicariously aroused distress and self-censure serve as self-restrainers” (Bandura 1999, 199).

However, distance can go beyond purely physical space between the perpetrator and the victim, and the literature provides a myriad of distantiation concepts that are more or less explicitly theorized: moral distance (Grossmann 2004, 75; Waller 2002, 196; Welzer 2002, 243), social distance (Browning [1994] 2001, 153; Hatzfeld 2004a, 28, 51), psychological distance (Waller 2002, 196), and cultural distance (Grossmann 2004, 70). The key commonality among all these ideas is that by placing some amount of space between the victim and the perpetrator, it is easier for perpetrators to exclude the victim from their moral universe; it is easier for them not to think of the other as a feeling, living human being with a family and a history.

Distance is also strongly related to other facilitative factors. Lisa Haagensen and Marnix Croes demonstrate with empirical evidence from Rwanda and Eastern and Western Europe during the Holocaust that “the smaller the social distance between the perpetrator group and the victim group prior to genocide the more severe the dehumanization behaviors of the perpetrators during genocide” (2012, 245) in order to remove “the moral and cognitive obstacles that stand in the way of killing fellow human beings” (241). Slightly differently, a division of labor, as exists in most cases of genocide, facilitates this distance, not only physically, when individuals do not actually need to be present at the site of killing but “only” round up the victims and send them there (Kühl 2014, 209), but also morally or emotionally, as responsibility can be dispelled.

The system established by the Khmer Rouge maximized the distance between the perpetrators and the victims, as well as between the perpetrators themselves, creating a facilitative environment for morally decoupling the performed tasks. Because cadres were often working in areas other than where they were originally from, people seldom knew their victims, and thus the social and emotional distance to the people they were supposed to arrest, guard, interrogate, and kill was significantly higher than it would have been if they had known the people—hence their anonymity. By deploying the cadres to varying and distant areas, the Khmer Rouge was able to maximize this social and emotional distance and thus facilitate a strong detachment from the victims and people’s less inhibited treatment of their victims. This distance could be social and geographical as it led to less social ties: “He was also accused of being nice to his group because of his relatives; that’s why he did not dare to kill. Then they assigned a person who had never known any people [in the area] and it was easier for him to order the person to kill” (KR20A). Furthermore, this anonymity about the victims created emotional distance for the killers: The killers normally did not see or have any contact with their victims before, and as many as one hundred people were killed in one session in some security centers (KR24A), reducing the victims to just one among many and thus deindividuated. This was sometimes augmented by blindfolding the victims so that the killers could not see the eyes of the people they were killing, and locating the settings for killing outside areas where people normally went, as this rendered them more anonymous and thus facilitative of making perpetrators feel that normal rules no longer applied (Hinton 2005, 266).

While normally the Jews to be killed in the East during the Holocaust were seen by the perpetrators as an “anonymous collective” (Browning [1994] 2001, 153), this was undermined when victims spoke German, as this radically reduced the social distance between the perpetrator and the victims, demonstrating that they were from the same national group (prior to exclusion of Jews due to Aryanization) and thus making it harder for perpetrators to kill them; furthermore, Jews who had been in the service of the military or the police force took on a personal identity, again reducing the social distance between the groups and making it psychologically more difficult for the perpetrators to kill them (Browning [1994] 2001, 153; see also Haberer 2001, 400). This led to the, for us, seemingly absurd practice of trying to shoot unawares the victims whom one knew well personally and by name; “by 1942 standards of German-Jewish relations, a quick death without the agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!” (Browning [1994] 2001, 154–155).

However, in Rwanda (Fujii 2009, 172; Hatzfeld 2004a, 25–29, 51) and Bosnia (Vetlesen 2005, 194), as well as in some facets of the Holocaust (Gross 2003; Vetlesen 2005, 41), there was much violence between neighbors, and so the perpetrators actually knew some or all of their victims personally. This demonstrates that distance is not necessary for participation in genocide, but for most people it will certainly facilitate participation. For some participants, however, proximity can also be facilitative—for instance, for sadists for whom the visibility of the caused pain is central to the motivation for participating.

In Armenia, deportations were initiated by local officials who were geographically and socially, sometimes possibly also emotionally, close to the victims. However, the killings themselves were normally performed by other groups who did not know the victims, as they had already been deported (Altınay 1919, 23; quoted in Dadrian 1991, 121) and mostly occurred outside the towns in remote and “out-of-the-way and concealed places” (Dadrian and Akçam 2011, 294), or at sea, where people were thrown off ships to their deaths.

The last facilitative effect that is relevant for this topic is ethnic or ideological distance, which is discussed in the context of rebel group cohesion (Gates 2002). Here, and the argument can be applied equally to genocidal perpetrator groups, the ethnic and ideological proximity within the perpetrator group is important because it forges the group together and affords it higher cohesion. High levels of ethnic or ideological proximity within the perpetrator group will afford higher significance to the motivation of conformity and make people feel more strongly that they have to comply with their group.

Inversely, as an increasing distance to the victim group makes it easier to participate and kill these people, a decreasing distance to other members of the perpetrator group can increase participation. Individuals find it hard to desert close comrades or good friends by not participating (Grossman 2004, 65), particularly if they are very close to them, as this lack of distance creates a tighter social bond; this is particularly the case in situations of uncertainty or danger, in which the individual may believe that the other needs protecting.

3.2.4 Euphemistic Labeling and Sanitizing Language

Commonly in genocidal processes, while the victims are framed as dehumanized creatures, the perpetrators attempt to label the process of killing itself as positively as possible or even more commonly to take out the moral judgment linguistically, oftentimes using vocabulary borrowed from sanitation and hygiene or from bureaucratic procedures. Words from bureaucratic processes, such as “Final Solution” (Endlösung), “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung), “resettlement” (Umsiedlung), “labor in the East” (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten), and “evacuation” (Aussiedlung), were commonly used during the Holocaust to describe the deportation and murder of the Jews, adhering to strict rules of what was an acceptable way to linguistically refer to the killing (Arendt [1963] 1994, 80). Further, the Holocaust also had a host of sanitizing words that had connotations that the killings were providing better national hygiene: “cleansing maneuver” (Säuberungsaktion) or “clean of Jews” (judenrein); in essence, this sanitizing language provided a “cognitive script of tidying up in everyday life,” allowing participants to refer back to hitherto well-known patterns of behavior that could provide guidance in times of uncertainty (Kipp 2007, 609). In Rwanda, terminology such as “group attack” (igitero) suggested to most participants connotations of communal hunting (Mironko 2004). Similarly, the concept of purity plays a key role for Sémelin (2005a, 33) in explaining genocide in general and specifically in Rwanda, providing a framework within which the destruction of the impure victims allows a purification of the perpetrator group. Further still, the Khmer Rouge adapted the language to reflect its ideological tenets that condoned and demanded the genocidal killing of internal enemies. The act of killing was—as in other cases, too—referred to in the sanitized manner of “cleaning” (KR03A, KR20A, KR29B, KR31B, KR43A), as was the evacuation of Phnom Penh and other cities termed “cleaning” of these cities (KR28A).

Further, using an “agentless passive style” (Bandura 1999, 195) in the description of genocidal acts establishes that the killing “just occurs” rather than being committed by responsible individuals. This, in turn, can facilitate participation because the individuals participating are able to reduce their feeling of responsibility. While it is obvious that the perpetrators do not actually believe the euphemisms they use literally, “the euphemisms give perpetrators a discourse in which evil need no longer be experienced, or even perceived, as evil” (Waller 2002, 212).

3.2.5 Lack of a Threat of Legal Punishment

The lack of a threat of legal prosecution and punishment is an equally obvious and powerful facilitative factor. Given that genocide is a policy of the state or at least of a relevant authority, the order for genocide can take on the formal or informal character of a law. Under these circumstances, deviant behavior is defined not as participating in the crime but instead as nonparticipation. Having the certainty that one will not be punished for the actions one undertakes makes it significantly easier to commit them, first from a pragmatic, rational perspective that one will not lose anything through participation, but also as the impunity can possibly render the whole situation more morally unproblematic along the logic that if one will not be punished, it cannot be wrong.

3.2.6 Alcohol and Drug Usage

When committing genocidal violence, individuals are sometimes reported to have begun to habitually drink alcohol in order to reduce inhibitions and prepare for their participation. In this way, alcohol plays a role in suppressing the moral conscience rather than shifting it. Furthermore, there is evidence that alcohol also “served the men as a post-hoc mechanism for dealing with the psychological impact of their own actions” (Westermann 2016, 7). The most comprehensive study of the connection between alcohol and perpetration in genocide has been conducted by Edward Westermann (2016), who shows its significant role in the Holocaust. Even here, alcohol has a social aspect with the drinking encouraging social bonding and comradery between perpetrators who drink together before or after their task (3). This social bonding occurred primarily over beer, while at killing sites vodka or schnapps was most commonly provided (1). Although Himmler instructed that alcohol be consumed only after killing operations, it appears that the distribution of special rations depended more significantly on the decision of individual leaders (6). The facilitative effect of alcohol went further, though:

Members of the 1st Company of Police Battalion (PB) 61, tasked with guard duty at the Warsaw Ghetto, often followed night-time drinking binges in the unit’s Kneipe by venturing into the ghetto to murder Jews. The bar itself was “decorated” with antisemitic wall murals, and the front door served as a tally board with notches for each of the unit’s victims.… More than simply alcohol-fueled killing orgies, massacres of Jews in the East often involved ritualistic festive elements. In these cases, the use of alcohol served a celebratory function among the murderers. Hanna Senikova, a Ukrainian witness to a mass execution conducted by German SS- and policemen, recalled that the Germans had ordered a banquet to accompany the execution. (Westermann 2016, 5, 10)

There are reports in the literature of people committing the deeds while inebriated, particularly in Rwanda and Bosnia (Sells 1998, 74; Sémelin 2005a, 267). While this is often reported, it seems that most alcohol, however, was consumed at nighttime or after “the work” of killing had been completed. Consumption of alcohol likely aided desensitization to the horror of killing and allowed for a dampening of moral dissonance; with repeated and continued alcohol consumption night after night, processes of habituation of killing could occur without the chance of the perpetrator even coming to terms with his or her actions and not allowing cognitive dissonance to arise. Furthermore, research has been conducted on the widespread use of drugs under the Nazi regime, which had repercussions for enhancing many of the decision-making processes, not just of high-level but also of low-level perpetrators (Ohler 2015).

3.3  GROUPS

The next set of facilitative factors that make participation in genocide easier relate to the fact that genocide is mostly committed in groups, and there is strong evidence that this group setting of genocide perpetration matters. The main point here is that within a group, people can lose their individuality, both in processes of becoming more anonymous and in a reduction of the individual culpability assigned to that person. In the literature, much attention is paid to this. This section integrates the concepts of deindividuation and anonymity with ideas about diffusion and displacement of responsibility.

The types of groups meant here diverge from the sociological tradition of egalitarian masses as proposed by Elias Canetti (1960), in which the individual disappears into an anonymous mass and seems to be controlled by only this mass. This kind of conception of the group and an individual’s part in it is almost a denial of the individual’s agency and loses the individuality of the separate people. The concept of the group, as understood here, goes beyond the differentiation of just ingroup and outgroup and can be specified more tightly for dynamics of violent groups. This is captured by Axel Paul and Benjamin Schwalb’s (2015, 10; my translation) definition of violence masses (Gewaltmassen) as “nonorganized but not necessarily unstructured collectives of co-present actors who together, but not necessarily planned, exercise physical violence against third parties. Decisive is not the size of the collective but their capability of coordinated, violent action.” In this understanding it is not helpful to think of individuals “losing” their identity in the group and with this losing control; instead—again drawing on social identity theory—there are mutual cognitive, relational, and affective transformations in the group and the constitutive individuals (Reicher 2015, 185, 189, 190, 193). Furthermore, collectively accomplishing acts of violence prompts processes that make it likely that this violence will continue or be exacerbated in the situation itself, and also that the violence will be repeated in the future (Schwalb and Paul 2015, 401). This is akin to the group-level processes of routinization as described at the individual level in section 3.4.1.

In the Rwandan case, igitero (the group nature of killing) was key to many people’s narratives of their participation (Mironko 2004), and “killing produced groups and groups produced killings” (Fujii 2009, 154). It is also this reciprocal influence of the group and the individual that Fujii refers to when she writes the following, which is a succinct introduction to some of the themes developed in the following sections:

Joiners were not simply unwitting followers of their groups, however. Joiners also helped to create the very ties that bound them to their group. What facilitated this process was Joiners’ readiness to look to the group to make sense of the situation. By looking to the group, Joiners were able to shift the locus of agency away from themselves as individuals. As individuals, Joiners tended to see themselves as powerless to change or alter their situation. It was not that Joiners failed to see refusal (to join in the violence) as an option; rather, Joiners did not believe refusing, resisting, or protesting would affect the immediate outcome one way or the other. Indeed, when I asked them if they tried to resist or refuse orders, most Joiners issued a common refrain: they had no power, or no one would listen to them. (2008, 585)

3.3.1 Displacement and Diffusion of Responsibility

When people are committing an act that violates their moral framework, moral control should kick in and at least discourage, if not entirely deter, them from going through with it. This is particularly the case when they acknowledge that it is their deed and that they are personally responsible for the heinous consequences. However, when there are options for the people to be absolved from their individual responsibility, this can have a marked effect on their willingness to participate. Two mechanisms are helpful in this absolution of personal responsibility: displacement onto a legitimate authority and diffusion across a large group of peers, reminiscent of the division into vertical and horizontal social influence discussed in section 2.1.

As also demonstrated in the Milgram experiments, “people will behave in ways they typically repudiate if a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for the effects of their conduct” (Bandura 1999, 196), because from this perspective, the individuals see their actions as originating in the orders of the relevant authority and thus they do not see themselves as personally responsible. By displacing the responsibility for the action to the authority, they are able to reduce self-recrimination, and the more legitimate the authority is perceived to be, the easier this process becomes. This is particularly prominent in the context of military or paramilitary groups and by the official state character of genocide (Alvarez 2001, 95), as this greatly enhances the legitimacy of the order giver. This process of displacement can also be followed in the opposite direction down the line of hierarchy, with the person issuing orders stating that he or she has no responsibility because he or she did not actually participate in the killing (Jäger 1989, 201). While the suppression of individual responsibility has been described as a “crucial psychological precondition” (Vetlesen 2005, 147) for genocide perpetration, this position is not really tenable, as people can accept responsibility and go through with their actions, even though they may have moral scruples, because of some of the motivations discussed above; nonetheless, such displacement is certainly helpful for many participants.

Equally, though, and more important in the context of groups, is the possibility for the diffusion of responsibility through the participation or even just presence of many people. In individual acts, it is clear who is responsible, but within larger groups, this responsibility can be shared across many shoulders and one becomes alleviated of feeling morally responsible for one’s actions (Fujii 2009, 158; Grossman 2004, 65; Waller 2002, 212; Warr 2002, 62; Zimbardo 2008, 315). This happens because it can become unclear within the group who has actually done what, but also because responsibility can be parceled into small pieces through a strong division of labor, so that most people are only to blame for something relatively innocuous, but that in its summation amounts to the heinous crime of genocide (Waller 2002, 212; see also Angrick 2008, 88; Browning [1994] 2001, 77; Kipp 2007, 604). This was strategically used by some superiors, such as Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, who ordered that only shooting with several people at once was allowed in order to avoid direct, personal responsibility (Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß 1988, 64).

In Rwanda, “this group momentum did not take away meaningful choices for Joiners, but they did enable Joiners to place the locus of agency—the responsibility to act—onto the group and away from themselves as individuals” (Fujii 2009, 157–158). Thus, groups helped make sense of the situation, but also the genocidal discourse reinforced or even created suspicions that were otherwise absent, and were perpetuated due to a lack of counterdiscourse (Fujii 2009, 158). Another empirical example can be found in Bosnia, where the killing camps were opened by their commanders for local Serbs to beat, torture, and kill the prisoners, effectively spreading responsibility for these camps more broadly to people living around the camps; similarly, loot was distributed widely so that all were part of the spoils of genocide and thus shared complicity for it (Sells 1998, 74).

Social-psychological experimental research relevant to this topic includes Bibb Latané and John M. Darley’s (1968) study of Columbia University students who were left in a room and let smoke pour in. When alone, 75 percent of participants reported the smoke; when two additional participants (not confederates) were included in the scenario, only 38 percent reported the smoke; and when the two additional participants were confederates who did not report the smoke, the figure dropped further to 10%. This is a clear indicator that in the presence of a group, and the increasing anonymity provided by this, a feeling of responsibility to report smoke in this case or to stand up against something felt to be morally wrong can disappear through diffusion to the others.

Also, when thinking about responsibility in the context of the Khmer Rouge, it fast becomes clear that responsibility is not just diffused to the other members of the Khmer Rouge but also displaced quite concretely to Ângkar as the true source of authority. As discussed in section 2.1.1, Ângkar was portrayed as an absolute source of authority, an authority system that one is never part of oneself but only ever one’s superiors. Thus, as Ângkar expressed its demand for absolute obedience, it opened the opportunity for people to defer and displace all responsibility for their actions to this abstract authority. In the end, as no one was ever part of Ângkar at the implementing levels of this genocide, no one needed to take responsibility for their actions, and all could displace this further up the chain of command.

Furthermore, in Cambodia, two statements regularly made by interviewees when talking about the context in which orders were given to them were “It was the law” (KR07A, KR12A, KR19A, among several others) and “There was no law” (KR03B, KR19A, KR20A, KR51A), as quoted also in the vignette by Chandara. At first, this may sound contradictory, but the absolute power of Ângkar can reconcile this logical contradiction. What Ângkar ordered had law-like nature given its absolute authority, as discussed. However, the absence of law is meant to refer to the fact that at the same time there was no judicial system, no legislative assembly, and no constitution guaranteeing fundamental rights (KR07A). “There was not just one standard applying to all. Law was what people said during the Pol Pot regime” (KR07A). This absence of any external legal reference point or guarantor gives people the feeling that there is no continuity, no law to refer to. This is brought to the fore nicely by a former collective committee member: “According to my observation, it was because there was no law. They could do whatever they wanted. During that time, there was no law talking about this or that. During more than three years, there was no law. Law was from their mouths. Those who held higher positions ordered everything. It was their law” (KR20A).

It is precisely this discontinuity, this arbitrariness that makes Ângkar even stronger because people are even more dependent on the orders given by the specific individuals who were superior to them. First, this facilitates the direct attribution of responsibility to the system of Ângkar and thus makes it psychologically easier for those participating. Second, it removed any alternative system of morality to which to apply beyond the concrete orders they received.

3.3.2 Deindividuation and Anonymity

Within a group, one’s status as an individual can be changed and one can commit acts that one otherwise would not—deindividuation can be defined as a “state of relative anonymity in which a person cannot be identified as a particular individual but only as a group member” (Waller 2002, 216). The deindividuation process, in turn, leads to a greater integration of the individual into the group situation and thus a submergence to its social norms, because a “deindividuated individual is less aware of personal standards and less concerned with self-evaluation or evaluations of others” (Waller 2002, 217); and by removing oneself from these evaluations, individuals can more easily commit actions perceived as morally problematic. This stronger integration into the situation means that many of the above discussed motivations can work significantly more strongly when individuals are deindividuated (Zimbardo 2008, 305). This connection between deindividuation and increased propensity to commit acts that one would not if ordered to under other circumstances has also found support in a range of social-psychological experiments and other studies, which have been well summarized by Zimbardo (2008; see also Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, 613; for a critique, see Reicher 1984). Empirically, in Rwanda the large groups of sometimes more than one hundred who participated together in genocide would be a good example of a situation in which participants may have been deindividuated.

A key part of this concept is that the individual becomes an anonymous member of a broader group (see Grossman [1995] 2009, 151). This anonymity in a mass of numbers can be supplemented by a physical anonymity if participants wear uniforms, costumes, or masks to cover their individual identities (Zimbardo 2008, 219). In Bosnia, for instance, men are reported to have worn masks (Sells 1998, 77); in the context of neighbor-on-neighbor violence, this was particularly important, to facilitate a certain degree of anonymity despite the perpetrators sometimes knowing their victims.

Nonetheless, I believe that this depiction is a little one-sided. I concur fully that deindividuation and anonymity can facilitate participation when a person is opportunistically motivated to genocide or is motivated by an outgroup; however, a person who is being coerced or is participating out of conformity will attempt to shirk if this is possible and will not be seen as shirking. Depending on the degree of deindividuation, an individual may be able to use the mask of anonymity and actually not participate without fearing sanctions. For instance, in a situation of a mass group, all masked, someone who dropped out or at least fell back in a genocidal spree would not be noticed. Thus, anonymity and deindividuation can be facilitative of participation or of active attempts at nonparticipation. For example, in Cambodia, Khmer Rouge arrests were normally conducted in groups, and one former chhlop argued that going along to the arrest in a large group was part of the strategy to avoid having to kill, as it looked like one was still part of the group and noticed less that it was always the same few people who did the killing (KR03A).

In Cambodia, the very social isolation described in section 2.1.2 also acted in a facilitative manner, even as it precluded social dynamics from unfolding as they have done in other cases. The social isolation and lack of prior social contacts coupled with the difficulty of forming new social ties due to the oppressive system increased people’s feeling of anonymity, as they tended not to know who the others were or much about their background. This feeling of anonymity could possibly have increased people’s likelihood to participate in acts of genocide as they felt fewer social restraints.

3.3.3 Organization, Bureaucracy, and Division of Labor

Genocide as a crime committed by an authority often has strong organizational underpinnings that structure the killing and provide a bureaucratic framework, differentiating it from many other crimes that are of a more delinquent nature. Through a division of labor, individual culpability is purportedly reduced (see section 3.3.1) and psychologically many of the participants are able to distance themselves from the genocide, as their task is not actually the act of killing but instead “only” to support it—for example, by rounding people up, organizing transportation logistics, or guarding people so they cannot escape before their killing (see Alvarez 2001, 89; Kühl 2014, 57; Sémelin 2005a, 274). Also, as with other collaborative projects, the acknowledgment of a division of labor emphasizes that individuals’ motivations for participation may well differ depending on their position and their function within the whole (Bloxham 2008a, 188).

In Cambodia, Khmer Rouge cadres were involved with a multitude of different tasks during the regime’s rule (Williams 2018a). Tasks were divided up explicitly between and within units, with each person being responsible for only one very narrow part of any process (KR03B, KR17A, KR21B, KR22A, KR24A, KR53A, KR55A). As exemplified above, some so-called inside guards were in charge of providing water for the prisoners, others the food (KR27A); in interrogation, one person was in charge of asking questions, one for typing, and one for punishing detainees who were reticent; in transportation, one person loaded and unloaded the truck and another signed off on the list. While a division of labor is nothing unusual and is characteristic of most human organizational structures, this degree of division with such narrowly defined tasks is definitely unusual. This strong particularization of tasks enabled people to understand themselves as responsible for only their task and negate any responsibility for the actions of others before or after them in this process. Most cadres seemed to lack a sense that their actions were part of a process from arrest to incarceration to execution and that it was only through the performance of so many individual small tasks that the process as a whole occurred. Thus, this division of labor facilitated a strong diffusion of responsibility among all cadres who were part of this process, particularly those whose actions would come later on when overt violence was used more strongly against the victims, ultimately resulting in their deaths. In the end, people did not feel that they were part of the larger system, except as a victim of the system who had no choice but to fulfill this singular and (for the most part in isolation from its context in the process of destruction) relatively innocuous task. One member of the Khmer Rouge spoke about the fact that there were “systems” for each group (KR55A) and that in this context “it was separated. At the time, when those people were killed, we were not there. We were far away from that” (KR55A). People also emphasized that “only few people were actually the killers” (KR03B), disassociating themselves from the occurrence of killing and attempting to negate any part the process leading up to the killing could have in the resulting deaths. This is at once a diffusion of any personal responsibility onto the other people performing the other tasks, but also a negation of any responsibility except for the people who deal the final blow irrelevant of the process leading to this point.

Further, the strong organization of genocide can replace “individual motivation with organizational routine and bureaucratic incentives” (McCauley 2002, 77). This is evidenced by the effectivity of the legislation on dispossessing the Armenians before their deportation and annihilation; for officials, the legislation “structured their daily work and provided an impersonal, administrative-bureaucratic mask to hide behind. It epitomized formalism: they were dealing with documents, not human beings” (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 58). Described in great depth by Ulrich Herbert (1996), it is precisely this bureaucratic context that facilitated a merging of professional objectivity and dispassion with a new Weltanschauung, a worldview, to a deadly cocktail of enthusiastic bureaucrats putting their professional administrative expertise into the service of the Nazi ideology, striving to fulfill targets and establish lean and efficient processes, without reflecting on the deadly consequences these actions were inevitably having. A good example of such a bureaucrat is Adolf Eichmann, whose “thoughtlessness” in his acceptance of his institutional role was discussed in greater detail in section 2.1.5 on roles and doubling. Alvarez succinctly summarizes how bureaucracies can work so efficiently: “The impersonal application of formalized directives allows bureaucracies to function more efficiently and mechanically, since they perform on the basis of routines and rules applied uniformly, rather than tailoring procedures to individuals.… In other words, human relationships are replaced by bureaucratic objectives. This means that qualities of compassion, humanity, and concern are removed from consideration. Bureaucrats do not take into account the human cost of their performance and the ways in which their actions personally affect people, since these are, for bureaucratic purposes, largely irrelevant” (2001, 98).

3.3.4 Bystanders

The final group-related facilitative factor stems from the presence of others among or near the perpetrator group: bystanders. While some research has attempted to morally exculpate bystanders (Donà 2018), their presence has an important impact on the genocidal context. In the presence of many bystanders, it is less likely that anyone will intervene against participation. On the one hand, this is because people assume that plenty of other people are available to help, so there is less pressure on them to intervene—the so-called Kitty Genovese effect (Zimbardo 2008, 315)—and thus incentives for resistance are avoided; on the other hand, and as explained in the section on conformity, an individual who is part of a group will not want to stick out by acting against what the other members are doing, and will take their cue and remain passive. More important, though, is the fact that bystanders implicitly legitimate the action of participants by not explicitly resisting or registering dissent. Psychologically, simply by being present, bystanders thus encourage participants even if they are actually against the genocidal action (see Williams 2018c).

3.4  TIME

A final group of facilitative conditions can be categorized under the heading “time,” as they all speak to the facilitative effect that passing time can have on an individual’s propensity to participate in genocide. These time-sensitive factors all attest to the malleability of human morals and human sensitivity to violence, and show how over time and in the right circumstances these can gradually be eroded.

3.4.1 Habituation and Routinization Leading to Desensitization

Over time, people can become accustomed to most actions even if they are at first repulsed. Doctors become used to the sight of gaping wounds, people working in a morgue adapt to an environment surrounded by cadavers, and scholars of violence and war become familiar with gory accounts of atrocity. Likewise, perpetrators of genocide can become desensitized to the horror of what they are doing, and their actions can gain a certain degree of normality. At first, many perpetrators were horrified and disgusted by the actions they were committing, but most accounts of the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda show that over time the perpetrators became much more used to the killing (Browning [1994] 2001, 69, 128; Hatzfeld 2004a, 54; McCauley 2002, 79; Sereny [1974] 1977, 200; see also Anderton and Ryan 2016). The first killings committed by SS soldiers showed that they were not yet routinized into this act of killing (Orth 2002; see also Orth 2000); only over time did they become habituated to the process of killing. In this sense, brutalization would appear to be more of a consequence of than a precondition for participating in genocide (Welzer 2002, 243; see also Alexander 1948, 301; Winton 2011, 365); others have argued that brutal behavior was also something of a disposition and some perpetrators had a career in violence and brutality that preceded their participation in genocide (Kühl 2014, 204). Bloxham (2009, 289) argues that young men at the Eastern front experienced “interactive brutalization, a reduced sensitivity to the infliction and suffering of violence because of exposure to both.” Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that a gradual desensitization process, while facilitative to primary or continuing participation, is not a necessary prerequisite; the most evocative example here is provided by the “spontaneous” and extremely brutal killing of nearly all Jews in Jedwabne, as described in considerable depth in Jan Gross’s (2003) study Neighbours. However, brutality can also serve several different purposes: “asserting own expectations, that would otherwise not be attainable, intimidating the other in advance to be able to assert expectations later, impressing onlookers or creating a valve for the pressure being built up by the other side” (Kühl 2014, 215); and finally, by using brutality toward the victims, people can persuade themselves that their actions are actually right (Kühl 2014, 216).

As part of their standard training, soldiers, militias, and other security personnel learn to use violence. They are conditioned and habituated to acts of violence in order that they become desensitized (Alvarez 2001, 96), but also so that they are conditioned (that is, they will react to a certain impulse with a specific reaction without having to think about it); it becomes the only right reaction to the impulse and engrained in the conditioned individual (Kühl 2014, 284). This is particularly important, because in situations in which the individual is angry or frightened and thus is no longer thinking with their rational forebrain, they can, through the conditioning, still act in the prescribed way and overcome any inhibitions (Grossman [1995] 2009, xxii). Furthermore, an individual who has performed an action so often that it has become conditioned can almost deny that he or she is in this specific moment actually killing another human with the same action (Grossman [1995] 2009, 257). Besides the actual training (oftentimes using targets shaped like humans), people can become socialized into a context in which violence becomes normal, particularly in the absence of any antimilitary or pacifist norms that could provide a counterdiscourse (Bašić 2004, 17).

A certain degree of routinization and ritualization is posited to have a psychologically alleviating effect on individuals in the context of ethnic riots (Tambiah 1996, 230), and it is plausible that a similar dynamic of routinization should also be facilitative over time for continued participation in genocide. Rituals as “behaviours that are apparently excessive or unproductive but which nonetheless are persistent” can be “enacted for the psychological benefit of the perpetrators rather than as instrumental exercises in discipline” and can, for instance, lead to the humiliation of the victims, which psychologically makes it easier for the perpetrators to commit their acts of killing (Waller 2002, 207). Furthermore, there are reduced costs to repeat perpetration as one has already transgressed boundaries—and the more killed, the more abstract and less individualized these then become (Anderson 2018, 206).

Several former Khmer Rouge in Cambodia spoke about how, over time, their work became easier and how they got used to the tasks they had to perform (KR03A, KR24A, KR34A; see also Hinton 2005, 238), although some said that it never became easier and that they remained just as afraid and unwilling to kill as the first time (KR15A). This habituation to violence is the effect of time and routinization, ultimately leading to their desensitization to the initially horrific actions (see also Hinton 2005, 238). This habituation can also be seen earlier as people were continually moved from one unit to another, each time coming slightly closer to the locus of violence and rising in the ranks. In this sense, people over time received more and more responsibility for the violence or, put a different way, were engaged in successively new and more key tasks for the violence, and in this they became more used to this participation. Finally, the idea of cutting off one’s heart and the necessity of doing this to serve the regime manifests the concept of habituation (KR15A, KR55A). There is even the realization from some interviewees that they would have liked to desensitize themselves and thus facilitate cutting off their heart. An example, referred to earlier, is people in killing units who would eat the livers of victims in order to “prevent themselves from being shocked by killing people” (KR03B).

3.4.2 Escalating Commitments and the Continuum of Destruction

A further process that occurs over time relates to an increased willingness to participate, as opposed to the reduced inhibition to participate as just described referring to desensitization. More specifically, the facilitative factor discussed here is not really an increased propensity to participate over time but instead a gradual sliding into participation over a period of time that is almost imperceptible and that makes the perpetrator ever more committed to the cause and to his or her action within this. There are two approaches to how this change can occur, hitherto not differentiated clearly in the literature: the continuum of destruction and escalating commitments.

The first and most prominent approach to this is provided in the concept of the continuum of destruction by Staub (1989), in which the individual is changed by successive steps, each preparing him or her for the next slightly harder action. The concept is not clearly located at the macro or micro level by Staub, and he refers to the different levels interchangeably. The continuum of destruction describes a gradual evolution and begins with initial acts that seem insignificant but are part of a destructive system (for instance, using the “Heil Hitler” greeting and salute). While these may seem irrelevant and not particularly harmful, they already devalue the victim group a little and pave the way for psychological changes within the individual that may make more destructive behavior possible. This cycle of learning and changing due to one’s own actions can continue and lead to a person committing acts of killing in a genocidal context (Staub 1989, 18). Janine Clark supports this process to explain initial participation in Bosnia, but finds that perpetrators hereafter follow “erratic movements up and down a sliding scale of positive and negative behaviour rather than a steady development along a continuum of destruction” (2009, 437). Also, Fujii describes a similar process in the context of groups being constitutive of killing in Rwanda, when she says that “through interacting in groups and acting as a group, Joiners came to participate in the violence through a series of graduated steps” (2009, 154; see also Smeulers 2015, 246). Few other studies have empirically looked in detail at whether the continuum of destruction actually works—for instance, in Rwanda. However, the study of participation in terrorist groups has demonstrated that individuals come to participate in a long process constituted by a sequence of events that begins with relatively mundane activities and gradually escalates into extreme violence (McCauley and Moskalenko 2008, 420; Taylor and Horgan 2006).

An alternative perspective is provided by the idea of escalating commitments, in which a person continues along a path of perpetration in a series of small steps, because to stop would be to admit that the last step (which was hardly much less bad) was also wrong. This “sequence of seemingly small, innocuous incremental steps” (Waller 2002, 205) provides an individual with a powerful motivation to continue along the path, lest the moral problematique of previous action be revealed. In any given social situation, we are more likely to repeat a previous action and thus confirm the correctness of previous decisions than to revise our decision and admit that previously we may have made a mistake (Welzer 2006, 87). Referring back to the concept of cognitive dissonance discussed above, a person who has committed some acts that are outside his or her moral comfort zone will have adapted his or her morals in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance, thus allowing the action to continue without psychological distress. When the time comes for a next, slightly more severe step, the individual subconsciously has two options: either take this step and very slightly adjust the moral standards to include the new action, or refuse to act in this way, saying that it is morally problematic, but then be confronted with the fact that it is hardly much worse than the last step, creating strong cognitive dissonance. Thus, peu à peu, the moral framework is completely readjusted to legitimate the new actions. Even simple steps like the adoption of anti-Jewish stereotypes make “principled resistance against more radical steps of persecution … very unlikely” (Feldman and Seibel 2005, 4), given that one would not have a leg to stand on in why a certain amount of persecution is not legitimate but milder stereotypes are. Newman reports on several different strands of social-psychological research that demonstrate “that if you get people to harm others—or at least believe they are harming others—their feelings about their victims become more negative. As a result, it is clear that whatever leads people to participate in discrimination and persecution, continued involvement in that activity will create pressure to justify it. And one way to justify it is to decide that your victims deserve what they are getting. That, in turn, can encourage you to intensify the brutality of your behavior” (2006, 112).

There is a key difference between escalating commitments and the continuum of destruction that other authors do not make. Escalating commitments see the morals being “pulled” along behind, because when approached for new (and worse) action an individual does not want to refuse in an attempt to morally justify the past action. The continuum of destruction, on the other hand, sees the individual change at every stage (naturally due to the past experiences), but this change “pushes” the individual to seek out opportunities to go one step further. The difference is not great, but the continuum of destruction sees individuals as more proactive, whereas escalating commitments see a reluctant individual who reacts to new situations and participates in order not to be confronted with potential cognitive dissonance regarding the past action.

A fascinating further tweak to the Milgram series gives interesting experimental material to underline this dynamic. The setup was identical to the standard experiment, except that a second confederate posed as a teacher who is in charge of deciding whether the learner’s answers are correct, and the participant is responsible for delivering the shocks. When the experimenter with the white coat is called away, the confederate teacher suggests raising the shock level with every mistake. The compliance rate all the way up to 450 volts was thus reduced to 20 percent (from 65% in the standard setup), demonstrating the importance of the perceived legitimacy of the experimenter’s authority. However, it is still 20 percent who participate despite a lack of authority, and several authors interpret this as evidence in support of the idea of escalating commitments and the pressure to continue along a path once chosen in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance of admitting that it was wrong (Burger 2009, 3; Chirot and McCauley 2006, 57; Schelling 2004, 49). While this could certainly be the case in this experiment, as well as in most other versions of the Milgram experiment, this is not the only plausible explanation for the 20 percent participants; the dynamics of conformity described above, for instance, provide an alternative explanation.

3.5  CONCLUSION

This chapter has introduced the manifold facilitative factors that do not motivate people to participate in genocide but make it easier. I distinguished four main groups of facilitative factors: First, the ideological framework, which a genocidal regime constructs, is important because it provides the moral justification for the killing and can construct the enemy as threatening. Both of these mechanisms allow the individual to see his or her actions as permissible and legitimate. Next, various processes can allow the individual to morally disengage from the negative connotations of the act of killing—for instance, by dehumanizing the victim, devaluing life in general, creating distance between the victim and the perpetrator, or using various linguistic constructs that remove the morality from the act of killing. Third, group dynamics can also impact people’s participation by diffusing or displacing responsibility, allowing for a deindividuation of the perpetrator; furthermore, the way genocidal groups are organized and the labor is divided can be facilitative, as can the presence of bystanders, who implicitly legitimate the actions. Fourth, over time people can become habituated to or routinized in killing and thus desensitized, or alternatively they can gradually be pulled in along a continuum of destruction or through escalating commitments. These facilitative factors are complemented by inhibitive factors, which are basically the opposite of any motivation or facilitative factor and can make someone’s participation in genocide less likely.

VIGNETTE  IV

Sopheak

AN INTERROGATOR SEARCHING TO UNEARTH ENEMY STRINGS

WHEN I WAS young, I looked after cows and worked in the rice fields with my parents until at fifteen or sixteen I became a monk for four years. After disrobing from being a monk, a village and a commune chief assigned us to carry injured soldiers. I did not want to go because I was scared of being killed as there was a lot of bombing. But during that time no one refused to go, otherwise we could be accused of being against them, arrested, and killed.

I was then assigned to be a commune chhlop to spy on soldiers on the risky battlefield, spying on the enemy’s military base and patrolling. Later I was transferred to defend a military base, at night guarding and spying. I was very tired. I fought very often against Lon Nol’s soldiers, two or three times a month. When we defeated them I was happy at first, but it became harder. There was no freedom and I was not allowed to visit home. The work was difficult, too, because whatever they assigned you to do, you had to finish it. They did not care about how hard it was or how tired we were. We were ordered to do everything without any breaks. We guarded the village against robbers and people who had been evacuated from Phnom Penh so they could not escape to the jungle.

After some training, I later guarded prisoners in working groups, then in prison cells, making sure no one escaped or killed themselves. There was one prisoner per cell and I guarded two or three cells. No one committed suicide during my duty, but later one prisoner jumped from the building and another took a rifle and opened fire on the guard. They did not let me know what kind of mistakes those prisoners had made. I wanted to know, too, but the leader already banned me from asking anything; I could only talk to them when they needed the toilet.

After two or three months I moved to Tuol Sleng prison, S-21, where I guarded big rooms with twenty or thirty people. In one floor, there were two guards and there were four or five big rooms. It was still difficult like before because I was assigned to guard again and I did not have the right to leave the prison or go out for fun. I only worked. It was so stressful and I wanted to visit my parents.

Only when I was moved from the guarding to the interrogating section did I know what mistakes the prisoners had committed. After learning to type on the typewriter, I interrogated prisoners. Step by step, no leading questions. In the interrogation there was torture and hitting, but I did not do it, only the leaders did. I asked prisoners about their backgrounds. When we asked the prisoner but the prisoner did not answer, one of the group leaders came to interrogate and torture the prisoner. But the low interrogators did not torture. When there was an order from “the higher” to torture, then the interrogators could do so, too. I was just a new one; I did not have the right to do anything. Only when the order to hit them came, did we hit them. It was like that. When I was ordered to do something, if I did not do it, I had also made a mistake. When the prisoner confessed, I just wrote it down.

Torture was mainly by beating them with a tree branch or electric shocks from a hand-driven generator. It was because the prisoners did not answer or confess at all; others confessed inappropriately because they wanted to avoid punishment, but instead they were punished even more. About half the people I interrogated had really made national treacherous mistakes. For example, when they talked about how they joined the CIA, it was true. But about half just invented what they said. There were people who did not answer even after the torture. They did not know what to confess. I knew who was telling the truth and who was not because I was trained to interrogate them. It was our obligation, when the prisoners did not confess, to torture them. If we did not do this, they would not answer.

After the interrogation, I gave them back to a guard. Later they were put in a car and taken away. But I did not know where to. I worked there for four or five months before the yuon came. When the regime ended, I thought it had been a difficult regime. It was too strict; I worked without time to rest, to have fun, to be happy. It was so stressful.

Today he lives in Kampong Chhnang.

CHAPTER   4

Contextual Conditions

AS THE THIRD in the trinity of chapters presenting the Complexity of Evil model on why people participate in genocide, this chapter sets out the contextual conditions within which this participation occurs. These contextual conditions differ significantly from the two previous chapters on motivations and facilitative factors, respectively, as they are no longer located at the micro level but are factors that have a statewide impact and that create the situation that all perpetrators within each case are acting in, and also the context within which others do not participate. This context is nonetheless important for the model as the individuals do not make their decision in a vacuum, but are embedded in a broad environment that structures how they perceive the situations they are in and that provides a framework within which they can comprehend what is happening. While some readers may find it intuitively more appealing to begin with the context as the bigger picture, I have structured the book to begin with motivations and then facilitative factors and only now proceed to the contextual conditions, as the former pose the key mechanisms that are causally crucial for perpetration. This chapter now brings in the context and shows its specific relevance at the micro level in its impact on the motivations and facilitative factors.

There has been a considerable effort made to understand how various factors influence the occurrence of genocide, particularly from quantitative scholars (Butcher et al. 2020; Goldsmith et al. 2013; Harff 2003; Krain 2005; Querido 2009; Rost 2013; Schneider and Bussmann 2013; Ulfelder and Valentino 2008; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004; Wayman and Tago 2010; R. Wood 2010), as well as my own set-theoretic work that attempts to study this from a perspective that embraces multiple pathways to genocide, each combining different factors (Williams 2016). However, this literature specifies why genocide occurs, not what parts of this are salient for individual perpetrators, rendering it important to look in some depth at how the context can have an impact on genocide occurrence and what this means for participation at the micro level.

Obviously, at this stage, it will come as no surprise that people are not acting in a vacuum, as we have seen that social dynamics within the group play an important part, as do constructions of authority and various cultural specifics of status, ideologies, and so on. These all play their part in constructing a context that provides various incentives for participation, and depending on the contextual conditions, genocide will occur or not (see Solonari 2014, 63). As contextual conditions that affect the whole of society, they do not impact certain individuals more than others; but they can vary in how they activate certain mechanisms and make some motivations more salient than others in a comparison between different contexts. Thus, one could describe the contextual condition as the IN part of an INUS condition (see section 1.5)—that is, the insufficient but necessary part of the condition—as the genocidal context is necessary for people to participate and to even develop their motivations for wanting to and being able to participate; but at the same time, the context is insufficient for people to participate, as this could not differentiate between participants and nonparticipants, requiring the unnecessary but sufficient part of the condition to be fulfilled through the motivations discussed in chapter 2.

The aim of this chapter is to look at these macro-level factors of the context that could plausibly impact the individual actors. In line with the ideas of Coleman (1990) and the so-called Coleman’s boat (see figure 1.2), we are on the left-hand side of the boat, looking at the linkage between the macro and micro levels, at how the macro level can impact the individual and his or her perceptions and attitudes and frame the situation in which the individual is acting. In changing our perspective from the micro level to the macro level in this chapter, it is important to emphasize that while the level of analysis does indeed become macro-level, our core interest in this remains to see how genocidal contexts are created as perceived by the participants, referring the macro-level phenomena back to the micro level where possible. This will demand a certain balancing act between looking at the conditions of how genocides occur and relating these back down to how macro-level conditions are perceived by the individuals and what impact this has on participation. To allow this balancing act to work, I will discuss mostly literature on relevant dynamics at the macro level, both the perpetrator literature and, more importantly, the qualitative and quantitative literature on genocide occurrence. However, I will for each factor endeavor to break it down and make it relevant to the perpetrators being studied in this book, discussing how they perceive this contextual condition and how it relates to their situation, their motivations, and other facilitative factors.

The macro-level contextual conditions deal with various facets of a genocidal state’s political, societal, economic, and cultural makeup. First, various facets of the state are hypothesized to be key to allowing genocide to occur, particularly the nature of democracy, autocracy or anocracy, and state capacity. Second, the uncertainty of a situation, whether it is due to political upheaval or armed conflict and war, constitutes a contextual condition that is particularly permissive of genocide, and relates down strongly to uncertainty at the individual level too. Third, societal tensions regarding ethnicity, ethnic dominance, and discrimination are discussed. Fourth, ideologies have played a role as both motivations and facilitative factors, but here they are key to an understanding of the genocidal context. Fifth, economic considerations at the national level can provide a context in which participation becomes more or less attractive. Finally, the sixth section will discuss various attributes of a society’s “culture” that can contribute to creating a genocidal context. This categorization is not exhaustive but is suggestive of empirical patterns demonstrated across the literature. Various authors attempting such a classification at a theoretical level will see varying nuances and debates, according to the author’s perspective and emphasis, and this constitutes my own attempt to divide up the literature.[1]

It is pivotal to understand that genocides cannot be understood purely as a top-down or bottom-up process that is led from national-level political decisions or by individual participants’ agency at the local level. Instead, genocide is “undoubtedly the outcome of an interaction between dynamics that were both central and local” (Mamdani 2001, 194). Research on riots has convincingly demonstrated that once elites have instigated a riot, they lose control over the violence, and only regain their control in the interpretation post hoc (Brass 2004); this characterization would go too far in most cases of genocide, however, as genocidal campaigns are always longer than a short riot and are more embedded in state structures. Nevertheless, and as in civil wars (Kalyvas 2006), local actors can and do “take ownership” of the genocidal project and the genocide can take on various forms in different areas. Here, Lee Ann Fujii’s (2009, 12) idea of scripts, referred to in the introduction, is instructive in thinking about how local interpretations of a macro-level genocidal trajectory work. Often the elimination of the victim group is not even an explicit policy goal but a by-product of broader strategic goals (Owens, Su, and Snow 2013, 75), such as the elite securing their own hold on power. In the end, however, genocide is a policy that is formulated by elites at the national level and put into practice by various organizations, institutions, and individuals on the ground (Straus 2015, xi).

At the same time, various authors stress complex interaction between the local and the national levels and also discuss the dynamic nature of the genesis and occurrence of genocide (Mayersen 2010; Straus 2012, 550). This chapter will attempt to allow for a certain amount of dynamism, but it would go beyond the scope of the book to give this a fuller treatment. However, it would be a fascinating endeavor to model changing contexts and disaggregate these to changes that are possibly lagged or different in various parts of the country (for an excellent example, see McDoom 2014b). This chapter has a different aim, though. Its aim is to differentiate between fundamental contextual conditions that characterize the contexts in which genocide occurs and understand what these mean for perpetrators.

4.1  STATE

The state is an important actor in the planning and execution of genocide as it sets “the parameters of popular participation, either by ordering it, legitimating it (explicitly or implicitly), or restricting it” (Bloxham 2008b, 229). It is state actors that will instigate the genocide and provide the narratives (or scripts, as Fujii would call them) through which genocide participation can be legitimized and planned. When genocidal ideology is propagated as a policy of state, it has considerably more gravitas than it would as simply any other ideology, be it the anti-Semitism propagated by the Nazi regime, anti-Tutsi ideologies in Rwanda, or the construction of the dangerous internal enemy in Cambodia. While most genocidal violence is exerted under the auspices of the state, this does not mean that it is perpetrated by the state. Beyond the military and police forces, as well as special organizations and bureaucracies, the state (particularly weak states) can delegate violence or refrain from stopping it by paramilitaries, civilian groups, or other such organizations that can more easily traverse the border of legality (Ahram 2014; Carey, Colaresi, and Mitchell 2015; Sémelin 2005a, 183), most notably the interahamwe during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda or various militias during the genocide in Bosnia. Also, while state authority is important, it is pivotal that “agents of local social control” mediate these genocidal policies for their local communities, as these are the people who possess authority at these levels and can actually mobilize the individuals (Dadrian 1995, 149–150; see also Gross 2003, 73).

But what kind of state is most conducive to genocide? Two different arguments are made in the scholarship. The first line of thinking is epitomized in Rummel’s adaption of Lord Acton’s iconic phrase on corruption to read “Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely” (Rummel 1997, 9). This strand of argument runs that democratically orientated countries are less likely to experience democides (his neologism for mass murder by governments of their own citizens, a concept akin to genocide), because of the cross pressures in their governance systems, the political culture of accepting difference, and the fact that no one group can take complete control of the polity. Conversely, in autocratic regimes the government is unrestrained in its dealings with its citizens and any groups under its control. Thus, no actors can constrain the actions of the regime and a genocide becomes feasible toward disagreeable groups. For example, the National Socialist regime in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s managed to erode all political opposition peu à peu, and thus was able to exert its policies throughout the Reich as the leadership saw fit. In Cambodia, the totalitarian nature of the state and its intolerance for any form of opposition was even stronger; Ângkar’s authority was tantamount to total, and what the leaders of the regime said had quasi-law character, underlining the unconstrained nature of the executive. By the time the Khmer Rouge had established its hold on power, it had delegitimized Lon Nol supporters, pro-monarchists, and any other form of opposition, even founding its genocidal construction of the enemy on the idea of counterrevolutionary opposition to the regime. It was the “absolute power” of the Khmer Rouge that allowed it to decide absolutely and unequivocally over life and death of “internal enemies.” The regime is commonly discussed as a “dictatorship” by my interviewees, and one former guard at S-21 security center explained that as a “dictatorship regime during that time, they killed people even for making small mistakes. They just killed people who made mistakes and those who were against the regime. There were 10, 20 people at a time. Put in prison and tortured and killed like chickens and ducks with no consideration” (KR27A).

The proposition of autocratic, totalitarian states being more genocidal is supported by a wealth of studies (Stewart 2011, 28), including the prominent statistical analysis of Barbara Harff (2003) that finds autocracies to be three and a half times more likely to commit genocide than democracies (see also Easterly, Gatti, and Kurlat 2006; Eck and Hultman 2007; no statistical effect was found in Krain 1997). Furthermore, increased military expenditure (and with this state strength) has been demonstrated to be one of the key predictors of genocide (Bae and Ott 2008), although Michael Colaresi and Sabine Carey (2008) find that this is conditional on the absence of “institutional executive constraints” as unrestrained executives will have a free hand to deal out genocidal violence.

A slightly different but related nuance is that some scholars emphasize the necessity of state capacity in the implementation of genocidal policies (McDoom 2014b) and how varying levels of capacity will impact chosen strategies (see Ahram 2014, 494; Sémelin 2005a, 194). For example, Straus (2015, 10) emphasizes that perpetrating organizations must “exercise effective domination over a territory in which the target group resides.” This is demonstrated well by the fact that only when the Khmer Rouge had taken control of the whole country did the genocidal violence start, and it ceased when the Vietnamese invaded and the Khmer Rouge’s control over the state became limited (although various other forms of violence existed before and after).[2] Challenging this logic, Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino (2008) argue that mass killing is actually more likely in weak states that cannot prioritize the provision of public goods.

The second, contradictory argument that has been made regarding regime types’ impact on genocide occurrence is that it is not autocratic regimes but transitioning regimes that are in the process of democratizing that are most susceptible to genocide. This point has been made most strongly by Mann (2005), who argues that there is destructive potential in the process of constructing a new democratic nation-state. As a new national identity is created, it is possible to redefine the demos (citizens of the state) to include only one ethnos (ethnic subgroup in the country) and thus remove the targeted victim group from their citizenship—their membership in the community—and ultimately create the possibility of their victimization and destruction. The paradigmatic case in point is the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians, as well as the Assyrians and Greeks. In the dwindling Ottoman Empire, the new Ittihad leadership sought to create a new political community in its process of democratization, to redefine the Ottoman demos as a solely Turkish one, to raise up the Turkish ethnos to constitute the entire demos, thus excluding the other groups, making them superfluous to the state and even framing them as dangerous to the newly emerging demos. An interesting other take on this is that elites may seek to use genocidal violence to demobilize opposition activists and shift the political discourse away from their policies in transitory regimes (Gagnon 2004), a process that could be seen to play out in the former Yugoslavia, where Slobodan Milošević’s regime attempted to redefine the Yugoslav demos as Serbian and to remove the other ethnic groups’ claim to authority in the post–Cold War transformation period; in this context, Gagnon (2004) argues that the demobilization of (I would say ethnic) political opposition serves the purpose of distracting from this shift in demos constitution.

In both of these contexts, the state becomes criminogenic, legitimating and encouraging the genocide (Anderson 2018). Thus, the moral framework within which action occurs shifts, as Anderson argues, and “individuals will adjust their moral beliefs in response to changed conditions, as dictated by coercive and persuasive forms of power” (2018, 8). The state can shift this moral belief system because it holds a monopoly over the “legal codification of deviant behaviour—it has the power to distinguish right from wrong, and to define social relationships” (26). Furthermore, the state legally constrains and defines behavior with “laws as ‘demarcations of difference’, particularly through withdrawal of citizenship or exclusion from public and political life” (51). Finally, these laws and the state authority behind them can also convey legitimacy of the genocidal action (52).

Whether in the context of a totalitarian or autocratic state or during transition, a strong state can have a significant impact on the individual perpetrators themselves because the genocidal orders are given by state authorities and thus seen as legitimate (see Prusin 2010, 158). However, this legitimacy can be ambivalent in whether it demands violence or allows it, with the state having a strong influence on people by refusing to stop killings that are occurring as pogroms even if the state is not actively calling for killings or is even carrying out the killing itself (Solonari 2014; see also Gross 2003). Qua office many people in the genocidal organizational hierarchy receive the legitimacy they require in order to demand obedience for their orders. In Rwanda, not only did the strong nature of the state before the genocide provide readily available information and command channels through which the genocidal policies could be transmitted, but—even more importantly—the strong state was already an authority to which people would refer and whose orders one was accustomed to taking. This is particularly evident in the use of communal labor (umuganda) before the genocide, in which every family provided one person for a day to fulfill tasks for the communal good. This structure and concept of communal labor was taken and reapplied to the context of genocide—and now instead of maintaining roads, people felt obliged to kill Tutsi. Similarly, in Germany, the strength of the totalitarian German state allowed for orders to be filled with the requisite authority, not just vis-à-vis German soldiers but also of peoples under occupation, where “already established hierarchical relationships assumed much more significance in the daily life of police officers” (Haberer 2001, 397). This includes implicitly that the state giving orders not only gives the authorities legitimacy but also suggests that they have the full power of the state behind them to render credible any threats made in an attempt to coerce individuals into participating.

4.2  SOCIETAL TENSIONS: ETHNICITY AND DISCRIMINATION

Although ethnicity is essentially a constructed category (Chandra 2006, 416), it can have very real ramifications on relations between groups when it is used politically. Helen Fein defines pluralistic states as “states with pre-existing internal cleavages and real opposition” (1990, 39), which often come into existence during processes of colonization and decolonization, as multiethnic states emerged when border assignments were arbitrarily decided on by colonial masters (Kuper 1981). Within these fractured societies Fein (1990) argues that the perpetrating group defines the victims as “outside the universe of obligation” and thus potentially able to be killed. This process of excluding the victim group can be marked by ethnically based discourses of racism (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2008) or anti-Semitism (Goldhagen 1996). This interpretation is backed by evidence from the communal level during the Rwandan genocide in a study by McDoom that shows that violence differed according to interethnic ties in Rwanda, as “well-integrated communities are more socially cohesive and resist extremist attempts to divide them, and thus require time to overcome interethnic bonds of trust and to destroy social capital” (2014b, 34). Also, a good predictor of why some communities engaged in pogroms in Eastern Europe while others did not has been shown to be “preexisting intercommunal polarization” and a lack of political integration and assimilation of the Jewish communities (Kopstein and Wittenberg 2011).

Comparative, statistical studies have found mixed results for the impact of ethnicity, although this could be a product of measuring different concepts related to ethnicity. Sang Hoo Bae and Attiat F. Ott (2008) find the ethnic fragmentation of the population to have the strongest effect on genocide occurrence, although the more fragmented the population, the lower the likelihood of mass killing. Krain (1997) finds ethnic fragmentation and marginalization to have no effect. On the other hand, ethnic polarization is shown to increase the likelihood of genocide (Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2008). Further, Harff (2003) has demonstrated that the salience of an elite’s ethnicity is important in the occurrence of genocide. I would argue that this is due to the circumstances that if it is perceived that elites are disproportionately from one ethnic group, this could cause dissatisfaction by the underrepresented groups and the status quo could be challenged. These challenges could in turn prompt the elites to frame security and their policies in ethnic terms.

Similarly, discrimination has been demonstrated to have powerful effects on the occurrence of genocide (Nyseth Brehm 2017; Rost 2013; Ulfelder and Valentino 2008), particularly economic discrimination (Rost 2013). Discrimination of any group highlights how the group is being politically framed as different. This marking of difference opens up the possibility of framing them in dehumanized, racialized, or other derogatory ways in the future and thus paving the way for genocidal ideologies to take hold. A pertinent example of this mechanism is provided by the progressively encompassing discrimination against Jewish citizens under Nazi rule, in which a wide variety of acts of legal discrimination built up barriers between Jewish and gentile people over the years preceding the Holocaust.

These ethnic divisions at the macro level relate to the individuals throughout the countries being studied here, by framing difference and allowing certain constructions of ethnicity to become salient for their everyday lives. By emphasizing ethnicity, ingroups and outgroups can be formed more easily, and processes of denigration vis-à-vis the victim group are facilitated. In this process, we can see a simplification of identities to just one layer (e.g., ethnicity) as well as a “hardening of identity” that renders them less fluid (Anderson 2018, 28).

Ethnicity supported the violence process in two ways in Cambodia. First, for the small ethnic minorities of the Cham, Lao, Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese, as well as some further indigenous groups, they were defined as outside the revolutionary group that was explicitly and nationalistically Khmer; the Khmer Rouge’s policies were by and for the Khmer (as its name suggests) and to a degree also inherently racist (Kiernan 1996). This was possible precisely because of the lack of ethnic fragmentation, which created a large ethnic Khmer majority and some quantitatively insignificant other ethnic groups. Second, ethnicity is also mediated by the intensity of conflict, as it allowed those who were framed as enemies of the people to be coalescing with the country’s external enemies. This took on explicitly ethnic connotations in that the Khmer Rouge propagated that the internal enemies, who were political constructions of antirevolutionary sentiment, were Khmer bodies with Vietnamese heads,[3] stripping their victims of the Khmer ethnicity and removing them from the dominant ethnic group and essentially ethnicizing the political construction of the victim group. Negative tropes about the Vietnamese also continued in my interviews—for example, references to yuon, a derogatory term for Vietnamese in Khmer, were relatively common. During the Khmer Rouge regime, the Vietnamese were seen as “expansionist, invaders” (KR34).

4.3  IDEOLOGY

In popular portrayals, ideology is the key explanatory condition of genocide, and ideologies certainly do play a very important role in the genesis and unfolding of genocide, as has been discussed at length in both the chapter on motivations (section 2.2.1) and more significantly the chapter on facilitative factors (section 3.1.1). Nonetheless, the role of ideology is essential at this level of contextual conditions too because it allows genocide to become imaginable as the “strategies of violence” that political leaders employ become shaped by ideologies (Straus 2015). Genocide is seldom planned as such from the start, but “preexisting ideological frameworks—what I call ‘founding narratives’—shape how elites understand and respond to threats in acute crises, especially war” (Straus 2015, 11), and allow genocide to become an imaginable outcome. As such, ideologies become radicalized at the national level, providing a fruitful framework for genocidal action (Murray 2015).

It is important to re-emphasize here that ideologies can have several different functions, but that in the end they originate in propagations at the national level. These ideologies can then justify, legitimate, and provoke, but at the same time they also recalibrate intergroup relations and can even impact on the ingroup relations between the perpetrators, giving credence to claims of authority for national elites, enhancing peer pressure and norms of camaraderie. These ideologies are developed and propagated from the national level, and thus play an important part in forming the genocidal context and creating the genocidal situations the individual perpetrators find themselves in. Chalk and Jonassohn (1990) even go so far as to say that modern genocides are defined by their implementation of an ideology, as victims are selected because of who they are rather than what they have or where they are, as is the case in premodern genocides (see also Freeman 1995). In statistical research, Harff has shown that exclusionary ideologies—defined as “a belief system that identifies some overriding purpose or principle that justifies efforts to restrict, persecute, or eliminate certain categories of people” (2003, 63)—can significantly increase the risk of genocide occurrence. The content of these ideologies will vary depending on the case, and various scholars have emphasized different types of ideologies, such as anti-Semitism (Goldhagen 1996), racism (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2008; Kiernan 1996; Weitz 2003), purity (Sémelin 2005a; see also Chirot and Karell 2014), nationalism in the process of democratization (Mann 2005), founding narratives of a group’s dominance (Straus 2015), or Marxism (Heder 1997). I shall not elaborate further on these various forms of ideology, as this discussion and the critiques against it have already been alluded to above.

Elsewhere, I have argued with Dominik Pfeiffer (2017) that ideologies or intent—as it is relatedly labeled in the judicial definition of genocide—is best understood at the macro level as a frame for genocidal action. In this sense, genocidal frames are seen as guiding understandings that are ideologically informed and tap into other broader societal frames. However, while they legitimate and guide genocidal action, they do not need to be tied to individual motivations at the micro level but just provide the framework within which this action occurs.

The exclusive ideologies propagated by the regime may not even be believed by the elites and certainly need not constitute their motivations for choosing genocide as a policy option; for instance, in the case of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians, the leading “Ittihad were not followers of the tenets of Islam. While the Ittihad continued to run the State largely as a theocracy, its leaders were personally atheists and agnostics” (Dadrian 1995, 5). Here, also, the Ottoman millet system and the unequal status of non-Muslims were used to legitimize this discrimination based on the doctrines of Islamic ideology (4–5).

A function of ideologies can be to create differences between different groups and to give meaning to these differential ascriptions; the ideology can then go on to legitimize the exclusion and ultimately also the destruction of one or more of these groups. This construction of difference was pivotal to the acceptance of the legitimacy of the destruction in Rwanda, where Tutsi were equated with the enemy RPF; in Cambodia, where an entirely arbitrary difference was constructed between supposed counterrevolutionary elements and the supporters of the revolution; and in Nazi Germany, where successive discriminatory legislation created difference legally (as explained in the previous section) but propaganda campaigns allowed stereotypes to (re-)emerge, become seen as truths, and ultimately see deportation and destruction of neighbors as legitimate. These ideologies can be seen as “not only penetrating all reaches of society (from elites to non-elites and from urban to rural populations), but also monopolizing the discursive space such that no contradictory messages came through that could challenge the inherent logic of the norm” (Fujii 2004, 101). In this sense, the ideology serves the purpose of normalizing the idea of genocide and framing it in such a way that it fits the historical narratives of popular discourse and appears to be a legitimate response to the victim group (113).

In Cambodia, ideology was propagated primarily through regular political indoctrination sessions that were mandatory for the entire population, as well as through radio broadcasting and to a lesser degree print media. All media were subject to tight censorship, with many topics and news on certain regions being taboo (KR47B). Many art forms and mass propaganda focused on positive portrayals of the aims of the revolution and the successes attained toward this, as “artworks for the Khmer Rouge were intended as means to actively engage in the revolution, for it was through the experiential quality of artworks that political subjects might be transformed” (Tyner 2019, 46), rather than as tools for political indoctrination. At the same time, the media sought to engage in the construction of the external enemies Vietnam and Thailand as threatening imperial invaders (KR47B), while the construction of internal enemies occurred more strongly in indoctrination sessions and self-reflection sessions. These sessions occurred once or twice a week and were aimed at “improving” and “educating” the individuals but also at rooting out mistakes they had made (KR49B). These internal enemies were seen as the key reason why any targets of the revolution were missed. This view provided a larger framework within which my interviewees could make sense of their actions, could differentiate between what should be constructed as right and wrong, what constituted revolutionary behavior, and what would be understood as mistakes. Through the various self-criticism and indoctrination sessions, individuals were able to locate themselves actively within the broader ideological landscape, not necessarily internalizing the ideologies but learning how to discursively move within them and perform in ways in which they conformed to them.

Drawing on strain theory, Anderson argues that in moments of collective strain—in which collective goal achievement is blocked, something valued comes under threat, or undesirable imposition is experienced and these factors are projected onto the victim group—individuals may become more receptive to new ideas and ideological tenets (2018, 20). Anderson posits that ideological shifts occur incrementally with “both ruptures (moral breakages) and continuities (the perpetuation of conventional norms)” (2018, 17). Leader Maynard (2018) provides more nuance when he convincingly shows how these shifts in society need not be so strong as to convert the entire population into convinced believers, but instead that subtle shifts at the individual level can still move the societal mean to a degree that genocide becomes ideologically viable. At the same time, ideology communicated through propaganda serves not only to convert individual attitudes, but in essence its “function is to communicate norms (acceptable opinions and actions)” (Anderson 2018, 69). These norms establish what is publicly speakable and allow people to have two opinions, a private one and a public one; these individuals can thus act on the public one, even if it does not conform to their private beliefs (Anderson 2018, 69). The propaganda of the regime can externalize responsibility, provide justification for violence, and support categorizations of the victims as dangerous (Anderson 2018, 71), performing both a group-binding and a stigmatizing function (78).

In a recent analysis, Gerard Saucier and Laura Akers (2018) study the “democidal mindset” to understand the “mental attitudes” with which perpetrators interpret the situation. But actually, the analysis is less about attitudes and more about explicit statements by high-ranking perpetrators. This is interesting in the context of this section, as it shows across various democides that similar speech patterns exist in how democidal regimes ideologically frame their action, particularly emphasizing “oversimplifying beliefs that facilitate the inculpating of an out-group, and not just the out-group loosely or abstractly but with every member of that out-group thereby inculpated. That is, we see a group portrayed as threatening, impure, absolutely bad, and less than human, all in the context of a worldview that not only essentializes groups but treats group-membership as the essence of any individual. The unificatory vision of one’s in-group only reinforces this pattern” (Saucier and Akers 2018, 91).

The ideological framework, therefore, is absolutely key to our understanding of how genocide becomes thinkable and implementable, but at the same time it is important to remember that this is a section on the context. Anderson’s work highlights well the importance of the moral context, in his general analysis, which he emphasizes more strongly than other dynamics when he talks about “exposure” (2018, 93); while he does discuss other important factors such as social dynamics and opportunity structures, these appear less important than the moral context.

4.4  UNCERTAINTY, UPHEAVAL, AND WAR

For many of the motivations detailed in the previous chapters, it is no easy decision for participants on whether to participate in genocide. It becomes even harder for someone acting outside a framework in which he or she has standard points of reference. In new settings in which the individual is uncertain what the situation and the context mean precisely, “people cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavioural options. In such situations the usual reward structures are different and expectations are violated” (Zimbardo 2008, 212). In such settings of uncertainty, people will refer more strongly to their peers or trusted people of authority for guidance on how to react to unfolding events, strengthening the salience of the first group of motivations focused on the ingroup, with the opinions (expressed and anticipated) of peers and authorities receiving more weight.

The literature identifies political upheaval and direct threats to governments as one of the key determinants of genocide occurrence (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Goldsmith et al. 2013; Harff 2003; Hiebert 2008; Krain 1997; Melson 1992; Nyseth Brehm 2017; Rost 2013; Rummel 1994; Ulfelder and Valentino 2008; Weitz 2003), with emphasis put on various different forms of domestic unrest, such as assassinations (Uzonyi 2014), revolutions (Krain 1997; Melson 1992), and coups (Uzonyi 2014). In her landmark study, Harff defines political upheaval as “an abrupt change in the political community caused by the formation of a state or regime through violent conflict, redrawing of state boundaries, or defeat in international war” (2003, 62). It is out of this logic that the rules of the political game can become unhinged and the legitimacy of the political community can be called into question (Melson 1992, 21). In this context, the community can then be redefined, enabling the regime to exclude and even annihilate certain groups (for example, see the above discussion on redefining the demos to exclude a certain ethnos in the process of democratization) (Mann 2005). The period of chaos that can be caused by political upheaval can serve as a smokescreen for genocidal action against the victims while other actors are focused on the political repercussions of the upheaval. Drawing on Straus, underlying this idea of the importance of threat are three fundamental assumptions: first, “organizing-level perpetrators conclude that future cooperation with the target group is impossible”; second, they “calculate that the target population is uncontrollable and uncontainable”; and third, and most importantly, they “posit a present and persistent threat from the target group,” which then necessitates their eradication (2015, 26).

Furthermore, the political upheaval can even be the political elite’s motivation for pursuing a genocidal policy if they feel that they may be losing control and thus choose to scapegoat a minority population in order to get their own ethnic compatriots to “rally around the flag” and support their leadership. It is precisely the uncertainty of the situation that makes the populace wary of changing leaders, as they fear for their security in a tense situation. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, this dynamic emerged very fast as the Yugoslavian state disintegrated and many nationalist politicians were able to assert their dominance by stoking fears of the ethnic others and presenting themselves as the only guarantors of their own ethnicity’s security. As such, “the genocidal state represents itself as restoring order in situations of perceived normlessness—it responds to crisis by providing decisive action” (Anderson 2018, 21).

Such uncertainty can be created by a myriad of domestic political factors, several of which were detailed above; however, the literature refers to one contextual condition above all others in terms of causing genocide: war. In research on the Holocaust, war plays an important role (Bartov 1991) and specifically military victories, “as the euphoria of victory emboldened and tempted an elated Hitler to dare ever more drastic policies” (Browning 2004, 427). Also, war suppressed criticism as most people were anything but enthusiastic about the war, but it was one’s duty to support one’s country during war, take on sacrifice, and to more easily divide the world into friends and foes (Browning 2004, 429).

War is argued to be an almost necessary condition for genocide to occur, with guerrilla wars (Uzonyi 2014; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004) or civil wars (Krain 1997; Stewart 2011; Ulfelder and Valentino 2008) being particularly salient. War creates a context in which situations are framed in a new way (Neitzel and Welzer 2011b, 23) and in which the enemy is defined within the new situation of war (Mamdani 2001, 195); in particular, unwanted groups can be scapegoated and portrayed as internal enemies of the state who (even though they are only civilians) are coalescing with the enemy actors with whom one is waging war. This rhetoric was strongly utilized in Rwanda when Tutsi civilians were portrayed as sympathizers of or even affiliated with the RPF, and in the Ottoman Empire when Armenian civilians were portrayed as revolutionary and uprising. Furthermore, this rhetoric serves to “normalize and legitimize the genocide by counting the killings as part of usual warfare activities—cruel, but necessary in order to win the war and save one’s own lives” (Kipp 2007, 606). The uncertainty of one’s own security in the context of warfare is juxtaposed to the necessity of annihilating a certain group who could constitute a threat.

These dynamics can be seen in the case of the Holocaust during the Second World War, with the world intent on beating the expansionist Nazi regime, but little attention paid to the plight of the Jewish and other minorities during the war. Furthermore, in the Ottoman Empire it was in the reconstruction of the Ottoman state into a Turkish state embedded in the context of the First World War. Both of these cases saw the deportation of their minorities under the pretext of wartime security and allowed for these actions to be executed without the attention they would have garnered during peacetime.

In Rwanda, genocide is highly interwoven with the civil war since 1990 that after a brief cease-fire resulted in resumed re-armament by both the RPF and government troops, as well as the increasing arming of civil defense units in various localities and youth militia. When Habyarimana’s airplane crashed, full-out hostilities resumed in parallel with the commencement of genocide. This violence of the civil war was pivotal to the genocide because it provided the justification for slaughtering the Tutsi civilians across the country, as they were portrayed as being supporters of the RPF troops who were attempting to take over power in the country (Fujii 2004; Straus 2006, 44). It was thus the intensity of this conflict that allowed the Tutsi to even be framed as dangerous to the Hutu community as a whole. Particularly in the context of resuming violence and the political turbulence in the wake of Habyarimana’s death, there was great uncertainty about how the situation would develop. From an individual perspective this meant that one needed to refer to local authorities and peers more strongly for cues on how to behave, and given the strong anti-Tutsi signals arguing for their dangerousness, participation seemed to many like the right thing to do.

Furthermore, Hendrik Bursee (2010) identifies various causal mechanisms for connecting war to genocide, but argues on the empirical basis of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda that war is best understood as a catalyst for genocide that is then used politically, and that genocide should also be seen as an escalatory war against civilians. In Cambodia it is even more striking in the context of the preceding civil war against Lon Nol’s troops and his American allies, as well as the then ensuing war with neighboring Vietnam, in which any deviance was immediately framed as a security issue and seen as part of these wars, necessitating the elimination of the thus framed internal enemy. This becomes semantically clear in the usage of the terms “front battlefield,” where one was fighting Lon Nol or the Vietnamese, and “back battlefield,” where one was fighting for the revolution and against the internal enemies. Owens (2014) argues that the presence of “crisis frames” can explain the broader targeting of the population as possible enemies in the genocidal violence of Cambodia.

War also changed the dynamics within the perpetrator ingroup: war “put a premium on Pflichterfüllung—the moral obligation of loyalty, comradeship, and discipline. In other words, conformity was an essential element of cohesion and coercion in the life of a Gendarmerie post existing in isolation and constant fear within an alien and potentially deadly environment” (Haberer 2001, 399). Furthermore, the war allowed identities to be mixed, as perpetrators of genocide could see themselves as “brave heroic soldiers” (Kipp 2007, 606), as they were fighting a declared enemy and protecting their country from this threat. Thus, individuals can not only gain a positive image for themselves but also gain a degree of security and certainty that their actions are correct amid a confusing and uncertain situation.

4.5  ECONOMICS

Next we turn to economic conditions that are purported to have impacted the occurrence of and participation in genocide. The first set of arguments runs that the economic strength of a country can have an effect on genocide occurrence—for instance, with an intermediate level of economic income being most strongly associated with genocide (Stewart 2011). And it is not just the level but also the change of the economic situation, with a shrinking economy significantly raising the likelihood of genocide as economic prospects become darker (Bae and Ott 2008). An alternative economic argument runs that it is actually international economic interdependence that matters (Harff 2003), with an emphasis on membership in formal trade regimes (Ulfelder and Valentino 2008). The primary causal mechanism is the threat that an intervention poses. Hence, strong international interest in the genocidal violence would be sparked by having highly interdependent economies and being part of a formal trade regime, making an intervention to end genocide more likely, and thus making it less of a realistic policy option for elites. At the individual level, the fear of retributive prosecution after the genocide through the intervening partners could make participation less attractive, and further, the knowledge of international condemnation for acts of violence can raise the saliency of counterdiscourses to the key genocidal ideology and provide an alternative moral framework.

For the case of Rwanda, there exists the proposition that land scarcity created such a dismal outlook for individuals that many young people seized the opportunity to participate in genocide in order to gain some possible perspective for the future (André and Platteau 1998, 38); more commonly, however, it is argued that any connection between these economic conditions and participation is not yet established firmly (Fletcher 2007, 27; see also Percival and Homer-Dixon 1995). Further, for the Armenian genocide, it appears that the expropriation of the Armenians was a by-product of the genocide and a further facet of the nationalistic enterprise of the breaking of the Armenian group, rather than an end in itself (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 166).

4.6  THE CONFOUNDING NATURE OF CULTURE

Along a similar line to the argument for a strong state’s influence as a contextual condition, it can be argued that there are elements of a culture that are facilitative for genocide to occur. Particularly, the presence of a monolithic culture, rather than a culturally pluralistic society, can be facilitative of genocide participation. A society with a monolithic culture possesses “a small range of predominant values and/or limitations on the free flow of ideas” (Staub 2002, 16). If the genocidal ideologues and proponents at the highest level succeed in embedding the genocidal policies in a discourse that resonates with the monolithic culture, few avenues for dissent will exist. The lack of alternative cultural framings gives legitimacy to the genocidal ideology and to the people putting it forward and thus affords them authority. This can go further yet, and within a monolithic culture “the negative representation of a victim group and the definition of reality by authorities that justifies or even necessitates the victims’ mistreatment will be more proudly accepted” (Staub 2002, 16).

Furthermore, certain culturally acceptable norms or practices can facilitate individuals’ participation in genocide. First, respect for authority can be more or less rooted in different cultures, as opposed to critical reflection of authority legitimacy and the condoning of ideas such as civil disobedience. In cultures with higher respect for authority, this can allow the mechanism of obedience to authority to apply more readily, as it “leads people to turn to authorities, old or new, for guidance in difficult times. It leads them to accept the authorities’ definition of reality, their views of problems and solutions, and stops them from resisting authorities when they lead them to harm others” (Staub 2002, 16; see also Staub 2014, 504). Wilhelmus Petrus Du Preez circumscribes culture by writing that “people act within a set of assumptions or rules. They act with a certain know-how and they act with theories of history and society and identity.… Their culture is not static. It is, in fact, hotly contested and fast-changing” (1994, 95). Thus, in times of uncertainty, as described in the previous section, cultural norms can take on a strong role in guiding behavior and governing who to listen to.

Second, the legitimacy of the use of violence varies culturally; historically there has been wide variation in the social acceptability of killing others as well as in the legitimacy of the use of violence against peers in certain social situations. A history of aggressiveness “makes renewed aggression more acceptable, more normal” (Staub 2002, 16). Within these contexts, culturally prescribed norms can differ, allowing certain degrees of violence, sometimes making killing acceptable. Socialization in a culture with a higher tolerance for violence will not only make certain forms of violence seem more legitimate but also habituate its members to its use, possibly through its augmented presence in society, or even through an individual’s own participation in it. This is not to say that there are cultures that are preordained to be genocidal, but only that within certain cultures there may already be a higher societal habituation to the use of violence; this does not make killing others easy, but may reduce some of the cognitive dissonance at the earlier stages of participation in maltreatment of members of the victim group.

Third, and in a similar vein, there may be other facets of a culture that resonate directly toward certain parts of the Complexity of Evil model, creating a context in which they become more salient. For instance, the way peer pressure or conformity works effectively could differ in degree in different countries depending on cultural norms of friendship or the value of family ties—or how well certain ideologies may be accepted could depend on how well they resonate with certain cultural myths or ideas.

An example of a cultural argument made that provides a cultural context that is more conducive to participation in genocide is that of a “shame culture” in Germany, in which people would in their actions (if not in their beliefs) conform to their group because of strong bonds of comradeship, which was constituted by “joining in whatever the group deemed to be good, right and appropriate” (Kühne 2008, 74). Thomas Kühne argues that the German shame culture had its roots inter alia in its humiliation in the First World War and previously its late-coming as a European nation-state and that a national culture was created in which there existed “a great ‘people’s community’, which could indeed put aside inner conflicts, because it felt bound together by means of a unique and communally committed crime” (2008, 75). Regardless of the merits or shortcomings of this particular cultural argument, it serves as an example of how historically framed communal experiences can have an impact on how today’s social situations are perceived and change the salience of how individual motivations work.

A further example often discussed in one form or another in the German historical literature on individual SS participants of the Holocaust is the idea of a Kriegsjugendgeneration, literally translated as a “generation of war youth” (Herbert 1996; see also Orth 2002, 94; Wildt 2002, 848–850). What is meant by this is a generation that was too young to have fought in the First World War but that grew up “with its mysticism” (Orth 2002, 94). This youth generation experienced the war from a distance through frequent radio and newspaper reports, and it became “a game, an adventure,” without having to have had the corporeal experience of actual violence and battle (Wildt 2002, 848). However, for this generation, remaining at home also came to be a poignant “missed chance of probation” that only the older people had received. Furthermore, this generation had experienced the political turbulence and economic instability of 1920s Weimar Germany, creating a generational culture that demanded a radical change, “an uncompromising generation” as Michael Wildt has termed it. This unconditionality created not so much a culture founded in policy ideas of liberal politics not being taken seriously, or bourgeois ideals appearing hollow compared with the egotism required for survival during their young years, but instead a culture of radicalism. A culture of radicalism that was combined with coolness, hardness, and “objectivity” in opposition to the older, more emotional, and issue-fixated generation (Herbert 1996, 522). This example does not constitute a national-level contextual condition but refers instead to a subculture, which can feed into the saliency of various other parts of the model (e.g., the strength of group ties and resulting conformity within the generation, or the strength of ideology).

A generalizing addendum to the cultural argument is provided by Vetlesen (2005, 147): “My premise is that evil never takes place in a cultural vacuum; rather … deliberate evildoing must be regarded as the conjunction of human maliciousness with the failure of cultural containment … or, more to the point, with the deliberate and systematic production of conditions which undermine whatever positive cultural containment is in place.”

Vetlesen’s premise resonates with the Complexity of Evil model presented here, as the culture can provide or reinforce a moral framework that is conducive to or inhibitive of the acceptance of the necessity of genocide and can also have implications for individual participation in it. This moral framework is often provided by ideological premises, but resonates particularly when these refer back to moral conventions established in a given group’s culture. I believe that cultural specificities can matter for genocide occurrence and individuals’ participation in it, even as the actual manifestation of cultures vary strongly.

4.7  CONCLUSION

This chapter has presented the third part of the Complexity of Evil model, shifting the focus away from the motivations and facilitative factors of individual perpetrators to the macro-level conditions that create the context in which genocide occurs. This departure from the focus on the individual is a necessary step because it helps us understand the broader context of genocide participation, paying homage to the fact that participation never occurs in isolation from the situation and the context, but, quite the opposite, participation is strongly influenced by these conditions. I have described various contextual conditions that have been identified in the literature and related these to the individual level. First, regime-centric conditions of how the state is structured play an important role in creating conditions in which authority structures become salient and coercion becomes credible. Second, societal tensions based on variously constructed ethnicities and discrimination create a context in which groups are created as different and the derogation of the victim group by the perpetrator group becomes possible. Third, ideologies provide a foundation for these exclusionary discourses and practices, legitimizing the exclusion and ultimately destruction of the victim group. Fourth, political upheaval and war can create significant uncertainty that creates situations in which individuals act without precedence and are thus more dependent on and susceptible to the influence of peers and authorities; furthermore, war normalizes the use of violence, allows scapegoating the victims as opponents in the war, and also makes it possible to treat victim groups in ways not possible in peacetime. Fifth, a lack of economic growth and economic autonomy from other countries provides fertile ground for genocide—the former condition giving rise to conditions that lower the opportunity costs of participating, the latter condition raising the independence of the elite to act as they like without international repercussions. Finally, various cultural factors can make participation easier because they legitimize certain practices or ideological constructions and discourses.

It is important to reiterate here that we should not overestimate the effect of the context as an explanation for genocide participation, because these conditions are identical for perpetrators and nonperpetrators alike. However, given how genocidal policies can be legitimized and participation can become the default option, it is necessary to understand the context within which these processes occur (Bloxham 2008a, 187). Other chapters of this book provide the answers to why it is certain specific individuals and not others who participate and what their motivations are. This is not to say, though, that the context is irrelevant. It provides a key to understanding how genocidal situations at the local level come about, the precise situations in which the perpetrators being studied here find themselves and which not only shape their perceptions of the world and the developing situation, but also influence their social relations within this situation. Thus, various contextual conditions can have a facilitative effect on creating situations or even directly on the individuals themselves; they can also have the effect of making certain motivations or facilitative factors become more salient in the given situation.

VIGNETTE  V

Sokha

A CHILD GUARD THE REGIME TURNED ON

WHEN THE WAR broke out in 1970, I was twelve or thirteen and was living at the pagoda in an area controlled by Lon Nol. There was a lot of bombing, and when the monks disrobed I came back home and lived with my family until liberation in 1975. Then the village chief assigned me to live in a child unit with fifty or sixty children. We built dams for irrigation and worked in the rice fields. After six months the child unit chief sent me to live in Phnom Penh, where I was trained about military strategies like building bombs for two and a half months, before they sent me to S-21.

At S-21 I was assigned to feed the pigs and grow potatoes for two months before guarding the outside prison wall, ensuring no prisoners ran away. One time I saw someone escape as he climbed the wall and ran away. It happened about fifty, sixty meters away and I heard someone inside the prison saying that a prisoner had escaped but I did not say anything as it was in someone else’s area of duty. The responsible guard on duty where the prisoner ran away was asleep and was arrested and put in prison. He was certainly killed and was not able to return to see his parents again. The prisoner who ran away was also a former member of the guarding unit, too. They arrested each other.

Later I changed to be an inside guard, giving the prisoners water to drink and handing them a box to go to the toilet. There was a different person responsible for giving the prisoners rice. Our sole task was to make sure that they did not die, but we cared about the prisoners and also gave them baths. We did not talk to the prisoners, only the interrogation group was allowed to do this. We did wonder what mistakes they had committed but we did not know.

We were allowed to talk within our unit of twelve people, but we could not talk to people outside this group. Our self-criticism meetings were also only within the group and they were afraid that we would not guard well or that we would fall asleep during our duty. If this happened, we were accused of being associated with the prisoners. Nonetheless, we worked the whole night and were sometimes very sleepy.

One time my unit chief and his deputy were arrested and put in prison because members of their group had fallen asleep while guarding. The chiefs themselves had not been sleepy, but their members had. So, they and the members who had fallen asleep were all arrested. After the arrest the chiefs were interrogated and were taken to be killed. Six other members of the unit and I had fallen asleep so we were arrested and detained for three months. They did not do anything to us but ultimately sent us to work in the rice fields.

I just wanted to survive and come back home. So I was pleased in 1979 when the chief of the United Salvation Front, Heng Samrin, came to liberate us. I then walked south from Phnom Penh to my home. When I arrived back home, I found that four people from my family had been killed: my uncle, brother-in-law, and my siblings. Then because I was so angry at the previous regime, I joined the army of the new Phnom Penh government and fought against the Khmer Rouge. They killed my friends and relatives. If there had not been liberation in 1979, we would all have been killed.

Today he works at a commune office in Kampong Chhnang province.

CHAPTER   5

Diversity, Complexity, Scope

Discussing the Model and Its Empirical Application

THIS PENULTIMATE CHAPTER is an attempt to go beyond the model as a whole and reflect on its empirical nuances. The last three chapters have been steeped in empirical evidence for the various motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions, showing the sheer breadth of factors that impact participation in genocide. However, to really underline the value of the Complexity of Evil model, this chapter emphasizes two key issues. First, it interrogates the differences among the three main cases underlying this research endeavor—the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Holocaust—teasing out which motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions play the most prominent roles in motivating perpetration in each of the cases. Second, this is brought together to specify which motivations, in general, are most influential. While each motivation, facilitative factor, and contextual condition is presented equally within the Complexity of Evil model and each has a similar potential of causing perpetration, empirically not every one of these is equally prevalent in actually causing perpetration.

5.1  ALLOWING DIVERSITY: HOW ARE THE CASES DIFFERENT?

To begin with, this section focuses on differences among the three cases. It is clear, again, that the unit of analysis being studied in this book is the individual perpetrator, and we will look at which motivations are particularly dominant across the many individuals included in this study later in this chapter (section 5.2). However, first we will look at the three cases studied in more depth to analytically sustain the differences between the contexts alluded to in the previous chapters. I will not apply the model to individual perpetrators, as this is relatively clear and will hopefully be performed by readers for the individual perpetrators they are studying. Instead, I will use this section to expand a little on the specificities not only in the distributions of the various elements of the Complexity of Evil model but also on their varying manifestations, which have already been touched on to a certain degree in the previous three chapters but will be discussed in more depth here.

5.1.1 Perpetration Motivations in Cambodia

While a host of factors were prevalent in Cambodia, a few elements of the model take on particular salience for motivating people to participate in the genocidal violence of the Khmer Rouge. Of particular importance are the totalitarian nature of Ângkar’s control over individuals and tied into this the social isolation that it created in society that enabled coercion and authority to have a strong impact; very basic forms of opportunism in order to survive; and the way the internal enemy was constructed and how this rendered anyone vulnerable to being identified as the enemy, increasing fear and disrupting group dynamics. Finally, the limited explanatory value of cultural factors will be discussed.[1]

5.1.1.1 TOTALITARIANISM PAR EXCELLENCE.   The Khmer Rouge erected its state of Democratic Kampuchea as one of the most, maybe even the most, totalitarian regime the world has ever witnessed. Ângkar had control over all facets of life in the Khmer Rouge’s effort to collectivize the whole of society and abolish the individual. Given the totalitarian nature of Ângkar, authority was absolute. People were expelled from the towns and from their homes; people worked collectively, lived collectively, ate collectively; no one was allowed to prepare their own meals or even eat a morsel of food outside of the collective; people were forced to shed their clothing and dress in the revolutionary style dictated by the Khmer Rouge. Individual ownership was abolished, money was abolished, and all economic resources were focused on the production of rice and the building of irrigation and dams to facilitate this. Yet Ângkar’s reach went further still, abolishing the individual not only in economic terms but also in personal terms. Furthermore, people’s freedom of movement was curbed, as they were only allowed to leave their collectives with written permission from their leaders—anyone found outside one’s commune without such a permission note was often killed. Formal education was terminated, Buddhism and all other religions forbidden.[2] The institution of the family was abolished (hitherto the focal point of Cambodian social relations)—replacing mother and father, siblings, and further relations with Ângkar; and Ângkar now decided who was to marry whom. There was no time of an individual’s day in which there was privacy or the possibility to talk frankly and openly with one’s closest friends or loved ones. This is also represented in the metaphor that Ângkar had “pineapple eyes”—that is, many eyes in all directions, a concept in which the omnipresent eye of Ângkar becomes almost akin to Foucault’s panopticon (see Hinton 2005, 132). Although Nazi Germany is often depicted as the epitome of totalitarianism, I would argue that the Khmer Rouge’s reach was far more intrusive and encompassing, precisely because private spaces were abolished.

This total control over all facets of life was rigorously and brutally enforced, reacting swiftly and violently to any divergence from Ângkar’s expected dominance. Any divergence from the prescribed codes of conduct, even the smallest misdemeanor, could be and was often interpreted as a mistake committed in order to undermine the revolution, thus making these people internal enemies who needed to be eliminated in order to save the revolution (see section 3.1.2). And given Ângkar’s reach into all parts of an individual’s life, its control was total and its dominance absolute. Through this absolute control, the population’s ability to undermine Ângkar became nonexistent, rendering any order by Ângkar law-like and necessitating the individual’s obedience lest he or she be prepared to feel the wrath of Ângkar. And as this threat was very real, Ângkar’s options for coercion were almost unlimited. One former guard at S-21 explained: “It was true that they were under orders. If they did not do it, they would be accused. If they did not kill, they would be considered not to have cut off their heart. I think that they were also afraid of being accused of having made mistakes, too. So, they did not dare to reject the order. It was the same for me, whatever they ordered me to do, I would follow all the orders.… So, we could not do anything against them” (KR22A).

With this coercive potential, anyone living under the Khmer Rouge reign had to respond to orders as desired by Ângkar, both the general population and the cadres themselves. In their submission, Khmer Rouge cadres felt no different from the other members of the population and felt that they must obey what Ângkar was ordering. Thus, this totalitarian state and individuals’ susceptibility to being coerced within it provide the first major key to why people participated in the genocidal violence of the Khmer Rouge, pushing the motivations of coercion and obedience to authority to the fore.

5.1.1.2 SOCIAL ISOLATION INSTEAD OF SOCIAL DYNAMISM.   While social dynamics played a significant role in the Rwandan case and the Holocaust (see below; Browning [1994] 2001; McDoom 2013, 2014a; Fujii 2009), one of the most surprising results of this study on Cambodia is that the social dynamics were very different. While at first glance social dynamics do not play a significant part in explaining participation in the genocide, I would argue that it is actually a form of social isolation that is key to explaining perpetration for some individuals. Social isolation means that these individuals were dislocated from trusted and meaningful social relations and instead of perceiving themselves as part of a meaningful social network, they acted only in detachment and isolation. Naturally, this does not mean that they were acting in a vacuum, but instead that the individual cadres of the Khmer Rouge felt alone in their actions and were influenced by the absence of friendship and comradery rather than their presence as in other cases.

Individuals became socially isolated as they were mostly split from their friends as soon as they were recruited and were then often relocated to a different area where they knew no one. Here, under normal circumstances, one would expect them to quickly form new social ties, but under the totalitarian rule of Ângkar, they each lived in constant fear of being suspected as an internal enemy. In self-reflection sessions mandated by Ângkar, people had to open up about themselves and their mistakes. Given that any misconduct, however small, could be construed as making one an internal enemy, individuals were in a constant struggle between what they should reveal (as everyone had to admit to something) and what they should not. As the leadership became increasingly focused on enemies within the system, it became important for cadres to be seen as rooting out these enemies. This allowed Ângkar to foment mutual distrust. Given the ambiguity of who an enemy was, this left ample space for denunciations within the group, leaving individuals justifiably afraid of all their comrades (on ruptures to social relations due to denunciation, see Bergemann 2017).

Within this context of social isolation and mutual distrust, people were even more dependent on Ângkar and more willing to follow its orders (see previous section), but it also allowed people a certain anonymity that facilitated their participation; they did not know the other cadres in their group, and they did not know the victims, increasing the social and emotional distance and thus removing some of the moral inhibitions about killing these people.

Furthermore, the division of labor, which exists in all larger organizations and can also be seen as a feature of the Rwandan case and the Holocaust, was even more pronounced in Cambodia. The minute division of tasks among individuals (see section 3.3.3) allowed moral responsibility for the killing to be diffused and for all those not involved in the actual act of killing a sense that their actions were unrelated to the killing process. It allowed them to displace the responsibility to those doing the killing, avoid seeing themselves as accomplices, and thus reduce their cognitive dissonance.

Finally, social dynamics did play a role, but in less obvious ways than peer pressure or conformity. For instance, social dynamics were important in making sense of the new world one had suddenly entered under the Khmer Rouge. It was with peers that one came to an understanding of how to define the enemy, how to define the roles one had, and what subservience to Ângkar meant. Within these social constructions, people came to know what it meant to be a member of Ângkar and knew what was expected of them within these roles.

5.1.1.3 SURVIVAL OPPORTUNISM.   Further, I have discussed that opportunism is a strong motivator for participating in genocide, and this is undeniably also the case in Cambodia. However, the individual profit hoped for by engaging in perpetration is of a much more basic nature under the Khmer Rouge regime than we have seen for other cases. It is not about amassing wealth and fortune, but instead about securing the necessities for everyday life and survival, better food, more rest, and the hope of more security for oneself and one’s family. In the context of forced labor and mass malnutrition for the entire population, the prospect of regular food and less or no manual labor was extremely attractive, making positions closer to the nexus of killing quite attractive. While quotidian motivations are commonplace in other cases too, Cambodia distinguishes itself by the high rates of starvation and sickness that the perpetrators were facing, making more basic opportunities attractive. This was exemplified by a former guard at a security center who told me, “I did not think about anything but I felt happy because I came to work in the place where was no hard work. Everyone, I think, who would come to work in an easier place than before would be happy as we were young. I did not care about what the place was about” (KR12A).

Of course, the mere fact that these are more quotidian does not render the motivation any more banal than it is for perpetrators in Rwanda or the Holocaust. Instead, the opportunistic motivations unfold within the context, as well as in relationship to the individuals’ position within this context.

Other opportunistic factors that Khmer Rouge cadres were motivated by prominently include career progression. A former soldier, bodyguard, and then district committee member in charge of the economy explained that people joined killing groups “because they wanted appreciation that they dared to kill people. When they did the killing, Ângkar admired them and kept them there to kill more people.… They were promoted to, for example, chief of the chhlop” (KR19A). Furthermore, settling personal scores is a recurrent topic in conversations with former Khmer Rouge. This is detailed in depth by one former commune chief:

However, in a different region, region 4, there was killing and revenge. The revenge was not because “the higher” told them to do so, but it was personal. If you used to work for Lon Nol and had ordered people to work day and night, for example to build a military base, then after they came back after the Khmer Rouge victory, the people wanted revenge remembering the time they had been forced to work so hard, had been badly treated, and had been given little food. So, people accused others and killed them in revenge. The revenge happened locally in the villages and communes, but later “the higher” were blamed. (KR06A)

Others tried to blend into the group in order to conceal actions from their past, which would lead to persecution if the Khmer Rouge found out. For example, one former Khmer Rouge militiaman who was a government-sponsored commando during the civil war (and thus an enemy) voluntarily joined the Khmer Rouge soon after the end of the civil war. He explains that “the reason I joined the militia of Pol Pot was because they evacuated people from the city.… I then felt insecure. So, I did it in order to survive as I had the bad background of a former commando. Because later as people were evacuated, they started to kill those people” (KR03A).

5.1.1.4 INTERNAL ENEMIES AND THE ARBITRARINESS OF VICTIMHOOD.   Ideology plays a secondary role in motivating cadres of the Khmer Rouge to perpetrate genocidal violence. However, as in other cases, too, ideology plays an important role in creating a framework within which the violence becomes painted as legitimate. In Cambodia, people did not subscribe to the Maoist ideological foundations of the regime—most people despised the collectivization process that this inherently entailed—but they did buy into the ideological ascription of the enemy who wanted to undermine this system. The definition of who is seen as an enemy and who is not was to a certain degree arbitrary, and the decision was made by leading cadres in any area. However, the underlying categorizations of enemies are ideologically informed and accepted by most of my interviewees at face value, with enemies defined as people making mistakes in order to undermine the revolution; as CIA, KGB or Vietnamese agents; and as people formerly in the civilian or military service of Lon Nol. While people knew that they themselves were not agents or enemies of the revolution, they still feared being accused as such, and nonetheless also believed that at least some of those accused were genuinely enemies who posed a counterrevolutionary threat. For some people, even most of those accused posed such a threat. And in accepting these labels, the individuals subscribe to the ideological tenets of the system. Finally, the acceptance of these ideological constructions and the denigration of the enemies can be argued to make one’s own identity more appealing, supporting one in finding the role of Khmer Rouge attractive.

Interestingly, this flexibility of whether someone is declared an enemy gives the individuals in this otherwise highly constrained context a higher agency in deciding the fate of victims than in other cases. However, this constrained agency is undermined somewhat by the onus put on actors in finding enemies. If someone were to consistently deny that any of the people under his or her control were enemies, the individual would appear suspicious and be accused of being an enemy. So this agency relates only to deciding which people should be killed, not whether anyone is killed. Thus, agency does not stretch to the question of whether one participates, but remains constrained by the coercive environment.

5.1.1.5 CULTURAL ASPECTS.   In the Cambodian context, the main work on why people killed (before this study) was conducted by Hinton (2004, 2005), and he strongly emphasizes cultural aspects, particularly the impact of status, hierarchy, face, class rage, and disproportional revenge. The anthropological perspective with which Hinton approaches the subject is helpful for understanding some of the cultural context within which the killing occurred. Hinton’s work is particularly helpful in understanding the ideas of honor, respect, and obedience in social hierarchies and how they—through the idea of losing face—structure many of the social interactions between Cambodians traditionally and how they continued to have significance under the Khmer Rouge. While the Khmer Rouge attempted to abolish these traditional ideas of hierarchy and status, including linguistically, they continued to play a role, albeit in a different form. Furthermore, Hinton argues that taking vengeance on formerly oppressing “class enemies” was a concept “which played upon ontologically resonant local understandings of disproportionate revenge that were salient for many Cambodians” (2005, 47) and tapped into people’s anger at the preceding civil war, deaths in their families, the destruction of their homes and livelihoods, and the outrage at the coup against Sihanouk, as well as economic resentment of others’ wealth (58). Disproportionate revenge sees wronged individuals exacting revenge in such a stark manner that it preempts the other side from retaliating in return by killing them and their families or creating deep fear (69).

In the interviews I conducted there are some references to the importance of status in particular, as well as small allusions to some of the other ideas that Hinton suggests. My work here provides two extensions. First and foremost, my interviews present a wealth of further factors beyond these cultural explanations that are important for understanding participation. This does not negate the importance of Hinton’s work but expands the focus. Furthermore, my interpretation of these factors suggested by Hinton diverges, as this book focuses on different levels of factors that have different causal connotations. While Hinton (2005, 76) argues that “disproportionate revenge was a strong motive for many cadres,” I would argue that it can help explain the logic for killing an individual’s family along with the individual[3] and justifying the killing, but in very few interviews did this appear as the motivation for participating, much less the predominantly stated one.

Hinton’s culturally founded explanations of perpetration in the Cambodian genocide are thus extremely valuable for understanding the cultural foundations of some of the Khmer Rouge policies and the logics put forward for why certain people needed to be killed. However, my work here supplements this with a focus on people’s individual motivations for participating in the killing itself.

5.1.2 Perpetration Motivations in Rwanda

When discussing perpetration in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, my focus is particularly on what Fujii (2009) terms joiners. The most important research projects conducted on this case have highlighted three main motivations for participating in the genocide: security fears, pressure from other Hutu, and opportunity (McDoom 2008; Straus 2005). Fujii (2009; see also McDoom 2013, 2014a) more strongly emphasizes the social ties within these communities as important factors.

5.1.2.1 THE POWER OF SOCIAL TIES.   In stark contrast to the previous case of Cambodia, social ties play an extremely important role in understanding participation in genocide in Rwanda. The argument is made most succinctly by Fujii (2009, 185), whose social interaction thesis emphasizes “local ties and group dynamics, which exerted powerful pressures on Joiners to participate in the violence and powerful new identities for continuing.” According to this perspective, it is dynamics within the Hutu majority group that can account for most of the people participating in the violence, with the social ties coming to the fore at a number of points in time.

First, it was ties at the local level and the social and geographic proximity these ties entailed that help us understand who participates and who does not, with those closest to the local leaders and killers opting to participate (Fujii 2009, 185; McDoom 2008, 267; 2013). The mechanism underlying this is that people participate because of the pressure exerted by or conformity wishes directed at peers or because of the pressure by authorities (see next section). These friendship group ties pulled in hesitant members who did not want to stick out and risk repercussions. The power of the group is demonstrated most tangibly by the way in which some individuals, when the group was no longer present, not only ceased to kill but also went out of their way to help Tutsi avoid being killed. People participated out of fear regarding potential long-term social repercussions such as being excluded from the group, as well as possible more coercive options (see below).

Second, within these groups, the social ties are used to “make sense of highly volatile and uncertain situations by talking, planning, exchanging information, and finally, by acting as a collective unit” (Fujii 2009, 186)—that is, to understand the new and rapidly changing situation within which the individuals find themselves. This is particularly important because they come to participate step by step: first joining the group, then working at a roadblock, then killing, although many different paths and steps are possible, each taking on new meanings in the unraveling situation of Rwanda from April 1994. At the same time, this joint participation also forged a strong group identity with which people identified and which encouraged people to stay with the group and continue with their actions, leading Fujii to surmise that “killing produced groups and groups produced killings” (2009, 154). Also, in negotiating understandings of the current situation, the group (or more precisely, dominant members of it) was able to define who was to be seen as Tutsi and thus to be killed (185).

Third, in Rwanda the killing was implemented by groups that were considerably larger than actually needed to kill the victims; often between ten and fifty individuals participated but sometimes even more. Thus, the nature of participation depended strongly on the social relations in the group, as the group-performed action allowed some the possibility to not actually kill and yet still remain anonymous; also, killers’ consciences were eased as the responsibility for killing was diffused across the heads of all group members. A further and final facet pertains to the role that some women took on during the genocide: cheering on the men, shaming those not participating, and singing in order to encourage the perpetrators. These actions profoundly impact the social relations in the group, increasing the social costs of nonparticipation and increasing individuals’ propensity to desire conformity.

5.1.2.2 LOCAL AUTHORITY PROVIDES POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND INTRA-HUTU COERCION.   Local authorities played an important role in motivating individuals to participate in the genocide. From the beginning of the genocide onward, the orders to kill Tutsi civilians soon took on law-like character (Straus 2006, 93). Furthermore, this tapped into traditional sources of authority at the local level (Straus 2006, 82; see also Tanner 2011, 270), drawing on customary power (Mamdani 2001, 193); for example, local leaders had the authority to summon one male member from each household to participate in a practice emulating umuganda, the communal labor expected of all households for the community (Verwimp 2005). The nature of authority during the genocide also drew on the strength of the state, which people saw as highly influential on their lives (McDoom 2008, 265), and the tightly interwoven hierarchy that tied local leaders strongly to the central government and made them dependent on it (Brannigan 2013, 95). Nonetheless, authority was seized by various state and nonstate actors, including the interahamwe, and in the end radicalization was pursued by whichever actor was able to assert himself or herself (Fletcher 2007). In deciding which individuals and households to select from, leaders tended to select simply according to social and geographic proximity (see previous section). Through their selection of certain people to participate they were able to choose individuals who were more dedicated and exclude more hesitant or even resistant individuals, impacting the social dynamics of the group and consolidating a more radical socially constructed understanding of the situation (Fujii 2009, 129).

Beyond simply using the authority and legitimacy that they had as local leaders, these individuals commonly used coercive methods to increase the likelihood of people’s participation in the genocidal endeavor. This “intra-Hutu coercion” was varyingly implicit or explicit and threats could be either physical, including beatings or even killing, or material, with monetary fines also constituting a possible sanctioning option (McDoom 2008, 265). These threats, even of fatal coercive measures, were credible, and many Hutu were forced to participate on pain of death, sometimes by authorities, sometimes by peers, sometimes by groups of young men (Bhavnani 2006, 657; Fletcher 2007, 32; Hatzfeld 2004b, 130; Straus 2006, 140). While many were killed for their refusal to participate in the genocidal action, it normally sufficed to go along with the large killing group, but not everyone within this group actually had to kill (Hatzfeld 2004a, 242).

5.1.2.3 SECURITY FEARS OF THE THREATENING TUTSI.   In the spiraling security situation that ensued in the wake of the crash of Habyarimana’s airplane, rumors were rife around the whole country, and the danger of the Tutsi rebels’ RPF, as well as their supposed civilian allies, encompassing all Tutsi, was emphasized (for example, in the hate radio programs of RTLM). In this context, some individuals feared the Tutsi threat sufficiently to participate in the genocidal violence against the Tutsi in their communities (Fujii 2009, 121; Sémelin 2005a, 247; Straus 2006, 122). Further, people participating out of fear or anger were consistently shown to be the most violent perpetrators (Straus 2006, 150). Even though most of the victims of the genocide were unarmed civilians who posed no objective threat, the regime had managed to construe their dangerousness effectively by collectivizing the military threat by the RPF to all Tutsi. These fears that the RPF may kill one and one’s family were further mixed with a fear that exiled Tutsi may return to reclaim their former landholdings, constituting an existential economic threat to any Hutu living on seized land (Fletcher 2007, 28).

While some individuals may have genuinely been motivated due to fear of an existential threat, for many it is likely that these security fears provided a contextual background that legitimized and justified the killing, allowing the individuals to participate without the same degree of moral scruples they would have had otherwise for killing their Tutsi neighbors and friends. Tying into this, McDoom (2008, 285) reports that 41 percent of his respondents stated that people killed as vengeance for the death of President Habyarimana.

5.1.2.4 DIVERSE AND PREVALENT OPPORTUNISM.   An empirically prevalent motivation in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is opportunism, with people using the genocide as a cloak for pursuing their own private interests. The most prominent form of opportunistic motivation was that of looting, which was highly organized and open to those who had participated in the killing (Fujii 2009, 161; Mueller 2000). People looted Tutsi’s cattle, stole corrugated iron roof sheets, furniture, food, and valuables from their victims’ homes, and even took over the land and houses of those killed (Fletcher 2007, 33; Fujii 2009, 97; McDoom 2008, 287; Sémelin 2005a, 242; Straus 2006). The looting was strictly organized (Fujii 2009, 161) so that no one was allowed to loot unless he or she had also—at least broadly speaking—participated in the killing (Hatzfeld 2004b, 130). Further, it even occurred that an individual was denounced as a Tutsi so that a family member could inherit the land. The proceeds from the looting were often used to buy food and alcohol to celebrate in the evenings after a day of killing. Finally, access to the possibility of raping women or even taking women as sex slaves or as wives will have served as a motivator for some men to participate (Hatzfeld 2004a, 104).

Also, local political elites were able to use the aftermath of the crash of Habyarimana’s airplane to assert their authority, and local rivalries were fought out along the genocidal issue. As the killing became the new state priority, local political elites who were able to establish themselves as hard-liners received political and legitimation support from the center and were able to rid themselves of more moderate rivals. Through their participation in the genocide they established their control, eliminated rivals, and furthered their own career interests (Mamdani 2001, 218; Straus 2006, 79). Similarly, personal conflicts were fought out under the pretense of genocide, as people denounced others as Tutsi in order to inherit their land or to end a private feud with them (Jessee 2015, 68).

5.1.2.5 ETHNICITY AS A SCRIPT, NOT AS A MOTIVATOR.   Finally, it is worth mentioning again Fujii’s (2009, 19) idea that “state-sponsored ethnicity operated not as an external causal force, like gravity, but as an endogenously generated ‘script’ for violence … [,] a set of constructions that were intended for performance but remained open to interpretation.” This follows her social interaction argument that these scripts were mediated by group dynamics, as local ties shaped people’s perceptions of their situations. Ethnicity did not gain its relevance through some form of ethnic hatred but instead as a “script,” as a framework for legitimizing action and making sense of who was killing and who was being killed. This script was “written” by national-level leaders but was then “directed” in the various localities around the country by local leaders who claimed authority for themselves. Individuals then participated as “actors” in the “performance” of the script, although they had some flexibility in how they acted out this role. Fujii (2009) thus renders ethnicity useful as an analytical category, having demonstrated how ethnic fears and ethnic hatred cannot adequately explain the patterns of why people participated in the violence of the genocide.

In this context, this ethnicity script is also used to define a “good Hutu” (Jessee 2017), and with this setting the parameters for an intra-Hutu competition to determine the best member of the group, “with the best member of the group being defined as the member who adheres best to the group norms and who is most successful in contributing to the main aim of the group” (Smeulers and Hoex 2010, 449). Failing to demonstrate that one is a good Hutu could result in one being suspected of sympathizing with the Tutsi and could thus have potentially dangerous consequences. Hence, ethnicity is also used as a way to bring people’s behavior in line with expectations as decided on by local leaders.

5.1.3 Perpetration Motivations in the Holocaust

Brought to the forefront of academic and public discussion by the heated debate between Browning ([1994] 2001) and Goldhagen (1996), the question of why people participated in the Holocaust has received a wealth of important contributions, on the motivations of Reserve Police Battalion members (Angrick 2008; Browning [1994] 2001; Haberer 2001; Issinger 2016; Kühl 2014; Mallmann 2002; Welzer 2006, 2008), SS members and concentration camp staff (Lifton [1986] 2000; Orth 2000, 2002; Schwartz 2006; Segev [1988] 1992; Sereny [1974] 1977), foreign auxiliaries (Black 2011; Pohl 2002; Rein 2006), and supportive civilians (Dean 2000, 2004; Frydel 2018; Gitelman 2014; Grabowski 2013; Gross 2003; Levis Sullam 2017; Solonari 2014). The overwhelming majority of studies supports the idea that the people who perpetrated the violence of the Holocaust were “ordinary men,” as they have been termed by Browning ([1994] 2001).

5.1.3.1 SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF COMRADERY.   As in the Rwandan case, social dynamics within the perpetrator groups are fundamental to understanding why people participated in violence. While some of these perpetrating groups were made up of local civilians, the vast majority of killing was perpetrated by members of state-led groups (Kühl 2014). The dynamics described for local participation, primarily studied for Eastern Europe, were in many regards similar to those in Rwanda, with pressures within friendship groups motivating people to participate (Dumitru 2014, 156); but the social dynamics of state-led organizations were slightly different, with comradery being the significant motivator in state-led groups such as the police, SS, and auxiliary units.

Browning ([1994] 2001, 174) argues that 80–90 percent of men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated despite their initial horror and disgust simply because it would have been more difficult to “break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour.” This behavior rests primarily on “the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades” (Browning [1994] 2001, 71) and thus wanting to conform with the group so as not to be excluded. It is important to note that it is irrelevant whether the majority actually supports the killing or whether everyone only believes that the majority supports it; an individual who believes that the majority supports the killing will feel compelled to participate in conformity with what he or she believes the group to want (Newman 2002, 60; 2006, 114).

However, Browning ([1994] 2001, 184–185) also demonstrates other mechanisms that underline this key role of social dynamics within the perpetrator ingroup. For example, individuals did not want to be seen as deserting their comrades and leaving them to do the “dirty work” while they are able to abscond (Browning [1994] 2001, 184; see also Chirot and McCauley 2006, 57); this was particularly the case for the military or police units that put a premium on duty, loyalty, and “Pflichterfüllung” (Alvarez 2001, 93; Haberer 2001). Also, individuals worried that their refusal to participate could be interpreted as a moral condemnation of their comrades’ actions; while people may well have had moral inhibitions, many participated anyway, and even when they did not they framed their nonparticipation along the lines of being too weak rather than too good to participate (Browning [1994] 2001, 184–185). This, in turn, reframed the participating individuals as tough, reinforcing ideas of masculinity (Werner 2008; see also Issinger 2016). Thus, often the authorities in the hierarchy did not even need to worry about strictly enforcing their orders, because they had already become part of the mutual expectations comrades had for each other (Kühl 2014, chapter 4).

5.1.3.2 STRUCTURAL AUTHORITY WITHOUT THE THREAT OF COERCION.   While the constant refrain of Nazi perpetrators was the argument that they had no choice lest they be killed themselves or deported to a concentration camp, no postwar trial defendant has been able to conclusively show that refusing an order to kill had fatal consequences (Browning [1994] 2001, 170; Jäger [1967] 1982, 120; for current confirmation, see Kühl 2014, 123; for testimonial evidence to this by perpetrators, see Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß 1988, 78–86). Nonetheless, these people may have acted under “putative duress,” not having known at the time that they would not have been killed and thus acting as if this were the case (Browning [1994] 2001, 170), particularly for auxiliary troops whose agency was considerably more constrained (Haberer 2001, 401). In some cases, such as Major Trapp’s Reserve Battalion 101, there were even explicit openings in which people were allowed to not participate. However, a vast majority did nonetheless as Trapp’s authority still held despite this “weakness” and was complemented by subtler pressures as Trapp showed how difficult the task was for him too (Welzer 2002, 244) and that it was unavoidable that the battalion implement its assignment (Kühl 2014, 171). In this case, Trapp merges elements of authority with comradeship.

Either way there is also the case to be made that beyond these coercive measures, solely the authority of the ordering individual can motivate people to participate in such actions. While Milgram (1963, 1975) and his experiments have received much critique (e.g., Kressel 2002), they and other social-psychological experiments do give credence to the argument that most people will obey an order if they see the authority issuing it as legitimate. As people act within a hierarchical system, they take on the authority’s definition of the context and the situation and then feel obliged to act as the legitimate authority is ordering them to. This obedience is facilitated by the fact that it allows people to displace the responsibility for their actions to someone else. This is in line with Arendt’s ([1963] 1994) study of Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil” characterized by Eichmann’s simple acceptance of the narratives provided to him by his superiors and his “thoughtless” participation, striving to excel at his work, without questioning this role or the morality of this action.

5.1.3.3 HABITUATION INTO VIOLENT ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES.   As Kühl (2014; see also Newman 2002, 52–53) has shown, the ordinary men who participated only came to be prepared to participate in the various actions of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 through their organizational memberships. Within the role of a policeman, violence is defined as not just allowed in certain situations but necessary and one’s duty (Kühl 2014, 262), and so the regime just needs to redefine the killing of the Jews (and all the preliminary tasks leading up to this) as normal police work and then the individuals will be able to react to this as a conditioned impulse (284). Thus, for instance, even if members of the unit did not agree with the anti-Semitic propaganda that they were receiving, by just silently accepting it they participated in normalizing these actions as police work. When clearing the ghettoes, deporting people, and killing them, the organizations attempted to design these actions in such a way that they fit into the normal framework for policing behavior, constantly reinforcing the legality of these actions as police work and normalizing them. At the same time, the organizations deliberately left room for interpretation and for acting outside the boundaries of the formally allowed—this meant that the organizational roles could continue to exist without being undermined by people sometimes withdrawing, looting illegally, or going well above and beyond the allowed and necessary actions in terms of brutality toward the victims. This enabled different people to embrace their organizational roles for different reasons, but then still be motivated to participate through wanting to fulfill the role itself (Kühl 2014, 92). This was further facilitated by the division of labor within the group so that not everyone had to participate in the killing, and by the gradual routinization people gained within the various roles (Alvarez 2001, 89; Angrick 2008, 88; Browning [1994] 2001, 777; Kipp 2007, 604; Kühl 2014, 209; Sémelin 2005a, 274; Waller 2002, 212). Finally, the normalized participation successively brutalized the individual perpetrators as they engaged in the actions again and again (Alvarez 2001, 96). Brutalization in most cases was not the reason people participated but instead a consequence of their participation, which in turn later motivated them to continue.

5.1.3.4 STRUCTURALLY SUPPORTED OPPORTUNISM.   A plethora of opportunistic reasons for participation existed during the Holocaust. Most prominently, people participated in the killing in order to be able to participate in the looting of Jewish property. This is the case for both organization members, such as SS guards in concentration camps, reserve policemen, or foreign auxiliaries, and participants from the local population. Lootings occurred particularly during ghetto clearances (Black 2011, 34; Mallmann 2002, 123) or afterward when searching for hiding Jews (Rein 2006, 396). During pogroms, local participants would often loot, and some individuals even moved around the countryside explicitly in order to participate and loot (Gross 2003, 90). In some localities peasants actively persuaded local officials to give them permission to kill and then rob the local Jews (Dumitru 2014, 155; Prusin 2010, 159). Often participants would force Jews to undress before they were killed so that their clothing and any hidden possessions could be divided up afterward; other times people would even go through the piles of corpses to salvage anything of value (Gross 2003, 101; Solonari 2014, 61). While not all people had access to these possibilities, many did and made good use of this, even though it was not legal to do so and all Jewish property was supposed to be handed over to the German state.

In light of career aspirations, some people engaged in acts of perpetration in order to distinguish themselves and commend themselves for a promotion (Alvarez 2001, 107; Browning [1994] 2001, 75) or to be transferred to easier jobs (Black 2011, 37). Further, local actors were able to curry favor with their new overlords by participating in pogroms against Jews (Solonari 2014, 60).

Finally, perks were available to people who were willing to participate. For example, foreign soldiers who were being held as prisoners of war and were living in horrendous conditions were able to get access to better food, clothing, and health care, as well as leisure activities, snacks, and prostitutes by being willing to participate in various actions (Black 2011, 7, 14). Further, in concentration camps, guards who killed prisoners in certain situations (for example, those attempting to flee) would receive extra pay, leave, or even a promotion; this made killing so attractive that some concentration camp personnel forced prisoners to enter forbidden areas so that they could kill them and receive the perks (Jäger [1967] 1982, 29; see also Kühl 2014, 180).

5.1.3.5 ANTI-SEMITISM AND NAZISM AS LEGITIMIZING PRINCIPLES.   Goldhagen’s (1996) stark case for the sole motivating force of anti-Semitism has been widely condemned, and, although some ideological fanatics did indeed participate in the Holocaust (Haberer 2001, 401; Mann 2000, 331), ideology does not play a significant role as a motivation. Anti-Semitic ideologies are helpful for explaining the worse treatment of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps vis-à-vis other prisoners (Orth 2002, 98), but the actual acts of killing cannot be understood merely through the lens of ideology.

Yet, ideologies do play an extremely important role as a guiding principle and a facilitative factor. While there may have been a “generalized notion of the Jews as part of the enemy” (Browning [1994] 2001, 73), there is little evidence that many participants were actually motivated by their anti-Semitism to participate. Ideologies are important because they give meaning to the situations and provide the social networks of peers and authorities with discourses within which ideologies can render the world understandable and explainable and in which the various actions demanded of them become meaningful and legitimate. However, ideologies are propagated to all individuals, those engaging in acts of perpetration and those not. Ideologies do little to show why some individuals are triggered into participation while others are not, but instead provide a broad framework within which this action becomes legitimate (see Eisner 2009, 53; Leader Maynard 2014).

In the end, there existed mutual expectations of the acceptance of the ideologies that would have necessitated explicit dissent for an individual not to have been taken as anti-Semitic (Kühl 2014, 102–104). While this did not mean that everyone would welcome overtly discriminatory propaganda, one would not expect one’s comrades to disparage it (209); this also accounted for a normalization of one’s views toward discriminatory and ultimately genocidal action. This indoctrination did not have the effect of actually motivating the perpetrators but instead of redefining the meaning of their participation toward a broad indifference and a normalization of these tasks as usual within their roles (114).

This framework is created by, on the one hand, demonstrating the moral legitimacy of the killing while, on the other hand, also removing the victims from the circle of obligation and responsibility (Browning [1994] 2001, 73; Fein 1990, 37–39). This, in turn, distances and dehumanizes the victims themselves (Haagensen and Croes 2012).

5.2  REDUCING COMPLEXITY: WHICH MOTIVATIONS ARE PARTICULARLY HELPFUL IN EXPLAINING PERPETRATION?

In this section we take a step back and look at all the motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions to try to decipher which ones are empirically more prevalent than others. While all of these facets are included in the Complexity of Evil model for the important reason that they can be INUS conditions for participating in genocide (for motivations), can increase the likelihood of participation (for facilitative factors), or can set the general frame (for contextual conditions), they are not all equally important in terms of their explanatory power. As already cited in the introduction, Kühl formulates a critique of Browning’s ([1994] 2001) approach to motivational analysis, stating that “the various motivations are strung together in a mundane study of factors. The various aspects are not justified, weighted, nor—and this weighs more strongly—put in relation to each other” (Kühl 2014, 14; my translation). In order to avoid such critique in this study, the preceding three chapters have gone to great lengths to justify the various aspects, providing theoretical and empirical evidence, as well as to relate them to each other between the various sections. It remains in this section to weight them and specify which factors are empirically most prevalent. Some are niche explanations that are important only for explaining a few cases, while others play a part in explaining many more cases. These differences will be tentatively approached here.

When evaluating all the presented motivations, all play some part for certain individuals. But in taking a step back, two major categories stand out: social dynamics in the perpetrator group and opportunistic motivations. Regarding social dynamics, all six motivations were important in some context; however, the impact of conformity to one’s group and of coercion (both from peers and from authorities) stands out across the board. The dynamics of wanting to conform with one’s group and measuring up to the (believed) expectations of other group members were particularly prevalent in Rwanda and the Holocaust but played a subtler role in Cambodia, where understandings of the situation, as well as definitions of the enemy, were accepted within the (dysfunctional) social dynamics of the group. Coercion, on the other hand, was omnipresent with Ângkar’s iron fist in Cambodia, and it also played an important role in Rwanda, where both peers and authorities enforced participation. While coercion was lower under Nazi rule, it is plausible that many people felt they would face fatal consequences if they refused to overtly comply. Opportunistic motivations abound across all cases, most often focused on material gain (ranging from simple survival in Cambodia to lucrative looting in Rwanda and the Holocaust) and career interests. Also, some people used the genocide to get rid of people against whom they held a personal grudge, unrelated to the genocide.

In terms of facilitative factors, while ideologies were not seen to be a prevalent motivation, they play a pivotal role across all cases in creating a framework within which participation becomes legitimate and even necessary. This process of moral justification is invaluable as it either reduces moral inhibitions individuals may experience or even provides added incentives; either way, the genocidal ideologies espoused by the regimes provide the foundation for people to speak positively or neutrally about the horrific acts they are committing, normalizing the process or sanctioning it. Processes of dehumanizing the victims also existed in all cases, but this and other factors all play into the more important factor of distance, be it physical, social, or emotional, which allows the perpetrator to more easily participate as he or she is not as intimately involved. While physical distance to the killing was enabled most strongly through the gas chambers in the Holocaust, social and emotional distance enabled more direct killing by the Einsatzgruppen of the police battalions in the Holocaust, as well as the very proximate killing in the Rwandan and Cambodian cases. Finally, and tying into the social dynamics motivation above, the nature of the group as the locus of perpetration is an important and recurrent facilitative factor in genocidal participation. In their various groups, perpetrators in Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust displaced and diffused responsibility, disengaging themselves from the violence they were part of. Across the very different organizational structures in the three cases, a division of labor and anonymous participation took on different but interlinked roles, each contributing to an easier participation of the individuals.

Finally, with regard to the context, elsewhere I have demonstrated in a qualitative comparative analysis that genocide occurs when an autocratic regime exists and the ethnicity of the elite is particularly salient, and this is combined with the presence of either an exclusionary ideology or major political upheaval (Williams 2016). This ties in most strongly to the nature of the state and societal tensions around ethnicity, combined with either ideology or uncertainty, as discussed above. While this refers to a macro-level study, the results are interesting here in their application to the micro level.

It is important to re-emphasize that these various influences on why people participate will vary among people, stages of participation, the context, and much more on top of this. The other motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions not mentioned here are by no means less important, and they can and do cause people to participate in genocide; however, they are just empirically less prevalent. The factors discussed in this chapter are the ones most important for trying to understand a broad selection of participants. The Complexity of Evil model helps us train our perspective on the empirical data, to see the patterns of why people participate in genocide systematically according to motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions and to be able to see the intercontextual commonalities between the cases.

5.3  CONCLUSION

This chapter has brought together the preceding chapters that presented the various levels of the Complexity of Evil model and has attempted to sharpen the points made in them by looking at which of the many motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions have the most empirical prevalence. In Cambodia, the nature of Ângkar, the high level of violence against cadres, and social isolation meant that obedience to authority and coercion were highly prevalent and social dynamics in the group of lesser importance; opportunistic motivations focused on survival and revenge for past wrongs. In Rwanda, intra-Hutu coercion was also important, but even more so were social dynamics of conformity and peer pressure within this group, as were the opportunities for looting and solving personal feuds. In the Holocaust, dynamics within the perpetrating group were pivotal, with both obedience to authority and conformity to peers being central. In all three cases, social dynamics were key to how an individual understood his or her situation and behavioral options, while ideologies were pivotal to how people constructed the victim group as an enemy and legitimized their killing, albeit most often not as a motivation but as a facilitative factor.

While the manifestations are quite different for each case, social dynamics within the perpetrator group and opportunism played the key roles in motivating individuals to participate in genocide, while ideologies were deemed extremely important in providing a framework for legitimacy and justification but not providing an adequate motivation for genocide participation for most individuals. Other facilitative factors that were important across all three cases were factors that had a psychological effect on making participation easier pertaining to the perpetrator group and how it acted together, as well as the distance between the perpetrators and victims.

VIGNETTE  VI

Ramy

A GARMENT WORKER PARTICIPATING IN THE EVACUATION OF PHNOM PENH

I GREW UP in a poor farming family with eight brothers and sisters, studying until grade 2 before helping my family grow rice. After the coup in 1970 there was fighting and bombs and my village was on the battle line, sometimes under control of the Khmer Rouge, sometimes of Lon Nol, so I could not stay there. I joined the struggle in 1973 going along with others to join the revolution because I was young and six other girls joined with me. They propagated us to join them in fighting the royalists, capitalists, and others, telling us bad things about them and how they took taxes from the people. We believed it was true, so I joined. There was a meeting and anyone who protested or asked questions was sent to “the higher,” although I did not know where “the higher” was; they said they were sending them to meet Ângkar, but these people just disappeared. I also joined because Prince Sihanouk had called for parents to let their children join. And people loved the prince, so my parents also told me to join.

I was assigned to cut and sew clothes to support the ongoing battle. Sometimes we had to work day and night, which was not a problem for me because they may have criticized us but never tortured us. In 1975, my whole unit was brought to Phnom Penh by truck to help evacuate the people because we were afraid that there would be bombings and we told people about the change of regime, too. I helped people to cross the river by ferry.

After the evacuation I worked in Phnom Penh. It was very quiet with no cars and only guards and people working in each ministry. I worked as a tailor in the ministry of commerce and from 1976 until the end of the regime at the ministry of foreign affairs. Even in Phnom Penh, those who were skillful were also taken out. For example, the person who taught my unit to make sofa covers out of clothes was taken out after she had taught us and we could do it. She just disappeared. I was suspicious, too, because she cried before she left. I just concentrated on my work, but I understood that those who were educated were killed. I was assigned to make mattresses, clothes, hats, and shirts. I did not know anything, I just followed.

I asked permission to visit my hometown in 1975 for one day, but when I saw the situation in my family, I came back. I thought that I had joined the revolution for my family to live in good conditions, but when I visited them, they did not have enough to eat. I did not dare to go again.

Having a husband during that time cannot even compare to having a boyfriend today. We met at night once every ten days and if there was a lot of work to do, we missed even this one day and had to wait another ten days.

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 were arrested, please not to name me; and if I were arrested, I would not name him. Then if you died, you died alone and did not both die. In 1977 and 78, after self-criticism meetings, some people, mostly the leadership people, were called to meet Ângkar and disappeared. So, we lower people also worried about our security.

When the Vietnamese came in 1979 I was really afraid because the Khmer Rouge told me that they would slash open my stomach and stuff grass in. So, I went with the Khmer Rouge by train to the West. I could not go to my hometown because I did not know where to go and there was no transportation. I took nothing but a few clothes because they told us that we were to be evacuated for just one week. I also had a small baby that was just forty days old. I felt hopeless during that time and I even wanted to abandon my child because it was too difficult. My child was very skinny and two other babies died and were buried along the way, too. We walked along a small path on the border and others told me to abandon my baby, as it would die in the end anyway, so that I could carry rice and live longer. But I remembered my husband and wanted him to see the child, too. Then the others refused to share the rice with me.

Today she lives in Pailin.

Conclusion

WHEN TALKING ABOUT participation in the Jedwabne massacres, Gross (2003, 125) speaks about the “God-knows-what motivations” that drove the local population to participate. The nature of these acts is indeed horrific, and yet such acts and similar ones have occurred again and again in other cases of genocide and will continue in future cases. In many situations, more people have actually participated in the genocidal actions than have resisted or refused, exemplified in the fact that only one dozen of six hundred men stood forward in Józefów when Major Trapp gave the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 the option of not participating in the impending massacres (see Browning [1994] 2001). Thus, the research question behind this book has been: Why do people participate in genocide?

It has been the aim of this book to delve into these “God-knows-what motivations” and to unpack this black box of participation, trying to render understandable and explainable in detail what motivates individuals to participate in genocide. In focus here have not been the perpetrators in the highest echelons of power, but instead the foot soldiers of the regime, the low-level individuals whose participation actually implemented the genocidal policies and made real the terrible consequences of these plans. These people are not psychologically or demographically aberrant in any way, but are simply “ordinary people” (see Browning [1994] 2001; Lewy 2017, 45).

To really understand why genocide occurs, I have argued that it is necessary to disaggregate the phenomenon and to understand these individuals, to take on their perspectives and to understand their actions from their own points of view. Thus, this research has sought to remove the normativity of working on questions of perpetration and to take participation at face value, striving not to judge the individuals for their acts but to understand their motivations for them. In the final chapter of this book, I would like to recapitulate the main thoughts articulated throughout the book and highlight the contributions of the Complexity of Evil model, as well as give some perspective on potential further avenues of research.

KEY THOUGHTS OF THE BOOK

This book has taken an action-centric approach to studying participation in genocide, which allows us to move away from a binary focus on perpetrators and nonperpetrators and focus on motivations for the specific acts of perpetration. Conceptually this allows one and the same individual to also engage in other acts beyond just perpetration and for the complexity of individuals’ actions to be appropriately represented. Building on these underlying assumptions I have developed the Complexity of Evil model, which brings the insights from different disciplines and from across various cases into conversation with each other and synthesizes them to an idealized abstraction of the empirical reality of participation in genocide. In this process the model seeks to tap into the underlying mechanisms behind individuals’ participation decisions, rather than focus just on their actual empirical manifestations. The model is abstract enough to allow comparisons between cases, but concrete and embedded enough that it is not reductionist. As such, the Complexity of Evil model is able to differentiate types of factors that have different causal implications for this participation: motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions. The most fundamental element of the model is the motivations, the actual impulse for people to participate. I define a motivation for participating in genocide as a mechanism that guides a choice between action alternatives that are both socially structured and individually constructed. With this definition I pay credence to the influential role that the social situation has on how people perceive their environments and what action alternatives they even have. Participation occurs only if at least one of the motivations is present, but it does not matter which one or ones. Facilitative factors are not necessary or sufficient in this way for participation to occur, but the presence of such factors makes participation easier for the individual and thus also more likely; many of these factors are psychological and refer to the situation the individual is in. Finally, contextual conditions work at a higher level, bringing together political, societal, economic, and cultural factors that together create an environment that is particularly conducive to genocide, impacting the salience of the various motivations and facilitative factors too.

Without rehearsing in depth the entire Complexity of Evil model’s facets, I will only briefly review the model here. The model differentiates between three broad types of motivations. First, ingroup-directed motivations focus on dynamics within the perpetrator group, particularly the implicit and explicit demands for obedience to authority along vertical group ties, as well as through horizontal ties to peers in the form of the implicit need for conformity or explicit peer pressure; both horizontal and vertical forms of social influence can be laced with threats, providing coercion as a motivation. Further, some participate in order to gain status within the group, or because they have taken on a role and thus adopt the attitudes, values, and behaviors associated with that role. Second, outgroup-directed motivations derive their motivational influence from the perception the individual has of the victim group, particularly the influence of ideology motivating people to participate in genocide, as well as participation being part of an emotional reaction to the victim group, be it anger, fear, disgust, and so on. The third category of motivations is opportunistic motivations, particularly factors that motivate people to participate for material gain, career progression, settling personal scores, or all manner of other reasons. Furthermore, individuals participate for the excitement of participating in otherwise taboo actions, or for the enjoyment of causing others pain (that is, sadism).

The empirical manifestations of these motivations differed among the three cases at the heart of this study—the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia—and so did the distribution of individuals being driven by these motivations across the cases. However, a certain pattern can be distilled from this cross-case analysis. Social dynamics played an important role across the cases, with conformity and wanting to measure up to anticipated expectations of peers being particularly prevalent in Rwanda and the Holocaust, while social isolation was pronounced in Cambodia; coercion and its motivational power was strongest in Cambodia but played a major part across the other cases too. Opportunistic motivations were also important for most individuals across the cases, although what type of benefit the individual hoped for varied strongly.

Next, the Complexity of Evil model differentiates between various types of facilitative factors, which alone cannot lead someone to participate in genocide but can make it easier when a motivation is present. First, ideologies are pivotal as facilitative factors (more so than as motivations) because they can provide an underlying framework that can legitimize or even necessitate participation in the genocide, allowing people to act on other motivations without being morally inhibited, as well as framing the enemy in threatening terms or introducing certain types of language that justify or reinterpret the killing. Second, there are various processes of moral disengagement that can make it easier for people to participate in genocide, such as dehumanizing the members of the victim group, devaluing life itself, or creating a larger social, emotional, or physical distance between the victims and the individual participant. Third, group dynamics are again important, allowing individual perpetrators to displace or diffuse the responsibility for their actions to other members of the group, particularly when genocidal tasks are strongly divided up. The anonymity that groups offer also allows people to more easily participate. Finally, over time, participation can become easier as individuals become routinized at killing or gradually habituated to it; also, the ideas of a continuum of destruction and escalating commitments describe two ways in which people get dragged into participation one small step at a time.

Across all three cases the ideological framework played an immense role in morally justifying the genocide and necessitating individuals’ participation; through ideologies of the regime, the enemy was (more or less clearly) defined and the only possible reaction to them stipulated. Distance also played a major part across the board, with various forms making participation easier. Finally, group dynamics manifested themselves quite differently in the various contexts, but again and again these dynamics helped displace and diffuse responsibility and aided individuals in disengaging themselves from their acts. Particularly, the anonymity that group participation afforded them and the division of labor, which existed in perpetrating groups, supported this.

The third and final level of the Complexity of Evil model is constituted by the contextual conditions, which provide the macro-level framework within which genocide occurs. Here, various factors were seen as important, focusing on regime-centric conditions of how the state is structured and the authority it can exert, societal tensions based on ethnic and other forms of discrimination, ideologies that provide a foundation for these exclusionary discourses and practices, political upheaval and war that create significant uncertainty, and economic factors, as well as cultural factors that can make participation easier because they legitimize certain practices or ideological constructions and discourses.

In essence, the Complexity of Evil model argues that an individual will participate in genocide only if he or she is in a genocidal setting and one of the motivations is present; at the same time, participation becomes easier and thus more likely when facilitative factors are present. People will participate if these factors are pressing enough to outweigh the negative connotations of participation.

THE COMPLEXITY OF EVIL MODEL: CONCLUDING REMARKS

This book provides a focus on the individual perpetrator who actually implements the genocidal policies. Thus, it falls in line with the development in the field toward disaggregated approaches that look beyond the macro-level occurrences and try to open the black box of genocide and disentangle the dynamics within. To contribute in this way, the Complexity of Evil model has presented a systematic and schematic approach, synthesizing insights from various cases and from across disciplinary borders and re-systematizing them into an abstract model. As such, the model argues for embracing a complex explanation of why people participate, identifying a multitude of motivations, the most important of which are relatively mundane and everyday in nature. In essence, the Complexity of Evil model highlights the comparable and generalizable nature of these motivations across the very different cases presented here, although their empirical manifestations may differ while being based on the same underlying mechanisms; given the diversity of my empirical cases, I would expect strongly that the model holds in other cases too. The model is intended as a template for understanding motivations of participation as it occurs, rather than being predictive—very different forms of data would be necessary for such a predictive endeavor. Furthermore, given the quite complex nature of the model, it would not lend itself to statistical or experimental testing that would provide a basis for prediction.

The quotidian nature of many of the factors explicated here suggests that the scope of the Complexity of Evil model may stretch not only to other cases of genocide but also to other forms of violence. While this may be the case (see Overmann 2016 for an application to participation in Mexican drug cartels), I would certainly argue that participation in genocide has some specificities that are not easily interchangeable. First, genocidal intent that specifies that an entire group must be wiped out provides justification and legitimation of the genocidal endeavor, sometimes even a proscription of its necessity. While other forms of mass violence may also involve some form of ideology, they do not need to. Second, the state-led nature of genocide provides a legal framework and legitimacy that are often absent, or at least not as pronounced, in other cases. Thus, participation in genocide is not aberrant action but the default action, while refusal to participate is deviant. Third, the indiscriminate nature of genocidal killing renders victims identical and exchangeable, stripping them of their identity and facilitating dehumanization and distancing. Fourth and finally, in stark opposition to massacres in the context of civil war, genocidal violence is one-sided, so the victim group itself poses little or no actual threat. Thus, participation entails little or no danger for the perpetrators, and there is a more plausible threat posed by intragroup coercion by one’s peers. Whether the Complexity of Evil model would also be useful for explaining participation in other forms of mass violence or violence more generally is thus purely speculative at this point and would require further research.

While it would go beyond the scope of this book to delve into the implications of the Complexity of Evil model for preventing participation in genocide, I do hope that the model will inspire others to consider the role of the micro level in genocide prevention. The model could act as a starting point for contemplating a systematic and cogent approach to thinking about prevention strategies, similarly to Leader Maynard’s (2015) considerations on countering mass atrocity ideologies.

As this book draws to a close, I would like to pick up on a question that Straus (2018; see also Straus 2017) posed in the epilogue of the edited volume Perpetrators (Williams and Buckley-Zistel 2018) about the relevance of the possible field of perpetrator studies and the actual analytical puzzle it is trying to answer. Given the fact that journals are being created[1] and academic associations formed[2] for the emerging field of perpetrator studies, this question is quite pertinent. In this book and with the Complexity of Evil model I argue that it is pivotal to take on the perpetrator perspective and that disaggregating genocide (and other macro-level phenomena for that matter) is important to reach a full understanding of these perpetrators; only by embracing this kind of research will it be possible to fully explain the processes that lead up to genocide and how the genocidal violence plays out.

However, I see two main problems with the idea of a field of perpetrator studies. First, this again stylizes and essentializes an individual as a perpetrator, rather than focusing on his or her actions; following this logic, maybe “perpetration studies” would better fit the bill. But, second, a sole focus on the perpetrators limits our horizon artificially. To understand these processes of genocide as they occur, we need to factor in not just the instigators and implementers but also those who resist or who are bystanders, as they influence these processes in their own ways, too. It is a legitimate research strategy to focus first on one of these types of actions, and I have done so with perpetration in this book, but it should be conducted with an openness to comparatively take these results to look at other forms of action also, just as the research can be taken to see if it is applicable to other types of violence as well.

This book is not the first word written on the issue of perpetration, nor will it be the last. But the contribution of the Complexity of Evil model to the study of perpetration, genocide, and conflict more broadly lies in its systematic nature, and I do hope that this will act as an inspiration to other researchers, not just to apply the model to their own research but to continue the development of such models, to see the value in abstraction, and to keep an open demeanor to the insights from other cases and other disciplines.

APPENDIX

List of Interviewees

The codes are composed of an anonymized ordering number and a letter signifying whether it is the first, second, third, and so on interview. An asterisk signifies that the interview is referenced in this book.

KR01*    Former central committee member, interviewed in Battambang province (A and B in August 2014, C in September 2014, D in November 2014)

KR02*    Former chief of a hard labor site, interviewed in Battambang province (A and B in August 2014)

KR03*    Former district chhlop militiaman, later also chhlop group leader, interviewed in Battambang province (A in August 2014, B in September 2014, C in November 2014)

KR04    Former commune chief, interviewed in Battambang province (A in August 2014)

KR05*    Former female mobile unit chief in the commune, interviewed in Battambang province (A and B in August 2014)

KR06*    Former messenger, later commune chief, interviewed in Battambang province (A in September 2014, B in November 2014)

KR07*    Former Lon Nol militia member (A in September 2014)

KR08*    Former mobile working group leader, interviewed in Banteay Meanchay province (A in September 2014)

KR09*    Former commune chhlop, interviewed in Banteay Meanchay province (A in September 2014)

KR10    Former translator for Vietnamese when they were still allied with Khmer Rouge, not a full-rights cadre, husband of KR11 (A and B in August 2014)

KR11*    Former chief of a female unit, interviewed in Kandal province (A and B in August 2014)

KR12*    Former guard at a security center, later body guard and messenger for chief of the security center, interviewed in Kandal province (A and B in August 2014)

KR13*    Former village chhlop, soldier, and later security center guard, interviewed in Kandal province (A in August 2014, B in October 2014)

KR14*    Former soldier, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Kandal province (A in September 2014)

KR15*    Former S-21 group leader of a guarding unit, interviewed in Kandal province (A in September 2014)

KR16*    Former military messenger, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Kandal province (A in September 2014, B in October 2014)

KR17*    Former soldier guarding in Phnom Penh, interviewed in Kandal province (A in September 2014)

KR18*    Former office guard, interviewed in Kandal province (A in December 2014)

KR19*    Former soldier, bodyguard, and then district committee member in charge of the economy, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in August 2014)

KR20*    Former commune chhlop, later collective committee member, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A and B in August 2014)

KR21*    Former regional soldier, later chhlop, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A and B in August 2014)

KR22*    Former soldier, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in August 2014)

KR23*    Former S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in August 2014)

KR24*    Former S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in September 2014)

KR25*    Former S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in September 2014)

KR26*    Former S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in September 2014)

KR27*    Former S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in October 2014, B in November 2014)

KR28*    Former soldier involved in evacuation of Phnom Penh, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in October 2014)

KR29*    Former soldier, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A in October 2014, B in November 2014)

KR30*    Former commune chhlop, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Kampong Chhnang province (A and B in November 2014)

KR31*    Former village chief and soldier, interviewed in Kampong Thom province (A in August 2014, B in October 2014)

KR32    Former member of a woodworking unit, interviewed in Kampong Thom province (A in August 2014)

KR33    Former soldier, interviewed in Kampong Thom province (A in October 2014)

KR34*    Former soldier, later district economic section, interviewed in Kampong Thom province (A in October 2014)

KR35–KR37    Short interviews with former Khmer Rouge in Mondolkiri (A in January 2015)

KR38    Former commune chhlop, interviewed in Mondolkiri (A in January 2015)

KR39    Former village chhlop, later district soldier, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in September 2014)

KR40    Former soldier, interviewed in Pailin province (A in September 2014)

KR41    Former soldier, interviewed in Pailin province (A in September 2014, B in October 2014)

KR42    Former soldier, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in September 2014)

KR43*    Former commune chief, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in September 2014)

KR44    Former village chhlop, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in September 2014)

KR45    Former messenger, soldier, and later communications officer, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in September 2014)

KR46*    Former military messenger in charge of communications, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in September 2014)

KR47*    Former staff member of Ministry of Propaganda, interviewed in Pailin province (A in September 2014, B in October 2014)

KR48*    Former messenger of medical office chief, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in October 2014)

KR49*    Former seamstress, interviewed in Battambang province border region (A in October 2014, B in November 2014)

KR50*    Former soldier, interviewed in Prey Veng province (A in October 2014)

KR51*    Former military messenger and secretary, interviewed in Prey Veng province (A in October 2014, B in November 2014, also provided notebook)

KR52*    Former commune chhlop, interviewed in Svay Rieng province (A in October 2014, B in November 2014)

KR53*    Former commune chhlop, teacher, security guard, and interrogator, interviewed in Svay Rieng province (A in October 2014)

KR54*    Former soldier and guard, later S-21 guard, interviewed in Takeo province (A in October 2014, B in November 2014)

KR55*    Former soldier, interviewed in Takeo province (A in November 2014)

KR56    Former guard, interviewed in Takeo province (A in November 2014)

KR57*    Former messenger, interviewed in Takeo province (A in December 2014)

KR58    Former chhlop, interviewed in Takeo province (A in January 2015)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WAS an endeavor of one individual on his journey toward academic maturity, yet not a project conducted in solitude. Like all projects, this one is embedded in a broader context, supported by many and encouraged by yet more. Among the many people who have stood by my side, I cannot name all, but I would like to thank a few people for their support in this process.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supportive colleague and trusted mentor Susanne Buckley-Zistel for her insightful guidance, tireless patience, and endless encouragement. Also, I was extremely lucky to have such supportive colleagues and friends at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University, who have unfailingly helped me with strategic advice and insightful comments on my work, as well as delightful company, particularly Judith von Heusinger, Mariam Salehi, Ulrike Krause, Melanie Hartmann, Christian Braun, Dominik Pfeiffer, Philipp Schultheiss, Joana Amaral, Maria Ketzmerick, Thorsten Bonacker, Werner Distler, Felix Knappertsbusch, Lisa Gutenbrunner, Sarah Katz-Lavigne, and the grande dame Mareike Stolley. To others in my broader network, for their advice at crucial times in the research process and their comments on earlier drafts of this work, I particularly thank Omar McDoom, Erin Jessee, Rhiannon Neilsen, Carse Ramos, Susan Braden, Lee Ann Fujii (whose untimely passing is a great loss), Jonathan Leader Maynard, Kjell Anderson, Ingo Rohlfing, Sergio Gemperle, and Daniel Bultmann, as well as the reviewers to the press. Further, I thank Christoph Horteux, Dorothee Fees, Isabell Schulz, and Samuel Williams for their helpful assistance.

In Cambodia, my deepest gratitude goes to the dozens of men and women who gave me their time and trust to speak with me about their experiences in the Khmer Rouge. Moreover, this research would not have been possible without the diligent support of my friend and colleague Keo Duong, whom I have to thank for the hours of excellent translating and the many days, weeks, and months together in the provinces of Cambodia. Also, I am indebted to Ali Al-Nasani and the whole team at the Böll Foundation for their kind support, as well as Tim Minea, Sonja Meyer, Hang Soviet, Kristina Chhim, Steven Heder, Henri Locard, Eng Kok-Thay, Vanthan Dara, Dy Kamboly, So Farina, and others at DC-Cam (Documentation Centre of Cambodia), as well as Keo Dam for their contributions to my field research.

Lest the fruits of this labor be trapped in the ivory tower, it has been important to me to present my findings outside the confines of traditional academia. My thanks go to Daniel Welschenbach for curating the exhibition Entering the Tiger Zone with me (one of the photos adorns this book), as well as to the many people who allowed us to take the exhibition to over a dozen locations. Thanks also to Ulrike Holler for her mentoring in how to garner journalistic interest in the topic.

As Ayn Rand said in Atlas Shrugged (Signet, [1957] 1996), “Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver” (382). I am deeply grateful to those who opened their personal and institutional purse strings, entrusting me with the material foundations to be the driver of this project. I thank the Heinrich Böll Foundation for the doctoral stipend and support toward field trips, the almost one hundred people who donated to my crowdfunding campaign to pay my translator in Cambodia, and Susanne Buckley-Zistel, the Centre for Conflict Studies, and the University of Marburg for the various funds for field research and conference trips. Moreover, I would like to thank my parents, who have unquestioningly and generously supported every step of my education and to whom this book is dedicated.

Last and most of all, I would like to thank those people who have been by my side to provide grateful distraction and gentle reminders of the fun one can have when not slaving over a laptop. My unending gratitude goes to my dear friends Paul and Sandie Lund-Steinheuer, Florian Kempf, Dennis Massmann, Hannes Schäfer, Amal Khan, and the many others who keep me sane, as well as to my wonderful family, Adam and Lesley, Alice, Peter, and Sam.

GLOSSARY

KHMER

Ângkar   the organization of the Khmer Rouge

anuthon   middle class

chhlop   militia

Kampuchea   Cambodia

Khmer   Cambodian majority ethnic group and language

khsae kbot   supposed clandestine networks of enemies, “strings of traitors”

prachiachun djah   “base people”; people living in the countryside as peasants when the Khmer Rouge took power

prachiachun thmey   “new people”; people living in the towns and cities when the Khmer Rouge took power

yuon   derogatory term for Vietnamese

KINYARWANDA

burgomaster   local leader

igitero   group nature of killing, nature of a hunt

interahamwe   youth militia

umuganda   collective labor

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. 1.    The exhibition was curated by the photographer Daniel Welschenbach and me and was shown at a number of cultural and educational institutions around Cambodia and Germany and at the European Parliament in Brussels.

2. 2.    As will be explained later, the model is causally founded in an understanding of “INUS conditions.”

3. 3.    Arendt laments that the judges did not believe that Eichmann was not an avid anti-Semite and would not “admit that an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case” ([1963] 1994, 23).

4. 4.    This is not the first systematic approach to studying perpetration, with work by James Waller (2002) pioneering the field, as well as Kjell Anderson’s (2018) recent contribution. Both of these previous works have a clear disciplinary focus: Waller structuring the dazzling array of psychological approaches, and Anderson providing a more criminological approach (albeit with many interdisciplinary elements). This book integrates these insights with further disciplinary approaches and provides a stronger causal modeling of how participation occurs.

5. 5.    While it is accurate that most perpetrators are male, this does not imply that perpetration is a male activity but rather that in patriarchal, male-dominated societies women have fewer opportunities to participate and are left with constrained agency to make the decision to participate. My argument is that, given the opportunity in other contexts, these women would be just as likely to participate and would do so for the same reasons (Waller 2002, 265; for an emerging literature that deals with specifically female perpetrators, see Adler, Loyle, and Globerman 2007; Bock 1998; Brown 2014; Frank 2006; Gertz, Brehm, and Brown 2018; Hogg 2010; Jessee 2015; A. Jones 2002; Lower 2013; Sarti 2011; Schwartz 2006; Sharlach 1999; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Smeulers 2015).

6. 6.    While Milgram’s work was aimed at understanding the dynamics of the Holocaust, Asch’s work was not within the field of genocide studies but has been frequently drawn on by scholars seeking to understand genocide.

7. 7.    Genocide is the unit of analysis less often in these studies than in qualitative work, yet they are informative for and part of the broader genocide literature.

8. 8.    These are just a small subsection of the studies already conducted; a broader range of studies has been included in the relevant sections of the model.

9. 9.    In essence, this is an attempt to transform substantive theory, which is generated from individual cases, into formal theory, which is based on the comparison of these cases and substantive theories (Vaughan 2011).

10. 10.    Both of these authors draw on Erica Bouris’s (2007) idea of complex political victims.

11. 11.    The reason there has been so much research on the Holocaust and Rwanda probably lies in the degree of public horror and knowledge about the cases, as well as the ready availability of data when the micro level became interesting to researchers, archival data for the Holocaust, and many thousands of former perpetrators in prisons in Rwanda.

12. 12.    Fifty-seven of the fifty-eight interviewees were former members of the Khmer Rouge. During one interview, it was discovered that the interviewee was not actually a former member of the Khmer Rouge.

13. 13.    Most interviewee quotes throughout the book are original as recorded, having been translated and transcribed by Keo Duong and redacted for English-language readers by me. In situations where recording was not possible, the quotes are paraphrases that draw on very detailed notes taken during the interview.

14. 14.    While I consciously tried to raise the proportion of women I spoke to, I was unable to. Women were treated as equal to men under the Khmer Rouge, and, in line with the egalitarian Communist ideals the Khmer Rouge was propagating, many cadres of the Khmer Rouge were also women. However, two reasons seem plausible as to why I nonetheless found far more men willing to speak to me. First, as one interviewee explained, women did not serve in the guarding, interrogation, or killing units (KR18A); and given the key interest I showed in speaking to people from these units, it is possibly less surprising that the ratio of men to women is so skewed. Second, in the traditionally patriarchal society of Cambodia, the picture of the female Khmer Rouge does not fit well, particularly not the violent woman cadre; hence, as people returned to traditional gender roles after the end of Democratic Kampuchea, it is possible that women’s participation will have been downplayed even more strongly, making it unlikely that nongovernmental organizations would refer me to women or that they would necessarily be known to have participated in their communities.

15. 15.    For four interviewees, the age was not recorded, and these are excluded from these statistics.

16. 16.    Following Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014, 182–184), I understand a vignette as a type of dense narrative, evocatively and descriptively telling one person’s story. These vignettes are written in the first person. Some of the wording is originally spoken as such in the interviews; other parts have been paraphrased or redacted in order to keep them short.

17. 17.    While overtly coalescing with the Vietnamese Communists, Pol Pot had in 1965 already entered into closer relations with China (Chandler 1999, 71–73; 2008, 247; for interwoven relations during Democratic Kampuchea, see Mertha 2014), and there was a deep distrust for Vietnam that resulted in territorial fights along the border between the two countries (Chandler 2008, 268).

18. 18.    These are reminiscent of the strings that are typical in traditional patronage networks in Cambodia.

19. 19.    The administrative levels, starting at the top, were zone, region, district, commune, and cooperative.

20. 20.    According to current government statistics, 1.075 million Tutsi people were killed, as explained during commemoration events in Rwanda for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the genocide.

21. 21.    Any individual who owned ten or more cows in the 1933–1934 census was classified as Tutsi. However, this was not the only criterion; the churches also informed decisions on who was to be seen as which ethnicity (Mamdani 2001, 98–99).

22. 22.    However, given their limited mandate, the UN troops proved unable to intervene in the rising tensions and later violence, and the role of the international community has been heavily criticized (see Barnett 2002; Dallaire 2003; Des Forges 1999, 595–690). As the UN Security Council refused to give the UN troops a more robust mandate (Dallaire 2003), the international media also initially failed to report the extent of the genocide and are sometimes charged with having “missed” the story (see several chapters in Thompson 2007, particularly Chaon 2007; Livingston 2007; Melvern 2007; Giles 2007; Dowden 2007; Kuperman 2007; or for a broader critique of decontextualized media reports, see Pottier 2002; see also Dawes 2007; Holmes 2014).

23. 23.    Around 4.8 million of the victims were Polish or Soviet Jews, with fatality rates of 94.9 percent and 70 percent, respectively (compared with the prewar population). By contrast, for example, 160,000 Jews from the German Reich were killed, which was 32 percent of the prewar population (Benz 1991), particularly because many were able to emigrate prior to deportations.

24. 24.    Others put this number significantly higher, claiming that 750,000 people had been killed by 1945 (Evans 2004).

25. 25.    An estimated 5,000 (Grau 1998) to 10,000 (Lautmann 1998) homosexual men were incarcerated in concentration camps, where death rates exceeded those of other groups significantly due to a primarily middle-class background that made them vulnerable to physical abuse and unprepared for manual labor (Lautmann 1998).

26. 26.    In English, “imperial night of crystal,” euphemistically referring to the broken glass of the Jewish shops that were being destroyed.

CHAPTER 1    THE COMPLEXITY OF EVIL

1. 1.    Straus (2006, 246) identified “luck, resources, uncommon savvy, strong moral principle, and great courage” as the main factors required for successful resistance. For avoidance strategies, see Browning ([1994] 2001, 61–74), Fletcher (2007, 32), and Fujii (2009, 169).

2. 2.    Cameron (2004, 241) goes further and posits that an important factor for the construction of social identity is cognitive centrality—that is, the value that one associates with the membership of one social group compared with another group of which one is also a member.

3. 3.    Termed “realistic conflict theory,” primarily, the experiment talks about zero-sum games in the context of materialist conflicts. Sherif and Sherif’s so-called Robbers Cave experiments with schoolboys at summer camp demonstrated how competition between groups could turn former friends against each other simply by having two randomly assigned groups compete against each other. The boys at Robbers Cave summer camp formed spontaneous bonds when they were allowed to play together to begin with; but after the boys were split into two groups, structures emerged, fast establishing a differentiated status system. Intergroup conflicts were instigated by the experimenters in which there was a winner and a loser (zero-sum games), provoking hostility between the groups. These intergroup conflicts then also reflected on individual attitudes and behavior toward the other group, undermining previous good relations; more important than interpersonal experiences before the competition setting were the group setup and competition they found themselves in. Ultimately, a reduction of intergroup hostility was possible when all children had to pull together across groups to find a solution to a common problem (Sherif and Sherif 1969). The importance of the intergroup element has also been emphasized in terrorism studies (McCauley and Moskalenko 2008, 415; see also Sageman 2008).

4. 4.    A caveat to the social identity theory as also brought up by Sidanius and Pratto (1999, 19) is that “those who strongly identify with their ingroups should be most prone to discriminate in favor of these groups,” but this is empirically not the case. I do not believe that this logic must be correct, as this would suggest a deterministic relationship, which is not necessarily the case.

5. 5.    A peer is understood here not as an associate of similar age, as is often the case in social science, but as an associate who is a social equal (Warr 2002, 11); more specifically, peers often encompass friends, acquaintances, or comrades with whom one has regular, recurring contact and with whom one has built up enduring relations.

6. 6.    It is unclear whether status is really a factor regarding the ingroup and the dynamics within it, or whether this is an opportunistic motivation. In the end, this is dependent on the actual situation and the specific context. While the definition of status relates to others, the motivational power of status is opportunistic. Nonetheless, status is tentatively categorized here under ingroup, as status constitutes a meaningful motivation only within a group context, and thus an individual would not strive for status if he or she were not in the context of the group.

7. 7.    Underlining this logic, the formal definition of an INUS condition reads: “A is an INUS condition of a result P if and only if, for some X and for some Y, (AX or Y) is a necessary and sufficient condition of P, but A is not a sufficient condition of P and X is not a sufficient condition of P” (Mackie 1965, 246). In simpler terms, this means that for an outcome P (in this book, participation in genocide), something is an INUS condition A (here a motivation for participating) if it is a part of a combination of factors that together are sufficient for causing P, but that there are also other combinations of factors that are also sufficient for causing P. The latter part of the definition (the US of INUS) means that for a condition to be at least an INUS condition, there must be multiple pathways to the outcome, all of which are sufficient to cause the outcome, but none of which is necessary. The first part of the definition (the IN of INUS) means that within a specific pathway to the outcome, A is an INUS condition if it is a necessary part of this pathway but not individually sufficient, meaning that it will cause the outcome only in combination with the other factors of this pathway. An important caveat stipulated by Mackie is that X may not be a sufficient condition for causing the outcome—that is, A may not be redundant to the combination. The combination will cause the outcome only if A is actually present. Likewise, each combination must be of “minimal sufficient conditions,” meaning that within the combination each of the conditions must be present in order for the outcome to be present; in other words, if one were missing, this combination could not cause the outcome (thus making each condition individually necessary within this combination).

CHAPTER 2    MOTIVATIONS

1. 1.    For a critical analysis of the conception and development of Milgram’s research, see Russell (2009, 2011) and Perry (2013).

2. 2.    A confederate is someone who the participant assumes is also another voluntary participant, but who is actually an actor and plays a certain part in the experiment setup.

3. 3.    The questions were posed by the participant through an intercom and answers were purportedly given by the confederate by pressing buttons that would light up for the participant.

4. 4.    For an analysis of the simulated shock generator, see Oppenheimer (2015).

5. 5.    It is important to note that the phrasing of these experimenter responses are characterized more as arguments to persuade than they are as orders to elicit obedience (Gibson 2013, 305). These reactions to the prods by the experimenter are highly important for various interpretations of the experiment and have been studied in depth (Burger, Girgis, and Manning 2011); for a conversational analysis of participants’ attempts at resistance, see Hollander (2015).

6. 6.    These results have been replicated again and again, showing that (while at varying levels) the rate of obedience is significantly higher than any expert expectations; before conducting his experiments, Milgram had surveyed a group of psychiatrists and found that on average they expected only 0.125 percent of the subjects to be fully obedient (for an overview, see Blass 2002; for the most recent replications, see Burger 2009).

7. 7.    “Profuse sweating, trembling and stuttering were typical expressions of this emotional disturbance” (Milgram 1963, 371). It is this high degree of stress that Milgram exposed his participants to that has brought him the most ethical critique (see, for example, Nicholson 2011).

8. 8.    Quotes from my own interviews are cited with an interview code; for more details, see the appendix.

9. 9.    I am grateful to Julie Bernath for this thought.

10. 10.    Contrary to this, there is conflicting evidence of growing defiance of authority in the country from 1990 onward (Fletcher 2007, 28).

11. 11.    Kühl (2014, 152–153) makes the point that the norms of comradeship are more than those of normal collegiality because members of organizations who form bonds of comradeship are addressed in their role not just as a member but also as a person, encompassing all their other roles. This is not because the individual has no other roles beyond that within the organization, but because of the vulnerability related to this particular role that threatens the entire person. Thus, comradeship is vital because it reduces this vulnerability and increases the individual’s chances of survival.

12. 12.    These findings were not confirmed by Burger (2009) in his recent replication of the Milgram experiment, which had a reduced experimental design to reduce ethical problems with regard to the participants. The wealth of other experiments and the truncated nature of Burger’s experiment, however, do not significantly undermine the credibility of these original findings.

13. 13.    Under manipulation by two confederates, the amount of people giving wrong answers rose to 8.42 percent compared with 1.25 percent in the control group of just participants; nonetheless, in thirty-six rounds of answer giving 32 percent of participants gave at least one obviously wrong answer in concurrence with the dissenting minority of two out of six people (Moscovici 1976).

14. 14.    This quote is from a nonrecorded interview, hence only from notes taken during the conversation, and thus may diverge in part from the precise phrases used by the interviewee.

15. 15.    Status differences “are calculated from an assessment of a person’s age, gender, familial background, ethnicity, birth order, occupation, political influence, power, education, benevolence, religious piety, and personal character. Dyadic relationships are negotiated and structured on the basis of such knowledge, as illustrated by each person’s choice of verbal and nonverbal patterns of behaviour” (Hinton 2005, 186). Status differences manifest themselves intersectionally—for example, with Muslim Chams, who were base people during Democratic Kampuchea sometimes having a lower status than new people (Hinton 2005, 208).

16. 16.    This included hundreds of thousands of peasants who had fled to Phnom Penh for safety during the civil war, as they were deemed as traitors who had turned their backs on the countryside.

17. 17.    For a very concise and fitting metaphor for this lack of burning hate for most perpetrators of the Holocaust, see Bauman, as very concisely summarized by Baumeister (2002, 246): “Bauman’s analysis is that the mentality that directed the Holocaust was a gardener’s mentality. As he explains, the gardener has in mind an ideal notion of what his beautiful garden will look like, and to achieve that, he believes he has to get rid of the weeds (who do not belong in his ideal garden). Some gardeners may in fact hate the weeds. Others may regard the weeds as an irritating impediment. Some may have no particular feelings about the weeds. Others may even feel sorry for the weeds or admire their tenacious efforts to survive and thrive where they are not wanted. But all agree that the weeds must go, if only because the imagined ideal of the garden has no place for weeds. Whether the gardener hates the weeds or not is largely irrelevant—his feelings are merely a matter of his subjective experience while he carries out his task of getting rid of them. The very irrelevance of the gardener’s feelings is itself a tragic, even heart-breaking, aspect of Bauman’s analysis, and it may help explain why people have been reluctant to accept it.”

18. 18.    Mann analyzes the biographies of 1,581 people who were involved with the Holocaust; of the German-born males, “two-thirds were long-term Nazis, a third had been prewar extremists, and ‘careers’ in violence were common” (2000, 331); however, Mann also concedes that his data set cannot be seen as representative and is skewed toward “hardcore” perpetrators. Nonetheless, the numbers demonstrate that ideologically influenced perpetrators did exist and played a certain role in the Holocaust.

19. 19.    Quoted in Grabowski (2013, 41), referencing AAN, Armia Krajowa, 203/III-99.

20. 20.    Mac Ginty’s definition is for “flash” looting, which describes precisely what is meant in this context of genocide.

21. 21.    This quote is taken from a nonrecorded interview, hence only from notes taken during the conversation and thus may diverge in part from the precise phrases used by the interviewee.

22. 22.    Only one interviewee explicitly said that career progression posed no motivation for people to participate in killing.

CHAPTER 3    FACILITATIVE FACTORS

1. 1.    There is an interesting debate on the (il)legality of the Holocaust according to Nazi legislation; for a brief overview and a discussion of the impact the various interpretations had on ordinary participants, see Kühl (2014, 273).

2. 2.    An implication of the social dominance theory and the role of legitimizing myths is that subordinate groups need only emancipate themselves to unsettle fragile systems. In essence, thus, they are then responsible for their own indenture, and in the case of genocide are responsible for their own absolute domination and annihilation. Theoretically, through the constant perpetuation of social practices and their own self-depreciation, they are a major part of enabling the social system of dominance to remain in place. However, this opposes that in many societies subordinates fight against their position but remain dominated nonetheless. Altogether, I find the idea of legitimizing myths proposed by Sidanius and Pratto (1999) helpful in this context, even though the entire concept of social dominance theory cannot be applied to the study of genocide.

3. 3.    These attributions were mentioned in almost all of the interviews conducted, across all different types of roles and across all the provinces interviewed in.

4. 4.    This quote is from a nonrecorded interview, hence only from notes taken during the conversation, and thus may diverge in part from the precise phrases used by the interviewee.

5. 5.    This quote is from a nonrecorded interview, hence only from notes taken during the conversation, and thus may diverge in part from the precise phrases used by the interviewee.

6. 6.    Interestingly, given the geopolitical situation of the recent Vietnam War, the bipolar world order, and the Cold War, little differentiation is made between the CIA and the KGB, the two organizations most often cited by interviewees as having agents in Cambodia, along with the Vietnamese secret service. It is quite striking that both the CIA and the KGB are seen as imperialist and as the enemy and are very often conflated completely and used almost synonymously (KR15A, KR31B, KR34A, KR41A, KR41B, KR47B, KR49A, KR49B, KR53A, KR54B). Others report conversations from that time in which they asked their comrades who the KGB even was and received the response that they were Vietnamese agents.

7. 7.    After the end of the regime and the commencement of the second civil war, people no longer spoke about internal enemies (KR43A), much as internal enemies played a smaller part during the first civil war than during Democratic Kampuchea. This suggests that the construction of internal enemies was useful to the Khmer Rouge regime only when it had full control over Cambodia, but needed a system based on less fear when people had the option of defecting to the other side.

8. 8.    StA Hamburg NSG 0021/002, Bl. 2503–2504, quoted in Kühl (2014, 226; my translation).

CHAPTER 4    CONTEXTUAL CONDITIONS

1. 1.    For a different attempt to classify the literature on genocide occurrence, see Straus (2015, 3–5; similarly also Finkel and Straus 2012), who clusters arguments by (1) intergroup animosity and discrimination, (2) regime type, (3) stress and upheaval, (4) ideology, and (5) strategic considerations. Several of these categories overlap strongly with the categories I have identified, such as intergroup relations and societal tensions, regime type and the state, hardship/upheaval and uncertainty/war, and ideology. A less nuanced differentiation is made by Hiebert (2008) among (1) individual or group agency, (2) structural factors, and (3) processes of identity construction, whereby most of the contextual conditions discussed here are subsumed in her category of structural factors. For further overviews, see also Owens, Su, and Snow (2013) and Stewart (2011).

2. 2.    I would argue that the causal mechanism linking this lower level of violence to the lower degree of control during the civil wars preceding and succeeding Democratic Kampuchea is that during these times the leadership was more dependent on the goodwill of the population in order to recruit voluntary soldiers to fight their wars, because there was the very real possibility of the young people they sought to recruit defecting if they disapproved of the level of coercion exercised by the Khmer Rouge regime.

3. 3.    This means that while the people were seen to be Cambodians, they were placed in the outgroup of the Vietnamese to emphasize their “otherness,” the danger they posed to the community, and the legitimacy of the regime’s claim that it was necessary and right to eliminate them, conflating the arguments for killing counterrevolutionaries and the Vietnamese minority.

CHAPTER 5    DIVERSITY, COMPLEXITY, SCOPE

1. 1.    If not otherwise noted, these insights come from the interviews; see the relevant chapters for details.

2. 2.    While many Buddhist monks were killed during the Khmer Rouge (Harris 2013), the Khmer Rouge’s terror affected the Muslim Cham community even more strongly. And not only were religious functionaries targeted, but so was the population, resulting in a death toll of around 36 percent (Tabeau and Kheam 2009, 49).

3. 3.    It is one of the ironies of the Khmer Rouge regime that it often targeted entire families, wanting to eradicate not just the person thought to be an enemy but one’s spouse and often children too. This can be explained by the logic of disproportionate revenge, by which one wanted to rid oneself of potential avengers (Hinton 2005, 47); however, it is ironic because it also put the family center stage, which the Khmer Rouge had attempted to abolish and replace with unwavering and undivided loyalty to Ângkar.

CONCLUSION

1. 1.    The Journal of Perpetrator Research, http://perpetratorstudies.sites.uu.nl/journal-of-perpetrator-research/, accessed April 23, 2020.

2. 2.    Perpetrator Studies Network, http://perpetratorstudies.sites.uu.nl, accessed April 23, 2020.

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INDEX

- accomplice, 9, 30, 192

- action-orientated approach, 4–5, 8–9, 17–18, 51–56

- Adorno, Theodor, 10

- agency, 5, 18, 52, 73, 83, 88, 90, 99, 127, 152–154, 169, 194, 201; constraints on, 225n5

- agentic state, 67, 70

- aggression, 93–94, 103, 106, 108–109, 183

- alcohol, 117, 151–152, 198

- Alvarez, Alex, 130, 158

- Anderson, Kjell, 128, 143, 172, 177, 225n4

- anger, 45, 102–104, 107–109, 115, 123, 133, 195, 198, 213

- Ângkar: admiration by, 96, 193; authority of, 69, 71–72, 84, 131, 135, 155, 170, 190–192, 205; crimes of, 125, 190, 209–210; enemies of, 37–38, 59–60, 84, 125, 133, 138–140; indoctrination by, 26–27, 125, 192; loyalty to, 44, 140; orders by, 88; structure of, 71–72, 155, 190–192

- anonymity: as facilitative factor, 46, 148, 152, 155–157, 192, 213; in fieldwork, 35

- anti-Semitism, 32, 97, 101, 136, 170, 173, 175, 203

- anti-Vietnamese sentiment, 27, 134, 138–139

- anxiety, 83, 103, 105, 136

- approach: analytical, 5; not demonising, 5

- Arendt, Hannah, 3, 7, 68, 78, 89–90, 100, 201

- Asch, Solomon, 10, 75–76

- authoritarian personality, 10

- authority: construction of, 69, 168, 185, 201; cultural specificity of, 16, 48, 71–72, 178; defiance of, 66, 75; discretion of, 112, 139–140; displacement of responsibility to, 46, 64, 153, 155; identification with, 67–68; leaders with, 54, 61, 67–71, 105, 123, 135, 155, 175, 178, 197; legitimacy of, 82, 163, 182, 197, 201; local-level dynamics of, 13, 30, 48, 73, 170, 197, 199; motivation, 64–74, 190, 197, 201; state, 47, 172–173, 197, 214; strength of, 69, 163; vertical relations, 44. See also obedience to authority

- autocracy, 168, 170–172, 206

- banal, 2–3, 68, 90, 108, 142, 193, 201

- banality of evil, 3, 68, 90, 201

- Bandura, Albert, 144–145

- Bauman, Zygmunt, 75, 229n17

- Bouris, Erica, 225n10

- Browning, Christopher, 5, 10, 16, 69, 77–78, 86, 116, 122, 200, 204

- brutality, 33, 87, 101, 119, 146, 160, 163, 191, 202

- Buddhism, 19, 27, 132, 146–147, 190

- Bultmann, Daniel, 93

- bystanders, 4, 8, 17–18, 83; definition of, 8–9; influence by, 77, 159, 164, 216

- Cambodia (genocide), 19, 25–28

- career, 32, 45, 115–116, 123, 160, 193, 199, 203, 205, 213

- causal(ity), 56–57, 103, 195; crucial, 167; depth, 12; effect/impact/role, 2–3, 16–17, 21, 113, 127, 143, 199, 212; mechanism, 12, 19, 54, 180–181; ordering, 16; pathway, 98; sufficient, 19. See also INUS condition

- causally necessary. See necessary condition

- causally sufficient. See sufficient condition

- change. See dynamic approach; motivational change

- children, 24, 26, 136, 142

- China, 116, 226n17

- CIA, 27–28, 59–60, 131, 138–140, 166, 194

- civil war, 96, 113, 118, 137, 169, 179, 215; in Cambodia, 21–22, 24–26, 28, 114–115, 138, 140, 193, 195; impact on social relations, 63–64; in Rwanda, 29–30, 180

- Clark, Janine Natalya, 5, 162

- coercion, 44, 47, 54, 61–62, 70, 73, 78, 82–87, 104, 123, 181, 185, 190–191, 197, 201, 205–206, 212–213, 215; lack of, 64

- cognitive dissonance, 132, 141–142, 152, 162–163, 183, 192

- Cold War, 29, 230n6

- Coleman, James, 49, 55, 168

- collective action, 63, 94, 118

- collectivization, 26, 104, 139, 190, 194

- communism, ideals of Khmer Rouge, 19, 25–26, 95, 226n14

- community: definition of, 172, 178–180, 183; labor, 72; of perpetrators, 23, 63, 73, 111, 130, 197; of victims, 32. See also social group

- comparison, as approach, 11–12, 15, 19–20, 41

- complexity, complex political actors/victims/perpetrators, 17

- compliance, 66, 68, 73–75, 77, 141, 163

- comradeship, 70, 74, 77–81, 103–104, 120, 130, 150–151, 181, 183, 192, 200–201, 204

- concentration camps, 33, 78, 85, 101, 116, 118, 122, 144, 200, 201–203

- conformity, 44, 62, 66, 74–83, 87, 94, 123, 141, 145, 149, 156, 159, 163, 181, 183–184, 192, 196–197, 200, 205–206, 212–213

- conscious vs. subconscious, 51, 70, 92, 108, 129, 162

- constructivist approach, 13, 50–53

- context: causal effect of, 56–57, 167; definition of, 41, 43, 47–48, 167; as frame for subjective meaning, 50–53, 168

- contextual conditions, 46–47, 167–185; definition of, 2, 16–17, 46

- continuum of destruction, 46, 50, 161–164, 213

- culture: as contextual condition, 47, 51, 70, 137, 182–184, 194–195; distance, 148; frames, 40, 52–54; impact on motivations, 71–73, 81, 90, 94–95, 99–101, 107–108, 115, 117, 168

- decision-making process, 51–56

- defection, 231n2

- defiance, 75, 229n10

- dehumanization, 8, 46, 57–58, 99–100, 107–108, 132, 142–146, 148, 215

- deindividuation, 46, 152, 156–157, 164

- democracy, 170–171

- democratization, 29, 171–172, 175, 179

- denunciation, 32–33, 80, 114, 192

- desensitization, 66, 152, 159–161

- deterrent, 62

- discrimination, 8, 29, 43, 47, 106, 136, 142, 163, 169, 173–176, 185, 214

- disgust, 45, 78, 103, 107–108, 143–144, 160, 200, 213

- dispositions, 9–10, 87, 93, 128, 160

- distance, 8, 46, 89, 107, 120, 147–150, 164, 204–205, 207, 213–215; cultural, 148; emotional, 148, 192, 205, 213; ethnic, 105, 149; moral, 142, 147; physical, 68, 147, 205, 213; psychological, 149, 157; social, 95, 147–149, 192, 213

- division of labor, 3, 9, 148, 154, 157–158, 192, 202, 206, 214

- drugs, 152

- duty, 79, 88–89, 91–92, 96, 179, 201–202

- dynamic approach, 48–50. See also time

- economics: as contextual condition, 47, 169, 174, 181–182, 184–185, 190, 212, 214; as motivation, 63, 72, 110–114, 144, 195, 198

- Eichmann, Adolf, 3, 68, 78, 90, 158, 201, 225n3

- emotion, 51, 55, 99, 143–144, 148–149; as motivation, 29, 43, 45, 102–109, 123, 213

- enemies: in Cambodia, 1, 19, 26–28, 54, 72, 80, 84, 87, 96, 114–115, 117, 125, 131–135, 138–143, 150, 171, 174, 177, 181, 190–195; construction, 13, 45, 105, 122, 129, 133, 136, 138–140, 164, 171, 180, 194; in the Holocaust, 203; in Rwanda, 29–30, 104, 170, 176; as threatening, 35, 136–141, 213

- engaged follower, 67, 70, 74

- environment (social). See context

- escalating commitments, 50, 162–164, 213

- ethics: of action, 83, 92; framework for subjective meaning, 52, 129; of language, 6; of researching perpetrators, 5–6, 22–24; of victim construction, 6

- ethnicity: causal role of, 12–14; as a contextual condition, 47, 169, 173–175, 199, 206; development of in Rwanda, 29, 88, 199; as a script, 13–14, 199

- euphemisms, 6, 46, 92, 100, 130, 150

- evil, 1–2, 7, 10. See also banality of evil

- excitement, 45, 120, 123, 213

- experiment: medical, 33; social psychological, 43, 64–69, 73, 75–77, 90, 121–122, 144–145, 153–154, 163, 201

- face, loss of, 19, 23, 94–96, 115, 194–195

- facilitative factors, 45–46, 127–164; definition of, 2, 16–17

- fanatic, 3, 101, 203

- fear: of authority, 70, 72, 83–84, 87, 140, 192, 194; ethnic, 13, 99, 179, 199; imagined fear of outgroup, 100, 136–137, 179, 198; of losing job, 116; motivation as emotional reaction, 51, 57, 67, 102–107, 213; of peers, 80–83, 95, 123, 192, 194, 196; of prosecution, 181; of ridicule, 74, 82; security, 13, 179, 195, 198; of subordination, 25

- female, perpetrators, 225n5, 226n14. See also gender

- feud, 106, 113–114, 199, 206

- fieldwork, 21–24

- Final Solution, 6, 31–32, 78, 116, 150

- Fletcher, Luke, 73

- foot soldier, 3, 211

- fragmentation, 173–174

- frames, 13, 52–53, 68, 70, 78, 105, 112–113, 168, 174, 176, 178, 204

- freedom from prison, 118

- friendship: in participation, 51, 78–79, 183, 192, 196, 200; in recruitment, 63; in rescuing, 79

- Fujii, Lee Ann, 13–14, 17, 23, 63, 79, 85, 88, 153–154, 162, 170, 195–199

- gender: interviewees, 23; Khmer Rouge politics of, 226n14; perpetrators, 225n5; roles specified by, 31, 90, 226n14

- genocide: definition of, 7–8; legality of, 230n1; as a policy, 47, 179; as a process, 5

- genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. See Rwanda (genocide)

- genocide by the Khmer Rouge. See Cambodia (genocide)

- ghetto, 1, 33, 109, 111, 151, 202

- Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 74, 97, 145, 200, 203

- gratuitous violence, 67, 87, 91, 122

- gray zone, in actions, 4

- Gross, Jan, 160, 211

- group. See social group

- group identity, 63, 79, 196. See also social identity

- group norms, 74, 76, 94, 199

- group ties, 79, 184, 196, 212

- Gudehus, Christian, 51–52

- guilt, collective vs. individual, 6. See also responsibility

- habituation, 50, 52, 152, 159–161, 183, 202

- Habyarimana, Juvénal, 29–30, 180, 198–199

- Harff, Barbara, 171, 174–175, 178

- Haslam, Alexander, 62, 67, 73

- hatred, 13, 29, 32, 44–45, 97, 100, 103, 106–107, 137, 199

- Hinton, Alexander Laban, 19, 94–96, 101, 105, 115, 140, 194–195

- Hitler, Adolf, 31–32, 62, 161, 179

- Holocaust, 31–34

- horizontal influence, 44, 61–62, 81, 87, 153, 212

- Hun Sen, 28

- Hutu Power, 30, 135

- identification, 62–63, 67, 76, 78, 89, 91, 100, 105, 137, 200

- identity, 12–14, 29, 63, 174; group identity, 63, 79, 196; loss of, 46, 156–157. See also social identity theory

- ideology: as contextual condition, 47, 175–178; as definition of victims, 44; as facilitative factor, 127–141; as framework, 45–47; as motivation, 45, 97–102

- ideology of Khmer Rouge, egalitarianism, 226n14

- igitero, 150, 153

- impunity, 114, 151

- indoctrination, 24, 125, 133, 135–136, 141, 176–177, 204

- influence. See social influence

- ingroup: definition of, 42, 44, 61–64; facilitative factors, 152–159; motivations, 61–96

- inhibition, 50, 66, 104, 108–109, 151, 160–161, 192, 201, 205

- instability. See uncertainty

- intentionality, 61, 135

- interactionist explanation, 10–11

- interahamwe, 30, 39, 63, 73, 89, 170, 197, 223

- interdisciplinary approach, 41

- intergroup conflict, 43, 91, 102, 105, 110, 123, 175

- internalisation, 62, 74, 77, 81, 87, 91–92, 101, 177

- international criminal justice, 7, 28

- interviews: interviewee demographics, 23–24; as method, 22–24

- INUS condition, 56–57, 98, 168

- Jedwabne, 69, 160, 211

- Jessee, Erin, 17, 96, 114

- joiner, 78–79, 153–154, 162, 195–196

- Józefów, 69, 211

- justification. See moral justification

- just world phenomenon, 131

- Kalyvas, Stathis, 113

- Kangura, 30

- Kayibanda, Grégoire, 29

- Keo, Duong, 22, 134, 138

- KGB, 138, 140, 194

- Kühl, Stefan, 6, 15–16, 70, 86–87, 136, 202, 204

- law, 30, 38, 47, 72–73, 133, 151, 155, 171–172, 191, 197

- Leader Maynard, Jonathan, 98–101, 177, 215

- legitimacy: of authority, 67–68, 82, 105, 114, 128, 153–154, 163, 172–173, 182, 197, 201; of killing action, 98–100, 113, 130, 132–133, 136, 162, 164, 172, 175–176, 183, 194, 204–205; moral, 128, 130, 143; of orders, 47, 86; of structures, 73, 170, 179

- legitimization, 64

- level of analysis: context, 4, 169; individual, 4; local dynamics, 5, 8, 13–14, 169; macro vs. meso vs. micro, 9, 11–12, 43, 48–50, 169; middle range theory, 17; multiple levels, 4, 47–50

- Lifton, Robert Jay, 91–92, 122

- Lon Nol, 24–26, 37, 115, 119, 138–140, 171, 181, 193–194

- looting, 3, 45, 47, 55, 57, 82, 110–113, 118, 123, 154, 198, 202–203, 205–206

- low-level perpetrators, definition of, 8–9. See also perpetrators

- loyalty: to authority, 44, 69, 116, 119; to the ingroup, 26, 74, 78, 82, 92, 137, 181, 201; to the party, 96, 140; to the state, 78, 116, 130

- Mackie, Diane, 77

- macro-level approach. See level of analysis

- male. See gender

- mass killing, 6–8, 31, 33–34, 114, 171, 174

- mass murder, 6. See also mass killing

- McDoom, Omar, 15, 63, 103, 105, 113, 137, 173, 198

- media, 30, 49, 98–99, 135, 176–177

- memory, 22–23

- men. See gender

- micro-level approach, 12. See also level of analysis

- Milgram, Stanley, 10, 64–69, 73, 75, 121–122, 153, 163, 201

- minority: influence by, 77; targeting of, 19, 25, 28, 44, 174, 179–180

- model, as method, 20–21

- Moldova, 77

- moral disengagement, 45, 66, 128, 141–152, 213

- moral framework, 41, 44–45, 47, 57, 92, 128, 131, 141–142, 153, 162, 172, 181, 184

- moral justification, 45, 92, 129–136, 164, 205

- Moscovici, Serge, 77

- motivation, 43–45, 61–123; definition of, 2, 16–17, 53–58

- motivational change, 50

- multilevel. See level of analysis

- myths, 106, 130–131, 136, 183

- nation(ality), 6–7, 25, 130, 133, 137, 138, 140, 149, 166, 171, 183

- nationalism, 97, 134, 137, 138, 174–175, 179, 182

- necessary condition, 2, 56–57, 132

- Neilsen, Rhiannon, 132, 145

- neutralization, 128, 130

- Newman, Leonard, 10, 141, 163

- nonperpetrators, 8, 17, 48, 78, 105, 113, 185, 212

- normal. See ordinary men

- Norodom, Sihanouk, 24–26, 86, 138, 195

- obedience to authority, 44, 62, 64–74, 83, 87, 90, 141, 191, 212. See also authority

- obligation, 46, 47, 62, 67, 73, 78, 132, 143, 146, 173, 181, 204

- opponent theory, 121

- opportunism, as motivation, 45, 109–123

- orders, 62, 64–74. See also obedience to authority

- ordinary men, 1, 8, 10, 13, 16, 30, 68, 73, 99, 111, 200, 202, 211, 225n3

- ordinary people. See ordinary men

- othering, 13; of perpetrators, 10; of victims, 231n3

- outgroup: definition of, 42, 44; facilitative factors, 127–150; motivations, 97–109

- participation. See perpetration

- patriarchy. See gender

- peer pressure, 62, 80–83, 87, 91, 123, 175, 183, 192, 206, 212

- peers: definition of, 61; diffusion of responsibility to, 153; evaluation, 96; as reference group, 178, 192; social approval by, 76; social norms among, 53; status relative to, 94; support, 76; violence against, 183. See also coercion; conformity; peer pressure

- perks, 116–118, 122, 203

- perpetration: as action (see action-orientated approach); as a process, 9, 39; as unit of analysis, 17

- perpetration in Armenian genocide, 73, 84–85, 112, 116, 118–120, 132, 137, 144–146, 149, 158, 172, 176, 180, 182

- perpetration in Bosnia, 89, 111, 114, 118–119, 144, 149, 152, 154, 156, 162

- perpetration in Cambodia, 40, 44, 71–72, 79–80, 83–84, 88–89, 94–96, 101, 105, 114–119, 122–123, 131–135, 138–143, 146–148, 150, 155–158, 161, 190–195

- perpetration in the Holocaust, 3, 10, 39–40, 44, 66–67, 70, 77–78, 85–87, 90–92, 101, 109, 111–112, 116–120, 122, 135–136, 142, 144, 147–151, 154, 158–162, 200–204

- perpetration in Rwanda, 13, 39, 44, 63, 70, 72–73, 78–79, 82, 85, 89, 96, 104–105, 111–114, 118–120, 135, 144, 148–150, 152–154, 156, 159, 162, 195–199

- perpetrators, definition of, 8–9, 17–18

- Perry, Gina, 65

- Petersen, Roger, 102–103, 106–108

- Pflichterfüllung, 78, 181, 201

- pluralistic ignorance, 75

- pluralistic state, 173, 182

- political instability. See uncertainty

- Pol Pot, 26–27, 155, 194, 226n17

- Popitz, Heinrich, 3, 52

- poverty, 63, 113, 115

- power: as control, 83, 90, 145; customary, 73, 197; of group, 62, 75; Hutu Power, 30, 135; as motivation, 113, 122; political, 71, 73, 128, 138, 155, 169, 171; seizing/struggling for, 47, 105, 110. See also authority

- propaganda, 25, 80, 98, 133–136, 176–177, 202, 204

- proximity: defining perpetration, 8–9; defining situation, 48; lack of as facilitative factor, 46, 69, 149, 196–197; in recruitment, 31, 63. See also distance

- psychoanalytical explanation, 45

- psychopath, 3

- purge, 27, 29

- purity, 96, 137, 150, 175

- putative duress, 86, 201

- racial, 7, 32, 44, 137, 174

- racism, 139, 173–175

- rage, 108, 115, 194. See also anger

- rape. See sexual violence

- rational choice, 54–55, 110

- recruitment, 39–40, 63, 118–119; in the Holocaust, 69, 86, 116; into Khmer Rouge, 22, 24, 40, 86, 192, 231n2; in Rwanda, 31, 79, 85, 105

- regime type. See state

- Reicher, Stephen, 62, 67, 73

- religion, targeting of religious minorities, 231n2

- rescuer, 4, 8, 17–18, 83, 112, 119

- research ethics. See ethics

- resentment, 45, 103, 106

- reserve police, 33, 39, 135. See also Reserve Police Battalion 101

- Reserve Police Battalion 101, 66, 69, 77, 116, 122, 200–202, 211

- resisters, 18, 21, 47, 68, 72, 77, 153, 159, 162, 182, 197, 211, 216, 227n1

- responsibility, 18, 90, 92, 99, 115, 150, 157, 161; diffusion of, 46, 148, 153–155, 158, 192, 197, 205, 213–214; displacement of, 46, 64, 71, 73, 81, 130, 145, 153–155, 164, 177, 192, 201, 205, 213–214

- riots, 41, 63, 113, 160, 169

- rituals, 62, 151, 160

- role: diversity of, 8; as facilitative factor, 133–134, 136, 194, 197; as motivation, 44, 87–93, 95–96, 123, 199, 202, 204, 212–213; as perpetrator, 68, 70, 116, 206, 229n11

- Romania, 34, 78, 112–113, 116

- routinization, 46, 153, 159–161, 164, 202, 213

- RPF, 29–31, 104, 176, 180, 198

- RTLM, 30, 198

- Rwanda (genocide), 28–31; media coverage of, UN failing, 226n22

- S-21, 27, 59–60, 80, 83, 131, 143, 165, 171, 187, 191

- sadism, 45, 56, 90, 109, 120–123, 149, 213

- Sageman, Marc, 63

- sanitizing language. See euphemisms

- Scacco, Alexandra, 63

- scapegoat, 179–180, 185

- script, 13–14, 88, 150, 169–170, 199

- security threats, 13, 30, 105, 137, 179

- self-criticism, 134–135, 177, 187, 210

- self-esteem, 43, 94, 102, 106

- self-interest. See opportunism

- Sémelin, Jacques, 98, 100, 122, 136, 150

- sexual violence, 8, 118–120, 146, 199

- shame, 86, 94–95, 108, 144, 183

- Sherif, Muzafer & Carolyn Sherif, 43, 76

- Sihanouk. See Norodom, Sihanouk

- situational action theory, 55

- situational explanations, 10–11, 53–54

- situations, definition of, 10, 43, 48

- social dominance theory, 94, 106, 130–131, 137

- social engineering, families, 26, 231n3

- social group: constitution of, 53, 63; as facilitative factor, 46, 55, 152–159; value afforded to, 43, 48, 135

- social identity, 43, 62, 67–68, 70, 74, 80, 91, 152

- social identity theory. See social identity

- social influence, 34, 61–63, 87, 153, 212

- social isolation, 80, 157, 190–192, 206, 213

- socialization, 80, 89, 93, 109, 183

- social movement theory, 50

- social network, 63, 191, 203

- social relations, 61–63; horizontal, 44; vertical, 44

- social structure, 64, 93. See also social group

- social ties, 40, 78–81, 120, 144, 148, 157, 192, 196

- SS, 33, 39

- starvation, 28, 117, 144–145, 193

- state: as contextual condition, 170–173; formation, 178; genocidal, 101, 153, 168, 179; leaders, 46; loyalty to, 78; modern, 143; power, 128; sanctioned/led, 7, 200, 215; sanctions, 57; as source of authority, 70; state-sponsored ethnicity, 13, 88, 199; strength, 72–73, 89, 171–173, 182, 197; structures, 48, 73, 130, 169, 185, 214; totalitarian, 19, 170–171, 173, 191

- status: in Cambodian culture, 19, 94–96, 194–195; as motivation, 44, 56, 64, 90, 93–96, 100, 106, 108, 123, 212

- Staub, Ervin, 161–162

- Stone, Dan, 63

- Straus, Scott, 9, 11, 15, 82, 171, 179, 215

- structural individualism, 54

- subconscious process. See conscious vs. subconscious

- subjective meaning, 50–53, 68, 74

- sufficient condition, 2, 56–57

- symbol(ic), 29, 93, 102–103, 107, 136–137

- Tajfel, Henri, 43

- terrorism, 41, 63, 82, 108, 162

- Theriault, Henry, 120, 145–146

- thoughtless, 3, 68, 90, 158, 202

- threat, 61–63, 73, 78, 82–85, 99–107, 129, 136–138, 175, 177–181, 191, 194, 197–198; to status, 93–94; by victim group, 30, 35, 51, 136–138, 145, 215. See also coercion

- thrills. See excitement

- time, as facilitative factor, 46, 159–163

- torture, 27, 72, 131, 154, 166, 171, 209

- totalitarian, 19, 70–71, 83, 170–173, 190–192

- toxification, 132–133, 145

- Trapp, Major Wilhelm, 69–70, 86, 201, 211

- Trawniki, 33, 116–117

- typology: of action in genocide, 8–9; of perpetrators, 21

- umuganda, 16, 72, 173, 197, 223

- uncertainty, as contextual condition, 67, 70, 73, 80, 102, 104–105, 137, 150, 169, 178–181, 185, 206

- uniform, 62, 156, 200

- United Nations (UN): failing in Rwanda, 226n22; interventions, 28, 30

- United States, killings, 25–26

- unit of analysis: genocide, 189, 225n7; individual participation, 4, 17, 189

- upheaval, political, 35, 102, 169, 178–179, 185, 206, 214

- vertical influence, 44, 61–62, 65, 87, 153, 212

- Vetlesen, Arne, 137–138, 184

- victims: blaming, 129–131, 230n2; definition of, 7, 44

- Vietnam: distrust of, 226n17; liberation by, 28; War, 25, 230n6. See also anti-Vietnamese sentiment

- vignettes: definition of, 226n16; introduction to, 24–25

- Waller, James, 15, 137, 225n4

- war, as contextual condition, 47, 179–181. See also civil war

- weapons, 31, 88, 99

- Weber, Max, 55

- Wehrmacht, 33, 86, 130

- women: as perpetrators, 31, 90, 104, 116, 197; as victims, 112, 119–120, 144, 146, 199. See also gender

- Wood, Elisabeth, 63

- Zimbardo, Philip, 10, 90, 92, 156

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TIMOTHY WILLIAMS is a junior professor of insecurity and social order at the Universität der Bundeswehr München in Munich, Germany. His work has won awards by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the German Peace Psychologist Association, and Marburg University. He co-edited the volume Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Dynamics, Motivations, and Concepts (with Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 2018).