The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide

7 Januar 2021

Why do people engage in genocide? Prof. Timothy Williams, in his new book "The Complexity of Evil. Perpetration and Genocide" an answer to this fundamental question. Using approaches from political science, sociology, criminology, anthropology, social psychology, and history, he develops a model that can explain perpetration in a variety of cases, discussing primarily the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s. The book offers an amalgamation of previous literature with new fieldwork data from interviews with former members of the Khmer Rouge. As such, the model is both systematic and abstract as well as empirically grounded, providing a tool for understanding individual participation in various instances of genocide. Ultimately, the book highlights that the reasons for involvement in genocide are both complex in their diversity and mundane in their ordinariness and ordinariness.

To learn more about the book, see the two links: Link (external link), Link (internal link).