The emotion dynamics of mass atrocities: Doing violence

• In Event: Mass Atrocity Crimes: Understanding Dynamics, Actions and Actors?

Abstract

The Holocaust has shaped our understanding of mass atrocities as a bureaucratic regime and organised machinery of mass killings. Images of hierarchical and authoritarian obedience, of the ‘banality of evil’, and of the driving force of ethnic hatred and prejudice are forever linked to it, thus casting an extreme event as a general model of genocide and mass atrocities. Such an ‘exceptionalist perspective’ fails us in understanding contemporary mass atrocities, as it equally prevents us from a more nuanced understanding of the Holocaust itself. This bureaucratic model of mass atrocities has foreclosed a deeper understanding of the role of emotions in the micro-dynamics of mass atrocity events, and of the individual and group dynamics of emotions in the very process of ‘doing violence’, and the dynamics of mass atrocity events. The paper will focus on the role of emotions of fear and domination, of anger and shame that have hardly been acknowledged within the common master narrative of hatred, and will use the framework of Collins’ (2008) theory of violence. It is based on secondary data from exemplary events of mass killings in Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and during the Holocaust.

Author

• Susanne Karstedt, University of Leeds, UK