The following article, by Dr. Mina Rauschenbach, is part of JiC’s ongoing symposium on Alette Smeulers’ new book “Perpetrators of Mass Atrocities Terribly and Terrifyingly Normal?”. Mina is Research Fellow at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (KU Leuven), an independent consultant, and a certified mediator.

Since the publication of Alette Smeuler’s book, the debates surrounding what constitutes criminal, immoral actions or moral ones within an entrenched conflict leading to mass atrocities are taking on a new salience in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing global context. In today’s significantly fragmented geopolitical landscape, the normative legitimacy of international human rights law and principles is increasingly undermined. Impunity for atrocity crimes continues unabated around the world, with the number of conflicts at a post-World War II high. 

Even internationally recognised actors within the multilateral and NGO system are delegitimised in their moral authority to promote respect for international norms and to urge states to act in this regard. International norms also face unprecedented challenges amidst the global spread of political and social polarisation, which has reduced the space for traditional human rights advocacy and encouraged human rights violations.

In this troubled and volatile context, the main questions at the heart of this book – how can ordinary law-abiding citizens be involved as perpetrators in collective violence and can anyone become a perpetrator – take on full meaning. This publication offers a broad view of perpetration across a detailed typology of 14 categories which can be used as an analytical lens to better understand collective violence and its dynamics, its nuances and complexities. These typologies comprehensively demonstrate how different trajectories of perpetration result from the interplay of dispositional characteristics, individual life experiences, contextual factors related to an individual’s socio-political and structural environment, and perceived choices. Each type of perpetrator is characterised by a unique, or most salient, feature, driving force, motive and circumstance which contributed to their particular path and role in the commission of mass atrocities.

Moral agency and identity, and how these are interconnected and mutually reinforcing are transversal key themes running throughout this publication. The different typologies illustrate how identity factors shape moral agency, by guiding the way in which individuals perceive and interpret their social world in times of uncertainty and turmoil, and their position and sense of self-efficacy within it. In extraordinary and ambiguous circumstances, where information is contradictory and norms are blurred, one’s sense of belonging proves even more valuable. It helps us define threats and qualify trustworthy and secure relationships and allies. It also leads us to create a moral distance between “us” and the “other”. This make it easier to exclude those whom we perceive as not belonging to our community from our moral universe of obligations.  

Smeulers’ categories shed light on the key significance for moral agency of individuals’ status within the social power landscape, in determining perceived choices and the beliefs that guide and rationalise actions. This is particularly true of the categories of the Devoted Warrior, Professional, True Believer and Holy Warrior. Priorities such as ensuring the ingroup livelihood and existence, valuing group solidarity and loyalty to one’s community, and conforming to its norms of functioning and obedience are central to how they give meaning to their actions. This transpires in legitimisations of wrongful involvement and justifications to exonerate themselves, such as believing they are doing the right thing, perceiving no other alternatives than protecting one’s loved ones, and highlighting higher order imperatives and other collective concerns. Their normative landmark in conflict involvement is based on collective interests; it is less self-evident to be concerned about applying moral standards to interactions with the other group. 

Smeulers’ categories of Criminal Mastermind and Fanatics account comprehensively for how a moral and charismatic authority can significantly contribute to the blurring of people’s moral compass in conflict. Their respected status makes it easier for citizens to perceive them as providers of trustworthy and reliable information in times of uncertainty and chaos. They justify repression and violence through highly persuasive interpretations of events grounded in distorted understandings of historical relationships to the antagonist group. These narratives are all the more influential because they tend to be reinforced by a solid normative and ideological framework which help to reinterpret the social reality to fit a morally defensible lens. 

Narratives of historical injustices or existential threats provide an ideal ideological breeding ground on which Fanatics, Criminal Masterminds or Careerists can capitalise. These narratives allow them to create a rhetorical environment which unites communities in a sense of shared solidarity against the exterior threat and facilitates moral disengagement. By building up representations of threatening and demonizing others, they can reinforce victim-based identities and the ideologies which promote a reversal of morality in conflict. 

Moreover, a valuable contribution of this book is that it addresses the interactions between different types of perpetrators. It explores how these profiles depend on and may reinforce each other, and how they are necessarily complementary in order to sustain an organised machinery of mass murder through collective action. It demonstrates the social humus necessary for individuals to thrive as Criminal Masterminds, Fanatics or Careerists. They require a particular system and power landscape, made up of key individuals from the other perpetrator categories, which embolden them and support their political and criminal enterprise. In addition, the fact that our societies value the traits that define these architects, associating them with successful lives, positions of power and social status, may also play a role in the authority they enjoy.

Ordinary citizens also have a moral responsibility in enabling this power landscape. Willing and apathic accomplices, citizens may accept that the state is acting in their best interests by using unlawful methods, such as torture, illegal invasions or occupations, and assassinations by drones. Even when people are confronted with credible information about such crimes, it may be easier to trust legitimate authorities and charismatic elites in a context where it is morally difficult to draw clear lines between the legitimate and the illegitimate. 

The ability of architects at the top of the hierarchy to implement and legitimize their criminal policies also requires an ideological and structural fertile breeding ground to maintain and consolidate their control. Other elite moral authority bearers with a leadership role, such as religious leaders, intellectuals, media actors or third parties (state leaders, organisations) can play an important role in enabling and legitimising a normative order for violence to occur. Thus, perpetration can be presented as fully justified and morally legitimate by using specific framings. Examples include the necessity of national security, legitimate self-defence against terrorist or other existential threats, and normalised imperatives of ‘war on terror’. Such framings can legitimise the use of illegitimate strategies and tactics against people ‘to whom normal rules do not apply’, while claiming to respect international legal principles. 

Moral ambiguity can also be maintained by putting forward complex legal arguments and maintaining unclarity about operations to make it nearly impossible to determine the legitimacy of practices. The delineation between an act of perpetration and wrongful behaviour in conflict is unlikely to be clear and unambiguous. In fact, several of the individuals discussed in Smeulers’ typology have not been publicly held accountable albeit  having been accused of committing serious violations.

The moral ambiguity of behaviour in conflict may also be amplified when some perpetrators are conferred legitimacy and moral authority by authoritative external allies. The last decades have shown significant variability in political willingness and pressures to intervene and speak up in occurrences of manifest violations across the globe. Beyond these double standards, there are increasing voices pointing to the complicity of states, generally known to champion democratic and human rights principles, in supporting, or at least condoning, the criminal policies of their allies. If we assume that perpetrator involvement includes acts of facilitation and encouragement that are central to creating the conditions necessary for atrocity crimes to occur, there are quite a few examples of actors who may fit this category. This leads me to wonder about the threshold necessary to assume that moral responsibility spills over into causal and legal responsibility, and perpetration by complicity.

Using a broad definition of perpetrator, Smeulers also suggests that “doing the right thing” in some cases takes moral courage and implies disobedience and disloyalty to one’s group. It can come at a huge social and even existential cost for those who decide to go against the mainstream and stand up. This is maybe even more salient in our contemporary landscape of communication dominated by social media. Current times demonstrate that even in liberal democracies and times of peace, those voicing their opinion and questioning dominant norms face fierce efforts to strip them of their voices and undermine their perspectives. Acting on the moral principle of helping and showing solidarity to people whose lives they know are endangered can be criminalised. For example, individuals are prosecuted for rescuing migrants in need of urgent assistance at sea or for providing them with basic needs on their migration journeys.

This publication interrogates the binaries reflected in international criminal justice and its narrow focus on individual criminal accountability by highlighting the many nuances and trajectories characterising the perpetrator label. It offers a valuable and comprehensive analytical framework to reflect on the moral ambiguities, the power and identity concerns, the interactions and interdependencies between actors, and progressions characterising the involvement of individuals within an atrocity-producing system. It also offers valuable insights for paying more attention to the structural and systemic factors that create a normative order that is fertile for sustaining the collective embedding of individual agency in atrocity.