ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter frames the book Perpetrators and Perpetration and opens by giving a broad overview of previous work on perpetrators, focusing on various questions: Why do people perpetrate violence? What does perpetration as an action signify? What motivates these actions, and how are they affected by prevailing political, social or economic dynamics? Subsequently, it highlights the unique contribution of this edited volume to the literature: its interdisciplinary and inter-contextual character in which it combines approaches from political science, sociology, history, gender studies and anthropology to the study of the Holocaust, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, as well as the civil violence in Cambodia and Côte d’Ivoire and more conceptual pieces. This volume argues, first, that perpetration should be understood as action (moving away from a focus on perpetrators); second, the chapter suggests that ideologies may still be important when it comes to motivations for perpetration, but without them being the monolithic, all-encompassing constructions that they have sometimes been made out to be in past research; and, third, the chapter reiterates the ordinariness argument in most of the chapters, defying recent attempts to pathologise or exotify perpetrators.
