ABSTRACT
The Holocaust has shaped our common understanding of mass atrocities as a bureaucratic regime and organised machinery of mass killings. As the bureaucratic model of mass atrocities has excluded the role of emotions in the micro-dynamics of mass atrocity events, we know little about emotions of fear, domination, revenge and also the thrill and excitement that we encounter in photographs, ethnographic evidence or eyewitness reports of mass atrocities and cruelty, that all testify to the salience of emotions in such violence. After a brief overview of the ‘emotional turn’ in genocide and mass violence studies, four emotional dynamics involved in violent atrocities are explored: confrontational tension and fear (Collins 2008); the mechanisms of domination and humiliation; the dynamics of vengeance and revenge; and the intrinsic rewards and ‘agreeable’ emotions related to violence. Empirical data and evidence are used based on exemplary events and analyses of mass killings during the Holocaust, in Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Uganda, China and Latin America. It is demonstrated that rather being a cause of atrocity violence, emotions are corollaries of atrocity as these events unfold.
