ABSTRACT
Collective violence is a man-made event. The organized exclusion, persecution, and murder of thousands of victims is not a chance occurrence that suddenly erupts within a society. On the contrary, these episodes of violence are often well planned, prepared, and executed. Several actors play a crucial role in this process, sometimes steered by an authority, sometimes initiated within the killing fields itself. But all these actors have their own attitudes, fields of interest, maneuverability, and individual responsibilities. This heterogeneous perpetrator group, which has continuously expanded over time and research, can be divided into various categories or typologies. 1 Consider, for instance, the organizers (desk murderers), the ideologists, the architects, the executioners, and so on. In my opinion, these typologies are building blocks to grasp the heterogeneity of the perpetrator group and the complexity of the process of becoming a perpetrator. Describing these building blocks is one matter, but the interactions, the social contagion, or reciprocal mechanisms of influence is quite a different one. Supposing that we want to understand these processes and mechanisms that lead people to become entangled in the collective violence, we need to (clinically) focus on the system around the perpetrator and the relational aspects within his criminogenesis. From this perspective, we can compare collective violence to a murderous knot, an influential network of destructive (f)actors.
