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Violent Accounts: Understanding the Psychology of Perpetrators through South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Online ISBN:
9781479870288
Print ISBN:
9781479821600
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Violent Accounts: Understanding the Psychology of Perpetrators through South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Published online:
24 March 2016
Published in print:
21 March 2014
Online ISBN:
9781479870288
Print ISBN:
9781479821600
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

This book presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the book reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff—the foot soldiers—who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. The book transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

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