This chapter of the handbook introduces dehumanization as another dark side of humanity. Humanness is a central concept in moral psychology, and whereas people normally treat other humans with moral consideration, they may turn to dehumanize others as a result of moral disengagement and moral exclusion. The author reviews recent psychological accounts of dehumanization that are grounded in empirical research and highlights the diverse forms it takes: dehumanization varies from subtle to blatant, from interpersonal to intergroup, and from simple to complex. In these theoretical accounts, dehumanizing a person or group means ascribing less of certain human attributes to the target – both attributes that distinguish humans from other animals and attributes that distinguish humans from inanimate agents. Within this general framework, the author reviews the empirical literature on how dehumanization may function to prime, facilitate, and justify harm during intergroup conflict. He also considers a number of critiques and debates over these ideas and findings that have recently surfaced.

In Chapter 10, we advance concrete ideas that peace and social activists are invited to adopt when interested in using personal narratives of genocide and/or intractable war in intergroup processes of sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation. Our suggestions draw on conceptualizations discussed in the book, as well as recommendations derived from previous on-the-ground experiences in such contexts. Our proposals focus on the following four arenas: (1) intergroup methods for moving from narratives of distancing to narratives that encourage peacebuilding; (2) ways to deal with social forgetting and “dangerous memories” of genocide and intractable war in peacebuilding efforts; (3) how to deal with fake news, denial of atrocities, and distancing narratives in reconciliation endeavors; and (4) concrete suggestions for pursuing peace with personal narratives of genocide and war when the macro-social level is sabotaging peace efforts.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.

In Chapter 5, we propose our categorization of the four main kinds of personal narratives of genocide and intractable war – Distancing, Victimhood, Ambivalence/Paradoxes, and Embracing the Other while Remaining in One’s Pain – that joins conceptualizations and understandings connected to the development and dynamics of group identity, intergenerational trauma and types of coping, and genuine dialogue between former and present-day “enemies.” We combine these conceptualizations into a theoretical model that proposes the conditions that can either encourage sustainable reconciliation and positive peacebuilding or, unfortunately, obstruct peace endeavors, in contexts of genocide and/or intractable war. The theoretical model focuses on conditions that exist on two main levels: the personal and intergroup level, and the macro-social level.

Chapter 9 proposes topics and issues that connect to further research of personal narratives of genocide and war, and their connections to sustainable peace and reconciliation. This chapter proposes four different areas that have relevance for further exploration of this topic that can be explored qualitatively, quantitatively, or via mixed methods. The four research arenas are: (1) exploration of the categories of personal narratives of genocide and war; (2) personal narratives of genocide and war and their ties to societal transformation; (3) personal narratives and coping with the effects of genocide and war; and (4) further exploration of our conceptual model concerning kinds of personal narratives and the conditions that can either encourage peacebuilding processes or peace obstruction.

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.

Chapter 2 discusses the common belief that people different from us all look alike and act alike. The outgroup homogeneity effect, as it is called, is rooted in normal categorization processes that become oversimplified. Categorization produces a range of tendencies that contribute to prejudice such as stereotyping, inaccurate attributions, ingroup favoritism, outgroup derogation, dehumanization, even scapegoating and genocide. These phenomena are explained and connected to contemporary events such as anti-Asian hate crimes during the Covid 19 pandemic. Chapter 2 ends with strategies for change that include intergroup contact, creating more complex social identities, and cooperative learning.

Starting in 1990, the lethal combination of three factors led to genocide: political transition, civil war and bipolar ethnicity. In the second half of 1990, the start of the democratisation process coincided with an attack by the RPF, the political–military organisation of the Tutsi refugees. Despite the signing of a peace accord in 1993, the civil war resumed in 1994 and led to the RPF's victory. From April to July, the Tutsi were the victims of a genocide orchestrated by Hutu hardliners.

What are the politics of choosing specific frames? This chapter is anchored on this question and finds a marked difference between frames employed at the field level and those by subfields in each country. It finds, for example, that the Kenyan national subfield’s favored frame resembled those selected by fields in the Global North. Concomitantly, it finds an ambivalence in using the genocide frame to talk about the atrocities in Darfur, arguing that this ambivalence is due to perceptions of how the frame would affect peace negotiations and the posture taken by transnational organizations such as the ICC, UN, and AU.

The chapter provides testimonies of individuals who took part in a genocidal process in order to understand how mass atrocities can take shape across different human societies. Through the analyses of interviews conducted with former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda and in Cambodia, it appears that many of them reported that they participated because they simply followed orders. It thus suggests that obedience to orders strongly influences individual actions during a war or a genocide. The chapter also highlights the key role of other forms of social influence, such as conformity to a group and compliance. However, the interviews reveal that complex additional factors have influenced former perpetrators in their actions, such as elements of coercion, the fear for one’s own life, and hateful propaganda. This chapter illuminatesthe many reasons that can lead a human to perpetrate evil acts.

The “just following orders” argument has been used across many documented wars and genocides around the world. It suggests that the justifications given by perpetrators perhaps reflect, at least in part, a reality in their brains that would be shared across all the members of our species. The brain is a complex structure composed of trillions of neurons that controls our thoughts, our feelings, our decisions, our memory, our senses, and that regulates our body. Even though a wide range of environmental and social factors can modulate how our brains process information and computes decisions, the brain is nevertheless the central processing agent. By providing a novel perspective on what is happening in the brains of those obeying orders, I seek to reveal the mechanisms leading to immoral behaviors under obedience at a deep and individual level – that is, at the neural level. This knowledge can be used to develop personalized interventions that take into account unique neurobiological profiles.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the standard definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, which is replicated verbatim in the Statutes of the ad hoc Tribunals and of the International Criminal Court. It turns to a discussion of its historical development as a response to the Holocaust, considers its relationship to crimes against humanity, and considers the underlying nature of the crime. The chapter then considers the protected groups (national, ethnic, racial and religious) and the challenges associated with identifying these groups. It considers the prohibited acts: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The chapter explains the contextual element, and the mental elements of ‘intent to destroy’, ‘in whole or in part’, and ‘as such’. It ends with a discussion of other modes of participation.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

The forced migration of French-speaking Acadians, Wabanaki tribes, and Loyalist refugees have rarely been considered in relationship with one another. Yet their principal movements centered on the Northeastern Borderlands of North America (bounded by Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec), and their interconnected movements spiked from the 1750s to the 1830s. This comparative assessment shows that while each of these coerced mobilities had distinctive qualities, large-scale population movement was the most basic foundation of colonialismss. Acadian, Loyalist, and Wabanaki movements shaped one another and were often associated with violence and trauma. At the same time, mobility offered opportunities and could nurture resilience. The legacies of forced migration in the Northeastern Borderlands during an early period of sustained warfare persist today, especially in the legal cases, artwork, and collective memory of Wabanaki people, who still live in their traditional homeland.