The idea of “the Orient” evolved from Western colonial powers. It is a politically dangerous and culturally biased idea. This concept continues to infect Western views of the Eastern world. This powerful argument is made by Edward Said in his influential text, Orientalism (1978).
The concept of Orientalism, he says, works in two important ways. It presents the East as a homogeneous region. The East is depicted as exotic, uncivilized, and backward. At the same time, it constructs the West’s idea of the East. This idea is a simplified, unchanging set of cultural representations.
Napoleon’s Experts and the Birth of Modern Orientalism
Edward Said explains that the idea of modern Orientalism arose from a significant historical event. In 1798, a French army led by Napoleon briefly conquered Egypt in battle. This conquest was significant because Napoleon took with him not only soldiers, but also scientists, recorders, and interpreters. These experts were given the job of recording and categorizing what they saw. In doing so, they created a version of “the Orient” as objective knowledge. Their words gained unquestionable authority back home in Europe.
However, as Said suggests, they were looking at the East through the lens of the imperialists who sent them. The West saw itself as rational, civilized, and progressive. The reports sent back to Europe by Napoleon’s “experts” were meticulously crafted. This meant that the East was presented to Europeans in a highly packaged way. The West explained the East. In the process, it was moulded to suit the European mind. Literary figures such as Lord Byron appropriated and disseminated this idea of what “Orientals” were like. They romanticized the Orient but continued to emphasize its inalienable difference.
The problem continues, Said says, because the idea of the Orient has never been questioned. The Western view of the East in all its forms keeps arising. This includes food, fashion, and sets of images. The Orient is seen as a place of mythical exoticism. It is the home of Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Sheba, Babylon, and Muhammad.
The ‘Othering’ of the East: Edward Said’s Critique of Orientalism and Globalisation
Orientalism is a framework used to understand the Orient, says Said. At the same time, it tells us that the peoples of the East are different. It portrays them as frightening. The world is viewed as a violent fanatic. Western nations feel the need to protect themselves from “the infiltration of the Other”. The challenge, he says, is to find a way of coexisting peacefully.
The Oklahoma bombing, USA, in 1995. The media first blamed the attack on “Muslims” and “Arabs” (the other). However, a white American was responsible for the attack.
Orientalism Key Dates
1375 Chaucer refers to the Orient as the lands lying east of the Mediterranean. Early 19th century French academic Silvestre de Sacy sets out the terms of modern Orientalism.
In 1836, Edward William Lane published Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. This book became an important reference for writers. One of these writers was the French novelist Gustave Flaubert.
1961 Franz Fanon writes about the dehumanizing forces of colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth.
1981 Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm argues that Orientalism tends to categorize the West. This is similar to the way Said says it packages the East.
Edward Said: Brief biography
Cultural theorist and literary critic Edward Said was the founder of post-colonial studies. He was born in West Jerusalem during the British Mandate in Palestine. His father was a wealthy Palestinian-American of Christian faith. Said went to private international schools in Lebanon, Egypt, and the USA. He later studied at Princeton and Harvard. He then became a professor of English Literature at Columbia University. He taught there until his death in 2003. Said wrote prolifically on a wide range of topics, including music and Palestinian issues.
Said stated that he was politicized by the Six-Day War of 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbours. After this event, he became an important voice for the Palestinian cause, especially in the USA. In 1999 he founded an Arab-Israeli orchestra with the conductor Daniel Barenboim, in the belief that music transcends politics.
Outline and explain two problems of using primary qualitative methods in sociological research (10)
Below I include the mark scheme and a possible answer to this question…
Hints for answering this question
The Indicative content the AQA provides in its mark scheme is as follows:
cannot make generalisations
cannot isolate cause and effect
difficulties analysing data
low in reliability
subjective
the imposition problem
unscientific
cannot generate social laws.
Personally I see these as falling into three groups which naturally fit together….
Cannot make generalisations/ cannot generate social laws.
Cannot isolate cause and effect/ difficulties in analysing data
Low in reliability/ the imposition problem/ subjective/ unscientific.
So the strategy here is to pick two of these and make these your points.
And it would be good to use examples from some qualitative methods, namely Participant Observation or Unstructured Interviews, ideally both…
Suggested answer
The first problem of using primary qualitative research methods such as Participant Observation is that they are unscientific, and influenced by the subjective biases of the researchers who use them.
A good example of this is Venkatesh’s study Gang Leader for a Day. He seemed to really like the leader of the 200 strong crack-dealing gang he studied, and the fact that he got on so well with him may have influenced the way he interpreted his actions. He may also have been selective in what he wrote, possibly keeping some of the worst crimes out of his publication.
A related problem is that we can never know how bad the bias is, because participant observation also lacks reliability, meaning that they are difficult to repeat in the same way and get the same results.
This is especially true for Participant Observation which is done over a several months of years. It would be impossible for someone else to replicate the context of Venkatesh’s study because the same situations will not occur again as there are so many different actors involved the research on the ground.
If another researcher could go back and repeat the research they may follow different leads, speak to different people, and find an entirely different interpretation of the same gang.
Although this is a moot point because by the time Venkatesh published his in-depth study the projects where he did the research had disappeared, so the length of time it takes to write up findings adds to this problem of reliability.
HOWEVER, one can at least verify the findings by showing them to the respondents who took part.
A second problem of primary qualitative data is that it is not usually possible to isolate cause and effect and uncover ‘social laws’
For example with unstructured interviews which are respondent led you might have a broad topic area and then ask respondents different questions to different respondents.
You would have a nice ‘thick description’ of what respondents think and feel about a topic area, but also just a mess of qualitative data.
The data you would get would be messy, possibly quite long winded and possibly with lots of irrelevant information if the researcher allowed the respondents too much freedom.
Thus if you do 10 unstructured interviews you might end up with 10 very different sets of findings with no common themes.
It would be hard for a researcher to analyse this data and find the common themes, isolate any variables and find out the discrete causes of social action.
To do that you would need to have structured questions and limit the options available to the respondents.
Having said that today it should be possible to use software to find the common themes in qualitative data, but even that might miss out on picking up on respondents talking about the same thing in different ways.
Signposting
For more posts on exam advice for A-level sociology papers please see my exams and essays page.
The Question: Non-participant observation to investigate pupil behaviour in schools (20)
Read Item C below and answer the question that follows.
Item C
Pupils behave in many different ways in schools. Some pupils conform to school rules, for example by wearing the correct uniform and completing tasks set, whilst others break school rules. Interactions between teachers and pupils, and between peers, are likely to influence behaviour.
Sociologists are interested in researching patterns of pupil behaviour, particularly disruptive behaviour. One way of studying pupil behaviour in schools is to use non-participant observation. Pupils are often observed during the course of a school day. One advantage of nonparticipant observation is that the sociologist can observe behaviour both inside and outside classrooms. Non-participant observation allows behaviour categories to be decided before the observation begins. However, behaviour may not be classified in the same way by different researchers.
Applying material from Item C and your knowledge of research methods, evaluate the strengths and limitations of using non-participant observation to investigate pupil behaviour in schools (20).
Hints and Tips: How to Answer…
These questions are METHOD + TOPIC, so you need to get in all of the methods stuff (theoretical, practical ethical) as a base, and then APPLY the methods to the topic, and this means USING THE ITEM!
Interactions between teachers and pupils, and peers influence behaviour.
Non PO can be used inside and outside the classroom.
Can categorise behaviours before hand
Categories of behaviour may not be classified in the same way by researchers.
Non-Participant Observation
Validity – depends on overt covert/ can’t ask questions about meaning (only observing)/ limited because you can only look for a few types of behaviour.
Practical – NOT practical, if in-person, one has to be in the classroom, can’t realistically follow pupils around easily outside of the classroom. Have to gain access to the school.
Representativeness – limited because of limited capacity to observe.
Reliability – can be repeated, but categories.
Ethics – consent?
Personally I find it’s easiest to imagine you are going to do the research, put yourself in the shoes of the researcher and think it through….
An Answer
Non-Participant Observation (Non-PO) may be a useful way to research pupil behaviours in-school, but practically it will probably only be useful to explore a limited range of behaviours.
Researchers could use Non PO in different classrooms to explore what kind of teaching approaches correlate with positive or negative student behaviours.
For example, a researcher could sit in a classroom and count how many times a teacher praised pupils, how much time they devote to teacher-led compared to student-led learning, and how much time they spend helping students with the later, and see if this is correlated with higher student engagement in terms of less off-task chatter, more completion of tasks, or even test results if done in the lesson.
If you did the research in league with the school you could focus on the same students and their behaviour responses in different teaching environments, and with different peers in their different subjects, this could be very scientific and favoured by positivists.
This kind of comparative approach would require the researcher to know what they are looking for in the first place, and to be able to quantify their findings they would need appropriate activity and behaviour grids to record data into.
In terms of validity, a problem may be that pupil behaviour may be different with a researcher present within the classroom. For this reason, filming a class may improve validity, although ethically students and ideally parents and teachers would have to be informed of this in advance to gain consent.
One observer may also miss out on some pupil behaviour in larger classes, they simply may not be able to see everything going on in a class of say 30 pupils, and for this reason filming may again be useful to go back and observe again. Filming would also allow for a second research to check findings, improving reliability.
The item mentions that different researchers may not categorise behaviour in the same way, this is a problem which could reduce reliability, especially if researchers are from different ethnic or class backgrounds, or different genders. Women may be less likely to see bad behaviour of girls, for example, and the same for men with boys, unconscious researcher bias may reduce validity and thus reliability. However as mentioned above, filming observations in classrooms could be a way to overcome this, different researchers can watch the same footage and come to an agreement around how to categorise behaviours.
Practically non-PO is not very practical, researchers would have to gain access to the school, and classrooms, teachers and pupils would probably not be very keen. In terms of representatives you would be limited to one class at a time, and one hours work of in-class observations would have to be written up and checked afterwards. If you wanted to research across different schools, access would have to be negotiated for each school.
The item mentions doing non PO outside of the classroom, the problem here is that if you’re doing this in corridors, playgrounds, or social spaces, there would be a lot of coming and going of different students, so you wouldn’t be able to focus on particular students, as you could do with being in a classroom.
This kind of outside the classroom would be messier than in-classroom, and to be honest i don’t know what you’d be looking for, maybe just open ended observation would yield something useful, but I can’t really see the point? Maybe you could use this to measure general rowdiness in different schools and see if this is correlated with staff presence (but the answer here seems obvious?). On reflection there seems little to gain from doing this.
Less structured non PO outside of classrooms would also be more subject to the subjectivities of the researchers.
One other way of doing non participant observation may be to set cameras up in corridors and school gates, these could measure things like student lateness, and maybe other things with the right AI software, but of course AI software has to be programmed which means that is open to human bias too.
Weaknesses of non-PO would be that you can’t ask students WHY they are doing what they are doing, so you wouldn’t have any in-depth information from participants.
This also raises ethical problems in that non-PO done on its own would be researching without any say-so from the participants, treating them like guinea pigs, and this method is in some ways like a field-experiment. This method thus wouldn’t be favoured by interpretivists.
One final thing is that OFSTED inspections and school internal observations offer a secondary source of non-PO data that could form the basis of further non-PO work, findings from either of these could be used as a jumping off point for further research.
For example previous internal school observations may have found that, for example, Kahoot works really well to engage students, so further observations could see if this is true in a wider range of subjects, or if IT more generally improves student performance.
In conclusion I think non PO is a useful method for exploring correlations of specific behaviours within classrooms, but must have a narrow focus to be useful. i can’t see how it would be useful doing more general observations outside of the classroom, it would be too impractical and too open to the subjective whims of the researchers to yield anything useful I think.
With recent advancements in medical technology, one would believe that more tests and earlier diagnosis simply mean better health. But what if our quest to detect diseases early is actually hurting us more than it is helping us?
Consultant neurologist Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan asserts that we now face a new kind of health crisis. This crisis is brought about not by hidden disease. It is caused by overdiagnosis. It is not doctors being wrong. It is diagnosing illness that will never have hurt anyone. In some cases, the illness may never have appeared at all.
When Diagnosis Doesn’t Help
Dr O’Sullivan reflects on her 30 years of medical practice and growing dismay at the trend towards overdiagnosis. She speaks of patients like Stephanie and her teenage daughter Abigail. Stephanie had epilepsy and wanted an explanation; Abigail, though, was a healthy teenager. After screening them genetically, Dr O’Sullivan informed Abigail she had a progressive neurological disease. The condition hadn’t yet appeared.
The diagnosis was technically true. It had no therapy or cure. However, it created anxiety over an eventual future that is unlikely ever to materialize. Abigail had changed from optimal health to the ominous diagnosis of serious disease. And that, Dr O’Sullivan insists, is the quiet, insidious power of diagnosis. It may alter our self-concepts. It can affect our sense of self-body even when no treatment is necessary.
Unintended Consequences
In another case, a young woman named Darcie had accumulated multiple diagnoses over the years. She was diagnosed with epilepsy, ADHD, and then autism. These diagnoses were given despite her having relatively minor or anxiety-based symptoms. The incessant medicalisation of her day-to-day experience rendered her iller, rather than healthier. And maybe even more importantly, it prompted her to see herself solely as ill.
This is not an unusual trend. More children are being diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders than ever before today. But mental illness issues in adolescents still rise. Clearly, more diagnoses have not resulted in better outcomes.
The Price of Catching “Illnesses” Early
What’s causing this trend, then? It is a mix of factors. These include increased public awareness and more advanced technology. Pharmaceutical company advertising also plays a role. Additionally, the rise of social media pathologizes normal emotions and behaviors.
Genetic testing and high-tech scans can now detect small abnormalities years before symptoms ever arise. But is it helpful to know you may fall ill in 30 years’ time? In Dr O’Sullivan’s view, early diagnosis without treatment can generate fear, anxiety, and unnecessary medical interventions.
Consider cancer, for instance. We praise early detection. However, early detection of many cancers would never have resulted in harm. Patients are treated for them nonetheless. And with disorders like Parkinson’s, now diagnosed before symptoms begin, early information might merely prolong a life lived with Parkinson’s. There is no cure, so it doesn’t lead to a life without it.
The Nocebo Effect and the Weight of Labels
Medical labels also have psychological consequences. Being told you are sick, even if you don’t know anything is wrong, can make people feel and act sick. This is called the “nocebo” effect: the negative opposite of the placebo. A diagnosis, while sometimes helpful, can validate a person’s notion that they are in pieces. This can create a vicious cycle of stress, dependence on healthcare, and reduced quality of life.
What Needs to Change?
Dr O’Sullivan is not calling for diagnosis to be prohibited — far from it. She is, however, demanding a more cautious, patient-centred approach. Tests must be employed only when they can actually do good. Practitioners must be prepared to withdraw diagnoses when they no longer serve the patient.
Lastly, medicine must be about healing suffering, not just labeling it. In an increasingly label- and early-diagnosis-obsessed culture, we must ask: Are we making folks healthier — or just more anxious?
Analysis: Labelling, Social Construction, and the Meaning of Diagnosis
Dr. O’Sullivan’s concerns about overdiagnosis and the psychological impact of medical labels can be further understood. This is achieved through sociological theories, particularly Social Action Theory. Social Action Theory was developed by Max Weber. It was expanded upon by later interpretivist sociologists. This theory emphasises how individual meanings and social interactions shape our understanding of reality. This includes health and illness.
Labelling Theory, a key concept in interpretivist sociology, is significant. It argues that illness is not just a biological fact. Illness is also a socially constructed identity. This post on Social Action Theory highlights the influence of labeling on how we define and react to health conditions. Our reactions are influenced by how others label us. Medical professionals especially influence this labeling. When a person is diagnosed, they are given a new social identity: “patient,” “sick,” or “at risk.” This label can profoundly influence how they see themselves. It can also affect how others treat them. This happens regardless of whether they actually feel unwell.
Dr. O’Sullivan’s cases of Abigail and Darcie show this in practice. The diagnosis—sometimes given for a condition that may never even manifest—can reshape a person’s self-concept and daily life. This mirrors what labelling theorists like Howard Becker describe: a person becomes their label. The label can bring about real changes in behaviour, relationships, and even physical well-being (as seen with the “nocebo effect”).
Furthermore, the social construction of illness means that what counts as “sick” or “well” is partly decided by social norms. Medical definitions and cultural attitudes also play a role. These criteria change over time and differ between societies. The explosion in neurodevelopmental and mental health diagnoses reflects changing definitions. It shows greater awareness. It also demonstrates how new categories of illness are created and legitimised socially, not just medically.
Social Action Theory suggests we should pay attention to the meanings that individuals attach to health, symptoms, and diagnosis. Medical professionals, under pressure from technology, social media, and pharmaceutical interests, may focus on early detection and labelling. But for patients, the meaning of a diagnosis may be less about biological reality. It may be more about how it changes their identity, relationships, and future expectations.
In summary: Dr. O’Sullivan’s critique supports the sociological view that diagnosis is not just a technical act but a social process. Labelling can have unintended consequences, turning healthy people into patients and creating anxiety where none may have existed. From a Social Action Theory perspective, the solution is not to reject diagnosis. Instead, it should be applied thoughtfully. Recognising that the meanings attached to illness are as important as the medical facts themselves is crucial.
Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland have stunned the world. The story opens a window into bigger questions about globalisation and geopolitics. It also questions who really gets to own the future.
This post explores some basic facts about Greenland. It also offers some analysis on whether we are now in a post-globalisation age.
🌍 Why Is It Even Called “Greenland”?
Blame Erik the Red, the Norse explorer who named it strategically around 982 AD. His aim? Attract more settlers by making a massive ice-covered island sound… welcoming. The name stuck, but over 80% of Greenland is still covered in ice today.
The population—just 57,000—is mostly Inuit and concentrated around the capital, Nuuk.
How Did Denmark End Up Owning Greenland?
In the 18th century, the Danish-Norwegian kingdom first claimed Greenland as a colony. It became solely Danish in 1814. After World War II, the US treated it like a protectorate. Then, in 1953, Greenland officially became a Danish province.
What followed was controversial: forced assimilation known as “Danization.” Greenlanders were relocated. Children were fostered in Denmark. Thousands of Inuit women and girls were fitted with IUDs without consent to lower birth rates.
🗳️ What’s Greenland’s Political Status Now?
Greenlanders voted for home rule in 1979 and gained further autonomy in 2009. Denmark still oversees foreign policy and defence, but Greenland runs its own government and domestic affairs. There is strong local support for eventual full independence.
Why Does Trump Want Greenland?
He has called it “strategically nice.” Greenland sits near Russian missile routes and hosts critical US military bases. It’s rich in rare earth minerals, and as the ice melts, it could offer new shipping routes and mining potential.
But there’s a big catch: Arctic mining is notoriously difficult, and even China has pulled out of projects there. Plus, Greenland already supports US military operations—without being owned by it.
❌ Denmark and Greenland Said No. Firmly.
Denmark quickly rejected Trump’s original 2019 proposal to by Greenland: “Greenland is not for sale.” Greenland’s leaders echoed this, calling the move “unacceptable” and uniting across political lines to oppose it. Trump’s follow-up? He didn’t rule out taking it “one way or another.”
🧊 Life in Greenland: Cold, Harsh, and Proud
Greenland is the most sparsely populated place on Earth. Most settlements are coastal—there are almost no roads inland. Winters bring near-total darkness; summers, endless light. The weather is brutal, the health challenges serious, and yet the people remain deeply connected to their land and culture.
🔍 What Does This All Say About Globalisation?
Let’s dig deeper by applying some sociology theory.
🛍️ 1. Hyper-Globalist View: Greenland as Global Gold
According to optimist globalisation theorists, Trump’s proposal reflects how global integration turns everything—even icy islands—into economic assets. Rare earth minerals, shipping lanes, and strategic location? It’s the dream of borderless capitalism.
🚨 2. Pessimist View: This Is Neo-Colonialism
Pessimist theories of globalisation highlight how global power still exploits the periphery. Greenlanders are Indigenous, self-governing, and have already faced forced assimilation. A rich foreign nation trying to “buy” them off? It’s not new—it’s colonialism 2.0.
🏛️ 3. The Nation-State Still Matters
Some sociologists argue that the nation-state is declining, while others think globalisation is in reverse. But Greenland shows how smaller nations—and even semi-autonomous ones—can still resist global superpowers. Local democracy and cultural pride won out over geopolitical ambition.
💪 4. Masculinity and Global Power
James W. Messerschmidt’s work on masculinities and crime offers another angle. Trump’s aggressive push to “own” Greenland is an assertion of hegemonic masculinity. It involves dominating territory, flexing power, and refusing to take “no” for an answer.
✊ Greenland Said No—and That Matters
Trump’s failed Greenland gamble wasn’t just a bizarre news story—it revealed how globalisation, imperial legacy, and modern identity politics collide. The people of Greenland, often overlooked in global politics, made their voices heard: they are not for sale.
🧠 Want to Explore More?
Check out these sociology reads to dig deeper into the ideas behind the headlines:
This blog post presents an essay which should score in the top mark band.
The full question
Read Item B below and answer the question that follows.
Item B
The patterns of educational achievement by gender have changed over time. Some sociologists explain these patterns through factors external to schools, such as socialisation and parental attitudes towards education. Changes in wider society, such as employment opportunities, may also contribute to these patterns.
However, the way schools are organised and the social interactions that take place within schools are also likely to affect gender differences in educational achievement.
Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate sociological explanations of gender differences in educational achievement. [30 marks]
An Answer
Introduction
Over the past few decades, there has been a significant shift in gender patterns of educational achievement in the UK. Boys used to outperform girls. However, recent data shows that girls now generally achieve better results at most levels of education.
External Factors
Item B highlights that external factors to schools, such as socialisation, play a significant role. Parental attitudes are also important in explaining gendered patterns of achievement.
One key external explanation is gender role socialisation. Sociologist Ann Oakley argued that gender socialisation begins at home. Girls are encouraged to be more passive and compliant. These traits are valued in schools. Parents are also more likely to encourage girls to read, which may explain their stronger literacy skills early on.
Another significant external factor is the changing position of women in society. The rise of feminism since the 1970s is notable. Sue Sharpe highlights this in her study “Just Like a Girl” (1976, 1994). She found that girls’ aspirations changed from marriage and family in the 1970s to careers and independence by the 1990s. This shift is also supported by improvements in employment opportunities and the introduction of equal pay and anti-discrimination laws. As a result, girls now see educational achievement as key to their future.
In contrast, Paul Willis’s classic study “Learning to Labour” (1977) offers insight into why boys might underachieve. Willis found that working-class boys often formed anti-school subcultures. These subcultures valued manual labour over academic success. This led to lower achievement and reinforced a “laddish” culture where academic work was devalued.
External factors like socialisation and changing opportunities help explain long-term changes. However, they cannot fully account for variations within schools. They also do not explain why some boys still do well. Therefore, it’s necessary to consider internal, in-school factors too.
Internal Factors
Item B also notes that “the way schools are organised and the social interactions that take place within schools are also likely to affect gender differences.” Teacher expectations and labelling play a major role. John Abraham found that teachers tend to view girls as more capable and better behaved. This perspective leads to higher expectations and more encouragement. This can produce a self-fulfilling prophecy, boosting girls’ achievement.
Conversely, boys are often labelled as disruptive, which can undermine their confidence and encourage anti-school attitudes. The influence of peer group cultures is significant. Willis showed that boys may experience pressure to act “tough.” They may avoid academic work, creating anti-school subcultures that hinder achievement.
The structure of assessment is another factor. According to research by Stephen Gorard, the introduction of coursework in the 1980s and 1990s benefited girls. Girls generally had better organisation and sustained effort. More recently, the coursework was reduced. There was a return to exam-based assessment. This change led to a slight narrowing of the gender gap.
Subject choices also matter. Girls are more likely to choose humanities and arts subjects. Boys tend to gravitate towards sciences and technology. This pattern is shaped by both peer pressure and teacher encouragement, and has long-term effects on achievement and future opportunities.
However, critics argue that focusing on gender alone ignores other key factors such as class and ethnicity. Not all girls are high achievers; working-class girls, in particular, still face significant barriers.
Education Policy
Although Item B does not directly mention policy, education reforms have played a role in shaping gendered achievement. The ReviseSociology (2023) post on education policy and gender explains several initiatives. Policies like GIST (Girls into Science and Technology) have encouraged girls to pursue non-traditional subjects. WISE (Women into Science and Engineering) has also promoted this effort. They have also challenged stereotypes. Anti-sexist policies and the promotion of equal opportunities have raised girls’ attainment.
Some argue that policy needs to do more to address boys’ underachievement. Girls have overtaken boys at most levels. Critics suggest more targeted interventions for boys are needed, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the gender gap in educational achievement is shaped by a complex interaction of external and internal factors. External factors such as gender socialisation, changing aspirations, and employment opportunities—highlighted by Oakley, Sharpe, and Willis—have played a major role. Internal school processes, such as labelling and assessment methods—highlighted by Abraham and Gorard—are also crucial. Education policies have tried to address these issues, with varying success. Overall, sociological explanations must consider the diversity of experiences among boys and girls. They must also consider intersections with class and ethnicity.
In recent years, criminology has started to focus on atrocity crimes. These are horrific acts that shock the conscience of humankind. But what are atrocity crimes? How have criminologists contributed to their understanding? And how can we, as students and future practitioners, engage critically with this area?
This blog post dives deep into the emerging subfield of atrocity criminology, highlighting key ideas, frameworks, and debates. We’ll examine the sociology of atrocity law. We will also discuss multi-level theories of causation. Additionally, we’ll look into the politics of punishment. This post will explore how criminology is grappling with the most extreme forms of violence in the modern world.
This material is especially relevant to the sociology of crime and deviance.
💡 Sociological Perspectives on Atrocity Crimes: Key Points
Atrocity crimes include genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and (in some definitions) the crime of aggression.
Criminology’s engagement with atrocity was slow to develop, but has grown significantly since the 1990s.
Scholars debate whether atrocity crime requires new criminological theories or adaptations of existing ones.
Criminologists contribute through their focus on aetiology (causes), sociology of law, and penology (punishment).
Multi-level analysis (macro, meso, micro) is key to understanding atrocity crime.
There are tensions between legal and moral definitions of crime, and between domestic and international approaches to justice.
Victims, perpetrators, and bystanders are all central to atrocity analysis, but victim recognition is shaped by politics, power and narrative.
Criminologists must work collaboratively across disciplines and support scholars in post-atrocity societies.
What Are Atrocity Crimes?
There is no single definition of atrocity crimes, but most scholars agree on a core list:
Genocide
Crimes against humanity
War crimes
Crime of aggression
Legal scholar David Scheffer (2002) defined atrocity crimes as high-impact crimes of an orchestrated character. They are against the conscience of humankind. These crimes result in a significant number of victims. They provoke a direct societal response holding perpetrators accountable. This helps bridge legal categories with public moral outrage and political urgency.
However, boundaries remain contested. Are colonial violence or mass displacement included? What about atrocities committed during peacetime? These questions point to an ongoing debate about where atrocity criminology begins and ends.
Tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees who were forced by the Tanzanian authorities to return to their country despite fears they will be killed upon their return stream back towards the Rwandan border on a road in Tanzania, Dec. 19, 1996.
The Slow Rise of Atrocity Criminology
Criminologists were slow to engage with atrocities. For much of the 20th century, they focused on “ordinary crimes” and largely ignored mass violence.
Early thinkers like Durkheim (1915) and Sheldon Glueck (1944) offered brief interventions. Glueck worked on the Nuremberg Trials.
A few exceptions, like Nils Christie’s 1952 study on SS camps in Norway, laid groundwork for later research.
It wasn’t until the 1990s, with the Yugoslav and Rwandan genocides, that atrocity crimes became more central.
Other disciplines—history, psychology, philosophy—were quicker off the mark, influencing criminology’s eventual engagement. Today, atrocity criminology is a growing subfield, with its own working groups, conferences, and research agendas.
A Sociology of Atrocity Law
Can the development of laws against atrocity be studied sociologically? Absolutely.
Durkheim’s legacy helps frame this. His focus on collective conscience and moral order shows how societies criminalize certain acts not just legally, but morally.
David Scheffer’s model brings together legal, moral and political criteria to define atrocity.
The internationalization of justice (e.g., ICC, ICTY) reflects a shift from national to transnational criminalization.
But, critics argue, claims to universality in International Criminal Justice (ICJ) often ignore colonialism and political bias.
Scholars like Marina Aksenova and Kjersti Lohne argue that atrocity law serves purposes beyond justice. It often focuses more on legitimizing global power structures. The victim becomes a symbolic figure—often gendered, racialized, and idealized.
The Causes of Atrocity: Aetiology and Beyond
Understanding why atrocities happen is a crowded and complex field. Criminologists add unique value by:
Bridging multiple disciplines
Recognizing moral/legal rule violations
Avoiding mono-causal explanations
Situating individual actions in social and historical contexts
Multi-Level Explanations
Criminology excels at multi-level analysis, breaking causes down into:
Macro-level: ideology, state power, political economy
For example, studies of engineers at Nazi death camps (van Baar & Huisman, 2012) show how technical values can override moral values. Institutional pressure also plays a significant role. The engineers weren’t uniquely evil—they were operating within a system that rewarded “efficiency” over humanity.
Criminological Theory and Atrocity
Can standard criminological theories explain atrocity?
Some say yes—strain theory, neutralization, differential association, and even anomie offer insight into how ordinary people commit extraordinary crimes.
Others argue that atrocity is a state crime, or even state policy, and thus stretches traditional theories to breaking point. Criminology, rooted in deviance, must adapt to explain crimes of conformity.
Still, these debates are productive. They open new paths for theory and force criminologists to confront the moral and political dimensions of their work.
Punishing Atrocities: Challenges and Innovations
Atrocity punishment is as complex as the crimes themselves. The traditional model—individualized, retributive justice—often falls short in the face of:
Mass, collective violence
Hierarchical perpetrator structures
Complex harms and victim experiences
International Courts and Their Limits
Courts like the ICTY, ICC, and ICTR have made symbolic advances. But their tribunal bias and political dependency on state cooperation limit their effectiveness.
Criminologists have found that trials often:
Focus on a few “symbolic” figures
Struggle to resonate with affected communities
Reinforce power imbalances (e.g. Global North vs Global South)
Domestic Justice and ‘Victor’s Justice’
In places like Rwanda or Bosnia, domestic trials have tried to fill the gap. But these are not always neutral. Some have been accused of bias (e.g. against Serbs in Croatian trials) or of replicating repressive politics under the guise of justice.
Restorative and Transitional Justice
Innovative models have emerged, especially in Colombia, where peace agreements included restorative punishments for ex-FARC fighters.
Criminologists argue for:
Context-sensitive justice models
Victim-centred approaches
Accountability beyond the individual
The Future of Atrocity Criminology: Quo Vadis?
In Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), a Bosnian film about the Srebrenica genocide, a UN translator desperately tries to protect her family amid spiralling violence. The film ends with her back in the classroom. She is teaching children born after the war. Meanwhile, perpetrators walk free in her community.
This haunting image raises the question: Where does criminology go after atrocity?
Atrocity criminology is now a vibrant, collaborative field.
It needs to continue working across disciplines and borders.
Scholars in atrocity-affected societies must be supported and included.
Rather than striving for a single definition, criminology must engage with atrocity as a moral, political, legal and social problem.
Final Thoughts
Atrocity criminology is about more than understanding evil—it’s about understanding systems, choices, institutions, and people. It asks difficult questions about morality, complicity, justice, and memory.
As students and future criminologists, we must approach it with:
Humility – knowing we’re late to the conversation
Empathy – for victims, survivors, and those living in post-atrocity societies
Critical thinking – about power, law, and justice
Solidarity – with those seeking truth, accountability and repair
Criminology may not offer all the answers, but it must ask the right questions.
Further Reading & Resources
Susanne Karstedt & Stephan Parmentier (eds.), Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justice
David Scheffer (2002), The definition of atrocity crimes
Alette Smeulers, Supranational Criminology
Quo Vadis, Aida? (Film, 2020)
Below is the Full Text on which the above summary is derived….
CRIMINOLOGY AND ATROCITY CRIMES
Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Mirza Buljubasić, and Barbora Holá, in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edition, 2023.
INTRODUCTION: EUROPEAN CRIMINOLOGY GATHERS IN SARAJEVO
In September 2018, the European Society of Criminology held its eighteenth annual conference in Sarajevo, the city which suffered the longest siege in modern warfare. Because of the war of 1992 to 1995 and ongoing prosecutions, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has a strong association with ‘atrocity crime’. The conference title, Crimes against Humans and Crimes against Humanity fitted its immediate social, political and spatial context perfectly. The conference was held in former military barracks, partially destroyed during the war, then rebuilt and transformed into a University Campus. The facade of the Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies, which hosted most of the sessions, still shows scars from the war. On sidewalks ‘Sarajevo roses’, red resin-filled concrete wounds caused by mortar shells, recall civilian deaths. Conference guests could choose to visit a number of museums or memorials to learn about, or commemorate the victims of, wartime atrocities: Gallery 11/7/95 which memorializes the genocide at Srebrenica; the Memorial of the Killed Children of Sarajevo; the War Childhood Museum; or the Sarajevo siege exhibition at the Historical Museum. Those with free time to explore the country could travel further afield, to the Srebrenica memorial at Potočari, or track down Yugoslav spomenici (monuments) to earlier atrocity victims. For example, the Smrike monument, a striking set of modernist blocks located near the Novi Travnik road, marks the site of World War Two massacres of Serb, Jewish and Roma civilians. Beyond its symbolic significance, the conference increased the visibility of atrocity crimes in the criminological mainstream. Sessions organized by the society’s working group on atrocity crime and transitional justice were supplemented by plenary talks from Barbora Holá, Susanne Karstedt, and Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Serge Brammertz. Atrocity crimes and atrocity justice stood at the forefront of conference discussions.
This all seems a long way from Hagan and colleagues’ observation only ten years ago, that “[c]riminology is only beginning to consider the mass violence associated with war, armed conflict, and political repression” (Hagan et al. 2012: 482). That is not to say that a criminology of atrocity has reached the status of a settled field of study, rather, the past decade has seen an increased volume of work building on strong foundations laid by forerunners who applied the tools of the criminologist to understanding the problem of atrocity and address the challenge to criminological knowledge posed by such crimes. We therefore start by giving an historical account of criminological engagement with atrocity crime after giving an historical account of criminological engagement with atrocity crime during the twentieth century, we survey the sociology of law, aetiology and penology to see if distinctively criminological approaches to atrocity crime emerge. We reflect on how scholarship on atrocity crime can be integrated back into criminology more broadly. One challenge in writing this has been to draw a set of borders around criminology, a child raised by a full village of adjacent disciplines, and sometimes contradictory personality to match. Here, we have tended towards ‘atrocity’, to be inclusive, or even voracity, to swallow up some who might not embrace a criminological identity. A second challenge has been to draw terminological boundaries around ‘atrocity crime’. There is, of course, no universal definition of atrocity crime. Looking through legal lenses, atrocity crimes are defined as ‘core crimes’ (strictu sensu)—war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression. Although these and other crimes of international concern in the broader sense (lato sensu), they can only be defined as core crimes if contextual legal elements of underlying acts are fulfilled. In contrast to our approach to the criminology of atrocity, in the studies we included, we have been stricter in defining the atrocity element, adopting the definition advanced by David Scheffer (2002, discussed at more length below). This stays close to the strictu sensu core crimes, but with a degree of flexibility where other crimes meet certain criteria: ‘high impact crimes: . . . of an orchestrated character, against the conscience of humankind, that result in a significant number of victims . . . and a direct societal response holding the lead perpetrators accountable’ (Scheffer 2002: 400). Yet we recognize that atrocity conceptualization remains unsettled. Boundaries delimiting the phenomenon are still being discussed within and beyond criminology, and atrocity criminology will continue to develop in association with criminologies of overlapping and related phenomena (war, organizational crime, state crime, inter alia).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRIMINOLOGY AND ATROCITY
The history of atrocity criminology features a number of ‘false dawns’ and sporadic interventions prior to more sustained engagement after war and genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Earlier halting starts demonstrate criminological responses to legal and (geo)political stimuli. The latest, more sustained, focus on atrocity indicates a growing discipline with capacity to support specialist sub-divisions (Bosworth and Hoyle 2011: 3, 6). Further, legal developments since the 1990s, particularly the development of international and hybrid judicial bodies prosecuting crimes under international law, provide much of the source material for criminologists working on the problem of atrocity crimes. Here, we explore the criminological gap that the study of atrocity opened up to other disciplines for most of the twentieth century and outline some key exceptions.
While Durkheim has had a lasting impact on sociological criminology, his late, brief engagement with atrocity (Durkheim 1915) is rarely cited beyond the occasional mention in early disciplinary stirrings. Nonetheless, his initial attempt to explain German violations of the Hague Conventions, unannounced bombardment of open towns, looting, and killing of wounded, is notable in two respects. First, while explaining a problem of international law and international relations, he looks beyond interstate conflict to explore the internal life of the perpetrator society, and he looks beyond elite decision-making (Durkheim 1915: 27 ff). Second, he focuses on the relationship between state and civil society, noting that those committing acts of war on an enduring peace are not necessarily exceptions to the norms of criminality (Durkheim 1915: 41). The subsequent ‘honest men’ thesis in the study of atrocities between the two World Wars supports one criminological theme the discipline develops: first it responds to events; second, to law. If the outcry of civilians, as a response to atrocities in war and in the case of the Ottoman Empire against Armenian citizens, was limited, so too was criminological reflection. Where early criminologists did engage with war and crime in the same breath, they focused mainly on the impact of war on the prevalence of ordinary crimes (Mannheim 1941).
During the Second World War, Sheldon Glueck diverted his attention from his domestic research partnership to focus on the crimes of the Nazi regime (e.g. Glueck, 1944). Durkheim’s work represents a beginning of a criminological aetiology of atrocity, while Glueck picks up questions of the origins of international atrocity law, problems of atrocity penology, and through applied research in support of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, atrocity criminalistics (Hagan and Greer 2002: 249). The subsequent domestic focus of criminologists at the expense of atrocity (see Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 230) is ironic given Glueck’s instrumental role in this watershed moment in the application of law to atrocity; more so in the UK, where mainstream criminological thought developed under the influence and stewardship of scholars taking flight from Nazi aggression, persecution or occupation: Norbert Elias, Max Grünhut, Hermann Mannheim, Leon Radzinowicz.
The years up to the late 1990s are not completely barren, but the limited mentions of atrocity crimes by criminologists generally state their relevance to the discipline without meaningfully advancing criminological knowledge (e.g. López Rey 1970: 39, 43, 244). One notable, if rarely noted, exception is Christie’s work on SS detention camps in Norway, in which 2,547 Yugoslav prisoners were held, of whom 1,747 were killed (Christie 1952: 439).¹ The study focused on conditions in the camps, how prisoners experienced these, and on distinctions between two groups of Norwegian guards: those actively involved in murder of detainees, and those who actively helped inmates, or who were more passive. Christie explored prior criminality on the part of guards, and with no decisive results, and their age, finding a marked difference. The killers, who he argued were responding to pressure from German authorities, were on average 6.5 years younger than others (Christie 1952: 452).
Throughout the second half of the century, atrocities continued apace, as part of the efforts of colonial powers to maintain their position, following the exit of those colonial powers, or as proxy-wars in the new bi-polar international order. Here, Hagan and Greer have noted that the waning and waxing of international criminal law has been predicted by Turk’s socio-legal focus on power in his work from the 1960s onwards (Hagan and Greer 2002: 232–233, see below). While criminologists mostly neglected atrocity until the 1990s, scholars in other disciplines did not, and their work influenced criminology when it eventually woke up to the disciplinary relevance of genocide, crimes against humanity and other atrocities. This includes psychology and Milgram’s work on obedience (Milgram 1963, see e.g. Collard 2019); philosophy (Arendt 2006, e.g. in Rafter and Walklate 2012); and history and political science (Hilberg 1992, e.g. in Rafter and Walklate 2012).
By tracking the term ‘genocide’ as a key word in criminological journal titles, Aitchison demonstrated the beginnings of a more sustained focus on atrocity in criminology from the late 1990s onwards (Aitchison 2014a: 25). While the only two striking results in the twentieth century came after the establishment of international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, neither responded directly to these, nor to the events they were set up to prosecute. Rather, they dealt with the Holocaust (Brannigan 1998), and the forced removal of indigenous Australian children from their families (Cunneen 1999). Even at this stage in the development of criminology as a discipline, it suggests a sluggish response to events and to legal developments. Today, there is a burgeoning criminology of atrocity featuring researchers at all stages of their careers and covering different research problems. A special issue of the European Journal of Criminology in 2012, under the editorship of Susanne Karstedt and Stephan Parmentier, signalled a ‘coming of age’, and the creation of a working group on atrocity crimes and transitional justice ahead of the 2013 European Society of Criminology conference in Budapest built on this. In the following three sections on subfields of atrocity criminology, we mine the rich seam of scholarship that has developed to cover distinct sociological tasks of a sociology of atrocity law, the aetiology of atrocity, and atrocity penology.
A GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY OF ATROCITY LAW: DURKHEIM’S PALE SHADOW
Half a century ago, Sutherland and Cressey observed that the sociology of law, the ‘systematic analysis of the conditions under which criminal laws develop’, was neglected in comparison to other endeavours in criminology texts, and that ‘research on social aspects of criminal law is greatly needed’. (Sutherland and Cressey 1970, 3, 12). This is true of the sociology of atrocity law today. The extent to which the sociology of the law of atrocity differs from a general criminological sociology of law is determined by two related factors. First, the extent to which atrocity crimes can be criminologically distinguished from ‘ordinary’ crimes. Then, assuming separation justifies a concerted response beyond the level of individual state jurisdictions, the impact of a shift in processes of criminalization, including legislative and adjudicative dimensions, from state societies to a society of states. Criminologists, and critical scholars in Public International Law, have highlighted the extent to which gaps in criminalization and enforcement undermine claims to universalism in International Criminal Justice (ICJ). While domestic criminal justice is a product of political processes, ICJ brings together a different set of state and non-state actors, changing the dynamics of criminalization.
In terms of understanding atrocity law as distinctive, David Scheffer (2002) gives a systematic analysis that seeks to unify a range of offences and bodies of law under the tterminology of ‘atrocity’ while exploring their criminalization in diverse processes of rule-making including custom, multilateral conventions, and jurisprudence.⁴ Under a formulaic term intended to be meaningful to a lay audience, it includes crimes that cumulatively match five criteria, moving from the species of criminality, severity, and general characteristics: magnitude, characterised by acts that are widespread in scale and include a large number of victims; covered by existing international criminal law; planning and leadership from a ruling elite; including individual criminal liability; and a criminal context including an exclusion of certain limiting criteria, the possibility of a final criterion, which is motive, such as social upheaval, or peace (Scheffer 2002: 395–400). Scheffer uses the Durkheimian language of crimes which ‘shock the conscience of humankind’ (used elsewhere in relation to atrocity (UNGA 1946). Nonetheless, his concern with identifying and criminalizing acts under the terminology of atrocities, is less about recognising global solidarity, and more about ‘selling’ international judicial organs to the public, and deterring atrocity crimes by emphasizing their severity and by not naming the corresponding law (Scheffer 2002, 416). Whether the severity of atrocities or the matching international courts and deterring the motive or not and the severity of applying the term ‘atrocity’, it has been taken most serious crimes hold as legitimate through the work done on them by criminologists, evidenced by the working group of the European Society of Criminology, its publications (Karstedt and Parmentier 2012; Holá, Nzatiira, and Weerdesteijn 2022), and by works (Karstedt agencies (UN 2014).
The international criminalization of atrocity has been addressed by a number of scholars who emphasize different dimensions, including the moral entrepreneurship of key advocates such as Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who represented survivors, helping introduce the language of core crimes and crimes against humanity (Sands 2016); or the political context, shaping which acts are subject to international versus local enforcement (Hagan and Greer 2002; Berlin 2020). Bringing back in Turk’s concept of the cultural ‘lapse’ of international criminal law enforcement after Nuremberg and ‘revival’ with the ad-hoc tribunals of the 1990s (Hagan and Greer 2002: 232). Turk’s earlier work had set the foundations for a theory of criminalization based on culture, inclination, and power (Turk 1964: 456). Hagan and Greer cite his 1982 work, Political Criminality, to explain how a short window of alliance between the USSR and USA, before a longer period of hostility, first permitted, then froze, international action to prosecute atrocities (Hagan and Greer 2002: 233). Most recently, the ‘hibernation’ thesis, which posits this cold war hiatus, has been challenged by careful excavation of developments which served as a foundation for the ‘justice cascade’ commencing in the 1990s with the founding of international tribunals, and with prosecutions in Guatemala and other Latin American states (Berlin 2020). Essentially, Berlin argues that developments at the international level in terms of new and expanded treaties, doctrinal developments on statutes of limitations, domestic legislation incorporating internationally defined war crimes and genocide, and the accompanying development of professional development were technocratic elites. Key to the development were international human rights organizations (Berlin academic networks, domestic and international human rights organizations (Karstedt and Lafree 2006). Mullins and colleagues (2004) describe a dialectic relationship between atrocity law and international politics, and the global spread of liberal democracy along with hegemony of the United States of America immediately after the Cold War made the internationalization of atrocity laws more likely. Ad hoc Tribunals were established while atrocities were still being committed in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. Further internationalized or hybrid judicial structures were set up for other situations, such as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). Earlier dreams of a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) were realized, albeit with significant gaps in membership (Mullins, Kauzlarich, and Rothe 2004). This suggests that atrocity law development is not only a matter of ethical ideals or ideologies, but political realism, national interests, and power relations (Mearsheimer 2018).
Moving from one disciplinary sphere of influence (international relations) to another (sociology), Marina Aksenova (2019) turns to Durkheim to ask why crimes against humanity are criminalized and prosecuted internationally. The task is made more pressing by the offence’s lack of foundation in an international treaty, its blurred boundaries with other core international crimes, and issues pertaining to the role of the state or alternative actors in perpetration. Her argument posits a global level of collective consciousness as its underpinning, injurious to ‘values essential to the entire world community’ (Aksenova 2019: 84), undermining a social cohesion based on the dignity of a ‘sacralized’ individual (Aksenova 2019: 87–88). The universalism this implies is far from complete, as recognised by Aksenova (2019: 84–87). Neither the enslavement of Africans nor the brutality of colonization,⁵ trigger the collective sense of responsibility and concern that international action that would indicate a truly global society would show for extreme violations of human rights. Such universalism was viewed as a distant prospect by Durkheim in the early twentieth century (see Aitchison 2014a: 43). Marina Aksenova’s work calls for an evaluation of how individualised, Durkheimian moral responsibility and collective conscience remains weak at the level of the international community. She highlights questions of which violence is repressed or tolerated, which states are indicted or not, and which arms are regulated or unregulated (Tallgren 2013: 149, 153).
One way to take this call forward is seen in Kjersti Lohne’s ethnographic approach to ICJ (Lohne 2019). If ICJ is an expression of an international will to punish (Lohne 2019: 4) and the ICC represents an achievement of global civil society, Lohne’s work aims to critically explore this by tracking the spaces in which it is made and sustained, and the people who occupy those spaces. Lohne takes a lead from Tsing, who problematises the assumption of a set of universals underpinning efforts to connect globally: such an assumption already suggests unity. Rather, as identified already above, the universal is an unfinished achievement, at best an aspiration, but one which Lohne suggests, can also be a façade covering particularist interest and the imposition of power (Lohne 2019: 18). As well as showing the continuing relevance of state power as a limiting factor (Lohne 2019: 216–217), her work offers a critique of ICJ and its claims to legitimacy based on social justice, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism. While driven by humanitarian impulses, it is expressed in penal terms. Claims to legitimacy, resting on a particular image of the victim, are contrasted to a deeper commitment to global justice found elsewhere in scholarship and activism with a strong focus on justice as redistribution rather than retribution (Lohne 2019: 221–222; see also Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 14–15).
The position of the victim as a passive object of justice in Lohne’s analysis can be expanded with reference to a growing body of victimological work focusing on atrocity (Eski 2021; Schwöbel-Patel 2021). Schwöbel-Patel’s analysis shows the victim at the centre of an ‘enterprise’ to ‘sell’ international criminal justice. This includes the legitimation of the victim in domestic politics (Boutellier 2000: 15), as does the legitimation of justice, albeit with a stronger emphasis on order than on accountability (Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 3, 128). The neoliberal problems, and associated victim’s impact on the victims whom it is supposed to protect and serve, raise important questions. Who is international justice for? Christie’s work on the ideal victim is appropriate and enters the frame. A tendency to favour those displaying particular properties—well-fitted, silent, and suffering—characteristics are vulnerability or weakness, depend recognition as victims (Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 132). By drawing on race, gender and age stereotypes, these very stereotypes are reinforced (Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 136) and endanger the interpretation of evidence (Buss 2014). Examples of those who do not fit the narratives of victims and perpetrator in a conflict (Goluboff 2006) and even those in post-conflict settings where present political discourse seeks to qualify or reframe the relationship to the politics of the past (Álvarez Berastegi and Hearty 2019, see also Chapter 14). The question of whose victimhood is recognized and heard by whom has ways a corollary of the questions asked by Tallgren, about laws, and whether atrocity is successfully criminalized through ICJ. Again, it suggests limits, above which violence and shared shocked conscience proposed in a Durkheimian revival.
Between international law, international relations, sociology and criminology, emerging critical scholarship on international criminal law and its practitioners recognises the distinctiveness of atrocity crime as a legal category rooted not in interstate and social and political relations, but in the interface between inter-state society and the bodies claiming to speak for a putative global society.
ATROCITY AETIOLOGY: A CROWDED FIELD
Criminologists came late to the crowded field of inquiry seeking to identify the causes and processes underlying atrocity crime, so face the question of what they add. The aetiology of atrocities is already significantly developed in other disciplines. Explanations for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes have been advanced in individual disciplines including anthropology, economics, history, philosophy and political theory, political science, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology inter alia, as well as in studies crossing disciplinary boundaries. We discuss four features of criminology which, when taken together, show a useful criminological contribution to aetiological inquiry on atrocity beyond simply replicating the labours of different disciplines. First, bridging multiple disciplines (Friedrichs 2000); second, explanations integrating a breach of legal or moral prohibitions (Trasler 1962: 11); third, eschewing mono-causal explanations in favour of complex configurations of factors across multiple levels (Radzinowicz 1961: 175); and finally, theoretical resources that situate individual action in a wider context (van Baar and Huisman 2012) who emphasize the diverse disciplinary foundations of criminology and caution against isolating criminological scholarship from ongoing conversations in supporting disciplines (e.g. Hagan 1988: 257). In this framing, atrocity criminology draws on its multi-disciplinary heritage to span boundaries. We examine the achievement of disciplinary integration but argue that logically it cannot be unique to any one discipline. We highlight three indicators of integration: first, integration within atrocity criminology, whereby criminologists build knowledge, insights and methods from criminological branches of inquiry into their own work; second, external communication of criminological insights is found by other disciplines or in multi-disciplinary settings; third, the uptake of theories by criminologists in other disciplines.
Tony Ward’s examination of explanations for the terror imposed in the Congo Free State under Leopold II of Belgium was one of the first two papers offering detailed engagement with the aetiology of atrocity in The British Journal of Criminology (2005). He uses a number of works of history from writers with and without academic affiliations (Ward 2005: 435). These histories, along with contemporary journalistic reportage, provide Ward’s data. Such use of historical research when analysing historical episodes of atrocity is common and can be found in other disciplines (e.g. Budde 2017: 87; Malešević 2017: 219–222). Ward uses the disciplines to define the actions of the Congo Free State in genocidal frame, reaching beyond law to include, history and sociology (Ward 2005: 435–436). Further, existing categories are brought in from political economy and anthropology. Before being linked to specific strands of criminological explanation represented by Renton and Katz (Ward 2005: 435). The model is political and continues, marked to Arendt’s political theory, as Ward makes clear in his analytical phase. This highlights the anti-rationality encouraged by colonial dominance, and leads Ward to show that excesses of violence were not only emotional but economic explanations (Ward 2005: 439). This takes us through an application of Mertonian anomie and strain, filtered through an application of corporate crime by Passas. Along the way, Ward draws parallels with sociological observations on habituation to violence in concentration camps (Ward 2005: 439–441). Ultimately Ward presents a picture where Europeans’ brutal savagery does not negate economic motivations, even when it seems at odds with them.⁶ Beyond turning to other disciplines for data or conceptual support, here we find an attempt to use criminology as a space to reconcile differences between disciplines.
The second aspect of criminological transdisciplinarity is activity and leadership in multi-disciplinary spaces. This is evident in the work of Alette Smeulers, a leading example in the field of atrocity criminology, whose work as researcher, teacher, supervisor and editor has done much to consolidate atrocity scholarship in criminology.⁷ As a student of political science, then doctoral researcher in international criminal law, Smeulers already demonstrated a degree of transdisciplinarity. This is further exemplified by her founding role in the interdisciplinary Centre for International Criminal Justice at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her aetiological contributions include work with Lotte Hoex (Smeulers and Hoex 2010), building on her earlier work on perpetrator typologies (Smeulers 2008) to interrogate group dynamics in the work on perpetrator typologies and the role of state policy in abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Rwandan Genocide; and with Van Niekerk (2009), on her work on low-level perpetrators’ (Mullins and Smeulers 2012). In a series of books she has edited with others, Smeulers has focused on the range and impact of legal and disciplinary debates in aetiological and other themes linked to advances in the interface of different disciplines (e.g. Smeulers, Weerdesteijn, and Hola 2019). She relates her work further to atrocity criminology, Smeulers has also tackled debate between disciplines (Karstedt and Parmentier 2012) and Karstedt 2013), a longstanding role in collected volumes on the pages of broader social science for areas to lead emerging links.
In terms of ‘reach’, although an early example (Karstedt 2013) of atrocity work in a criminology journal, Ward’s work on the Congo Free State is not an exception. A better example of reach might be found in work on atrocity in a mainstream journal: Green and Ward (2004) cited more than 200 times by the time Penney Green on state crime from. As might be expected, many of the citing works are in the sphere of state crime and the more recent intellectual agenda set out in the works in the author’s name in preparation is evident through further citations in Crime, Law and Social Change, the British Journal of Criminology, and Critical Criminology. Beyond this, work is being taken into other disciplines by researchers with criminological affiliations working across disciplinary boundaries and picked up at the intersection of International Relations and International Law (Gordon and Perugini 2020). These scholars are already working across disciplinary boundaries, and transdisciplinary reach requires such willingness across disciplines and identities. The uptake of atrocity criminology is worth noting. Interlocutors may work in spanning disciplinary boundaries, but logically they succeed less often. Criminology is seen as disciplinary at exactly the time it is reaching out across and into the wider range of studies. Historian Max Bergholz work on Kulen Vakuf (BiH) during World War II (Bergholz 2016) makes regular reference to criminology; political scientist Lee Ann Fujii (2011) cites historians and sociologists in her work on the genocide in Rwanda. Transdisciplinarity is a collective task, and while criminological labour contributes to that, it does not mark out criminology as exceptional.
THE BREACH OF LAW AND MORALITY
Criminology may claim some level of distinctiveness arising from its focus on behaviour that has been criminalized, but as noted already, the international dimension pulls criminologists onto new ground. Moreover, the field of atrocity studies is complicated for criminologists who normally explore crimes defined by, rather than enacted by and through, the state. For some, the formal legal labelling of a particular behaviour as crime is of little relevance in aetiological research; what matters is the conduct itself and relevant conduct norms (Sellin 1938: 24). The range of conduct criminalized varies such that a universal explanation of crime would be too broad to hold any value (Sutherland and Cressey 1970: 20). The counter-position holds that placing conduct in a particular legal (or moral) category means that the breach of a prohibition becomes part of the facts requiring explanation. Trasler proposed that knowing that behaviour contravenes creates a phenomenological distinction (Trasler 1962: 11). His proposal assumes that knowledge of what is and is not lawful, but also says little about how great the phenomenological distinction is and how much it contributes to an explanation of conduct. In criminology, law, whether defined internationally or in a domestic context, is one source of rule that may be relevant to conduct, but others beyond the specialism of criminology—such as professional codes of conduct (Browning 1988) and broader internalized ethics (Grossman 2014)—are potentially breached by atrocity or other violent actions. Some say that criminal law has no effect, rather it is put into effect by specific mechanisms of control and enforcement, and the absence of these may be part of a causal explanation. Mullins’ (2011) work illustrates this by comparing the prevalence of war crimes committed by four parties in the Georgia-Russia war of 2008. Of the 199 crimes in his set, 47 per cent were carried out by South Ossetian militia, and 42 per cent by Russian forces (Mullins 2011: 924). He argues that among the combatants, Georgia’s forces are less liable to prosecution because the country had signed up to the Rome Statute, and the oversight arising from alliances with the EU, NATO, and US introduced a further level of external control (Mullins 2011: 927). Where Georgian forces committed crimes, he notes that these were in areas where the war effort was under-developed, suggesting scope for uncertainty over what may or may not be deemed lawful by expert judges (Mullins 2011: 927). This fits with the argument that the language of manifest unlawfulness in the Rome Statute may not correspond well to reality in the context of conflict (Mullins 2011: 919). Criminal law is not the only factor taken into account. Mullins also notes that Georgia’s aim to reintegrate territory and inhabitants into the state is also key to understanding the lower prevalence of war crimes; while combatting Abkhaz forces, not subject to the same controlling oversight, he cautiously suggests that low levels of offending may reflect forms of plural ethnic co-existence in Abkhazia explain low levels of offending (Mullins 2011: 927, 930).
While the question of breaching moral, rather than simply legal, prohibitions takes us beyond a realm that might be claimed as specifically criminological, criminologists, among others, have focused on this as one dimension of the aetiological puzzle. Extreme acts of violence and killing are normally prohibited (although never without exception), and such prohibitions have been shown to have strong inhibiting effects on violence even in situations of extreme threat (Grossman 2014: 95). From a sociological perspective, violence requires an extra degree of legitimation (Malešević 2017: 26) and the state is a powerful source of that legitimation. One proposal from criminologists has been to look at temporary inversions of morality (Jamieson 1998) or temporary and deviant normative orders (Maier-Katkin et al. 2009). For Maier-Katkin and colleagues, this is a more convincing explanation than other criminological theories advanced. The basic assumptions of stability in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory are not compatible with Brannigan and Hardwick’s explanations positing temporary loss of self-control (Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 237). Similarly, other theoretical frames used to explain atrocity such as differential association and social learning (discussed further below) do not fit with an apparent sudden onset of violence in Jedwabne, their case study (Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 238). While this understates the prior history of anti-Semitic violence in the particular case, the rapidity with which normal moral prohibitions against extreme violence are overturned calls for attention. Jamieson (1998: 482) and Maier-Katkin et al. (2009: 239) point respectively to anomie and strain as preconditions for such inversions. The differences between places and contexts where law holds fast, or the apparent pre-existing morality is not inverted or out of effect, and those where such inversions happen earlier or later in a sequence of atrocities, put further attention in terms of strain features and other triggering factors (see for example the focus on Rwanda). The anonymized central and southern Yugoslavia studied by anthropologist Tone Bringa, is an example of a Bosnian village of ‘Dobin’, studied in the 1990s as Yugoslavia disintegrated, but which was late surrounded by war and other villages (Bringa xvi). Her full study outlines a rich identity consisting of common village and peasant elements, and separate Muslim and Catholic ones (e.g. Bringa 1996: 41). Strain is posited as a precondition, but not sufficient to explain atrocity (Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 240). In Bringa’s case, we see other factors which shape and direct atrocity. Socially and psychologically eroded norms of restraint among Croat villagers, any physicality turned on their Muslim neighbours, and the shared animosity which ultimately led to the ‘expansion of the accepted sphere for the Bosnian Croat army attack on a member of outside forces’; the marking of a former neighbour as exclusively ‘the environment of the enemy ranks’ (Bringa 1996: xvi, 56). This depersonalization, or production of enmity, may be one of the ways in which others are defined out of the zone of moral obligation (Fein 1990). Further, the question of a combination of inverted and stable norms would also appear to hold some explanatory power as evidenced in case studies of medical professionals (Browning 1988) and engineers (van Baar and Huisman 2012, see below) and their contributions to the Holocaust.
MULTI-LEVEL ANALYSES
Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are necessarily complex phenomena. Contextual elements and diverse acts are written into their definitions, as is complexity through the division of labour across individuals and organizations. Radzinowicz recognized that any mono-causal explanation of even simple crimes would be partial (Radzinowicz 1961: 175). When it comes to crime committed or experienced outside the context of concentrated episodes of mass victimization, criminologists increasingly look for explanations encompassing multiple levels (e.g. Dierenfeldt et al. 2019). As with an inclination towards transdisciplinarity, this is not something uniquely criminological. Nevertheless, it forms an important aspect of criminological approaches to atrocity aetiology and is evident in the proposal and utilization of various frameworks incorporating micro-, meso- and macro-level factors in an integrated analysis (e.g. Kramer et al. 2002; Olusanya 2013; van Baar and Huisman 2012).
There is some diversity in how levels are defined and what elements are attributed to them. For example, the macro level is defined broadly as ‘environment’, ‘institutional environment’ (Kramer et al. 2002: 274), or broadly in terms of structure (Olusanya 2013: 844). Rothe purposefully separated out the international from the macro level, suggesting the macro-level is reserved specifically for state-level phenomena. Although both levels are characterised by ideology, politics, economy, and military force, the separation allows her to emphasize distinct and contradictory pressures arising at each level (Rothe 2008: 99–100). Similarly, the emphasis at the micro level may be on the actions or emotions of individuals (Kramer et al. 2002: 274) or on more internal emotional and psychological dynamics (Olusanya 2013: 844). The meso-level is frequently used for the organizational or group settings, such as businesses, which mediate the larger structural pressures that ultimately fall on individuals (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1036).
The common ground, regardless of where boundaries are drawn, is that atrocity crimes require organizational elements and individual participation; both are needed for explanation in the aetiology of atrocity; and interaction between elements from different levels has explanatory power. As well as analytical levels, criminologists often also disaggregate by period and territory. Kovačević notes that the headline term ‘Bosnia genocide’ reduces a complex process enacted over years to a single coherent story (Kovačević 2020: 105). Karstedt has noted that the deconstruction of larger narratives in ‘even localised events’ is ‘the most important’ task at present for challenging knowledge generated through a top-down lens emphasizing totalitarian control and ideology (Karstedt 2013: 393). Aitchison (2014b), for example, combines organizational and local focus to examine police participation in atrocity crimes in one region of BiH in the context of war and genocide. He shows how structural legacies from the former Yugoslavia were moderated through a new, ethnicized, democratic politics at the level of the modern republic. At an organizational level, this fed into personnel changes and was accompanied by politicization and deprofessionalization, which accompanied militarization. This simultaneously shifted organizational orientation and capabilities to produce a police force which contributed to a range of atrocities. The research highlights differences in timing and actions across municipalities, suggesting the need not only for inter-regional comparison in the BiH war, but also intra-regional comparison. This turn to sub-state territory to serve as a site from which to view wider phenomena mediated by local factors is not unique to criminology (e.g. Bergholz 2016; Fujii 2011) but is a promising direction for multi-level analyses.
CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY
If the preceding sub-sections give the sense that criminologists’ contributions to aetiologies of atrocity are beneficial but not unique, then the theories that are most central to criminological. As attention to atrocity grew in criminology, a number of criminologists sought to identify conceptual and theoretical resources to adapt from the criminological back catalogue (e.g. Day and Vandiver 2000; Karstedt et al. 2021), to problematize such efforts (Woolford 2006), or to apply these in case studies (Ward 2005; Neubacher 2006; van Baar and Huisman 2012). Day and Vandiver represent an early effort, but one which is criticized for simply adding criminology and stirring (Woolford 2006: 96–97). They claim that existing scholarship on genocide and mass killings has produced theories resembling those of criminologists, claiming that Kelman’s work on atrocities could be reframed in terms of the earlier work of Sykes and Matza on techniques of neutralization (Day and Vandiver 2000: 45). This strand of theory feeds into work by Neubacher (2006) who analyses neutralizations in a 1943 speech by Heinrich Himmler and for Day and Vandiver is well-suited to explain the temporary or episodic nature of genocide (Day and Vandiver 2000: 46). Their work recasting Goldhagen’s historical analysis of Rummel’s political science of democide in terms of theories of criminalization (Day and Vandiver 2000: 47ff) is weaker, given that the persecution of Jewish Europeans and other groups by Nazis and their allies goes well beyond the bounds of coercion through criminal law and is better characterized as a state policy of murder. The test of the value of these initial leads is in their application in concrete empirical research.
Applications of criminological theory there focus mostly on perpetrators, with some further victimological work. The role of bystanders can, in part, be read into accounts which factor in control as a variable. The application of a combination of strain theory and.differential association represents a common strand in studies of perpetrators (e.g. Ward 2005; van Baar and Huisman 2012). The study of Topf and Sons, the German builders of ovens for Auschwitz and other concentration and death camps, by van Baar and Huisman works as a good example. These ovens not only burned the bodies of victims but fulfilled technical roles as air and ventilate gas chambers to murder Jewish, Roma and other victims more efficiently (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1041). Strain theory fits the family history, the efforts to stay afloat in a difficult and competitive economic context but is limited explanatory power given the small part of company economic decisions represented by business values (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1039). In terms of differential association, these values aligned to rule-breaking are learned alongside technical assumptions. The latter appear focuses on values of innovation and technical perfection that were embedded in the individuals enterprise, the sector, and German industry more broadly, and in the work of the engineers (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1041 ff). This shows the layering of certain values predating the atrocities. The engineers’ moral breach basically means values, knowingly assisting mass murder, is explained by their prioritizing technical responsibility over moral responsibility (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1041); values of honour and respect are highlighted in relation to new technical innovation, the values of humanity, human life and care subordinated to those new technical priorities (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1037, 1041). The old moral values are not abandoned, rather the victims murdered in death camps are excluded from the obligations abandoned, rather the victims murdered in death camps are excluded from the obligations abandoned, rather the victims murdered in death camps are excluded from the obligations of those values, and the ideology this may help to generate. This suggests ideology as a legitimating factor for participating in the kind of differential association in the work of the engineers. The third test is to link differential association to the engineer. This involves further explanation of the close connections between the perpetrators and the party and state through the SS (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1043) in terms of the transmission of values. The second is to explore the selective discontinuity indicated by the simultaneous production of humane care and technical goals for citizens and systems not then effectively murdered and incinerating Jewish and other others. Here, Helen Fein’s work on the processes by which groups are defined to be outside the universe of moral obligation (Fein 1990: 34) can be linked to processes of exclusion of Jewish people in economy, society and law from the earliest stages of Nazi rule. Evidently the categorical exclusion is not absolute, given that one of the Topf brothers made repeated efforts to secure the freedom of two Jewish colleagues in Gestapo custody (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1039). A further step would look not only at the exclusion of the other from the universe of moral obligation, but the creation of a moral obligation to contribute to killing members of that group (Anderson 2017: 26, 78–87).
Victimological contributions to atrocity aetiology are well represented by Rafter and Walklate’s (2012) work on the repeated massacres and ultimate genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Using a concept of dynamic victimality, they bring together a short-term frame of precipitation (actions in an immediate sequence of events) and a more structural frame of proneness, linked to wider vulnerability and risk of repeated victimization. Together these frame the social relations that explain the occurrence and specific timing of massacres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the genocide of 1915. Notwithstanding the challenge of explaining crimes characterized by conformity in a discipline oriented towards explaining deviance, the contributions of criminologists to the aetiology of atrocity over the last two to three decades add to an endeavour that is greater than any one discipline.
ATROCITY AND PUNISHMENT: SUI GENERIS CRIMES, SUI GENERIS PROCEDURES
The mushrooming of different international courts and tribunals since the early 1990s, and the related human rights movement towards ‘ending impunity’ for atrocities, stimulated criminological and other disciplinary inquiries into punishment for atrocity. Scholars focusing on international, domestic, or transitional punishment for atrocity identified two main problems for a penology of atrocity. First, the sui generis nature of atrocity as collective, organized, and mass-scale violence, oftentimes committed for political goals, and extending well beyond individual perpetrators and victims. Second, the sui generis nature of the criminal justice systems, whether international or domestic, with their own idiosyncrasies relating to their political, societal and cultural contexts and resources impacting on how they deal with atrocities. In the following sections we outline criminological and related interdisciplinary scholarship concerning the question of punishing collective crimes at an individual level; the punishment of atrocities through international criminal courts and tribunals (ICCTs); and the punishment of atrocities through domestic courts. While conventional penal theories and rationales have been applied, and called into question, when it comes to atrocity, academic discussions are largely limited to such critical engagement. One distinct contribution that criminologists (and other social scientists) introduced to the field of atrocity punishment, an area of inquiry largely dominated by normative and legal doctrinal approaches, however, has been the empirical interrogation of existing norms, assumptions and practices, as demonstrated in the growing empirical scholarship on punishment for domestic responses to atrocities. As with aetiology, the interdisciplinary engagement with punishment draws from a variety of disciplines, such as criminology, law, sociology and international relations.
INDIVIDUALIZED PUNISHMENT FOR COLLECTIVE CRIMES
As discussed earlier, criminologists have advanced multi-level accounts to explain acts of atrocity. According to these models, individuals committing atrocity violence cannot be isolated from their wider criminal contexts and vice-versa. Punishment, with its exclusive focus on individual criminal responsibility reduces and largely obfuscates the multifaceted and complex reality of atrocity perpetrators and understandings of their responsibility (Drumbl 2007). This gap between the empirical reality of atrocity and legal constructions of it calls into question many penological assumptions. Scholars have challenged the suitability of existing penal theories for atrocities. The specific socio-political and largely violent contexts in which atrocity crimes are committed; the mass, collective, and hierarchically organized character of atrocities; the nature of their perpetrators and perpetrators (Smeulers 2008); and the unique character of the resulting harm and victimization (Pemberton and Letschert 2022) are among the many factors that render the application of individualized responsibility problematic in atrocity contexts.
This criticism has led to calls for alternative modes of responsibility and punishment. Mark Drumbl (2007), for example, suggests a shift away from solely retributive frameworks and proposes a more pluralist and restorative approach, tailored to the specific realities of mass atrocity. He argues that conventional penal models, built for discrete, individual crimes, struggle to reflect the scale, scope, and collective nature of atrocities. Criminologists have therefore explored how punishment could better reflect not just individual culpability, but also collective, institutional, and systemic responsibility.
In this regard, attention has been paid to how courts—particularly international courts—construct and narrate responsibility in legal proceedings. Smeulers (2008) and others have analysed patterns in how perpetrators are portrayed and how sentencing reflects both individual acts and broader participation in collective violence. Courts often rely on symbolic trials of a few individuals, assumed to stand in for broader communities or structures—raising ethical and empirical questions about representation, blame, and justice.
At the same time, criminologists have interrogated the wider societal impacts of punishment for atrocities. For example, empirical studies have examined whether international trials contribute to reconciliation or deterrence. Findings are mixed. Some research suggests that highly visible prosecutions (e.g. the ICTY or ICC) can signal global condemnation and support transitional justice efforts. Other studies argue that such trials risk entrenching divisions, especially when perceived as selective or externally imposed.
Finally, this branch of atrocity penology has explored alternative justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions, reparations, and community-based justice. These mechanisms are often valued for their flexibility, cultural relevance, and victim-centred focus. Criminologists argue that such alternatives can complement formal legal processes and offer more holistic responses to the harm caused by atrocities.
INTERNATIONAL PUNISHMENT
A significant theoretical and empirical challenge for criminological scholarship on punishment and atrocity is that it suffers from ‘tribunal bias’. Scholars have been predominantly focused on ICCTs, yet these have only dealt with a negligible proportion of atrocities and atrocity perpetrators. For instance, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) tried, convicted, or acquitted 73 individuals for crimes committed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. In comparison, Rwandan domestic courts and gacaca jurisdictions adjudicated cases of over one million individuals accused of participating in the genocide. This tribunal bias manifests itself in two main ways. First, as briefly outlined below, the ICCTs feature as predominant objects of a scholarly criminological inquiry. Second, the tribunal bias also influences broader criminological imaginaries where criminologists have largely relied on ICCT sources to explore institutional influence, prosecutorial typology, or prevalence of atrocity (e.g. Aitchison 2014b; Bringedal Houge 2018). This brings forward limits on the epistemic accessibility of ICCTs, given the limited procedures they generate, and the particular characteristics of their criminal prosecutions.
Scholars have primarily studied the functioning and effects of ICCTs as sui generis international, cross-cultural, and politico-legal institutions, with various diverse constituencies and stakeholders who have competing agendas and goals. Empirical scholarship has, for instance, examined charging practices (Ford 2013), selectivity (Smeulers, Weerdesteijn and Holá 2015), witnessing (Stover 2007), evidence presentation and evaluation (Combs 2010; Chlevickaitė, Holá, and Bijleveld 2021; Fournet 2020), or sentencing and its predictability (Meernik and King 2003; Doherty and Steinberg 2016). These works identify specific features of punishing atrocities at the international level. ICCTs are expected to operate beyond nation states, but paradoxically are absolutely dependent on states’ cooperation for arrests, evidence, and for enforcement of sentences. This clearly distinguishes international punishment for atrocities from most domestic equivalents. Levi, Hagan, and Dezalay (2016) demonstrated how this means that ICCT prosecutors have to be not only legal, but also political actors, who operate in ‘atypical’ political environments. In these contexts, the prosecutors depart from normal criminal justice routines applied in domestic systems. The prosecutors choose their cases and evidentiary strategies, not only on principle, but also on the immediate historical and geopolitical context, to some extent to a degree of movement back and forth. ICC Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda sought to adopt a more ‘apolitical’ approach in contrast to her predecessor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, who made certain accommodations of US interests (Robb and Patel 2020). This difference showed when in 2020 Bensouda opened an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan since the country’s accession to the Rome Statute in 2003. The US response in the form of sanctions against key ICC personnel demonstrates the political stakes involved. Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, has subsequently indicated a deprioritizing of the Afghanistan investigations. A further specific character of international sentence enforcement arises from international prisoners serving their sentences in domestic prisons, scattered across those countries willing to enforce sentences passed in ICCTs. This results in unequal treatment and isolation from other prisoners, and it dilutes the international nature of the punishment and sentencing court exercises less control over the delivery of punishment (Mulgrew 2013).
Criminologists have also engaged with the domestic legitimacy of ICCTs and different stakeholders’ perceptions of the justice delivered by ICCTs (Kutnjak Ivković, Hagan and Hagan 2021). These studies demonstrate that ICCTs often lack legitimacy or fail to resonate in their post-conflict domestic constituencies. For instance, Clark’s research in BiH (2014) shows that there are essentially three competing versions of history: the Bosniak, the Croat, and the Serb. Each group accepts and advances certain ‘truths’, usually in which they are victims or heroes while others are aggressors. Each group denies any conflicting truths established by the Yugoslav Tribunal. Other studies have shown how ICTY’s justice is often perceived through a perspective of ethnic or national group identity, and different metrics are applied to the out-group, ‘those of the enemy group/aggressors’, as opposed to the in-group, ‘those of ours/victimized’. Using an experimental vignette, David (2014) found that in Croatia justice is seen through a prism of group identity. The international trials are more likely to be seen as just if the courts to be perceived as just only if they punish a wrong-doer from the national in-group. This example, Serbs. Drawing on David, Bijleveld et al. (2022) developed experimental vignettes based on a case of a war crime inspired by atrocities committed during the Bosnian war to measure perceived fairness of a sentence. They manipulated variables such as perpetrator nationality, group or trial location. Results from 570 respondents across 39 countries demonstrated that the perpetrator’s apology and an expert evaluation of fairness strongly affected the study, but also that differences in perceptions of justness of punishment between respondents from countries without recent conflict (e.g. the Netherlands, Germany) and post-conflict countries (e.g. Croatia, Colombia).
DOMESTIC PUNISHMENT
Compared to criminological scholarship on international punishment, research on domestic punishment of atrocities is limited. National criminal justice systems often try to mimic ICJ (Drumbl 2007). However, as Holá and Chibashimba’s (2019) case study of Rwanda shows, domestic penal power is dynamic, conditional, and instrumental. It is part of a broader political and societal change in the wake of the atrocity, closely driven by and connected to political and societal demands for a society in transition. Such demands largely influence design, implementation, and enforcement of punishments for atrocities. Such ‘punishment in transition,’ punishment for atrocities implemented in transitioning societies, is not only shaped by the character of the past atrocities, but also by the socio-political context of the transition and its transformative goals. However, retributive national criminal justice responses can be in conflict with, or detrimental to, broader societal responses to atrocity crimes in times of transition (Mayans-Hermida and Holá 2020). For example, the national criminal justice response in Croatia has been described as a form of ‘victor’s justice’ (Munivrana Vajda 2019), with a bias against Serbs. Such one-sided punishment is perceived as unjust by many and cannot foster reconciliation (Clark 2014). In contrast, Guzman and Holá (2019) discuss how punishment for atrocity crimes in domestic settings can, whether from principle, pragmatism, or necessity, lead to design and implementation of creative and innovative punishment modalities, even for the most serious crimes. In Colombia, for example, the 2016 peace agreement between the Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) set out punishments and penal measures in the form of restorative criminal punishments. These punishments (even for the most serious atrocities committed) combine restorative justice elements. Restorative punishment is understood as community service or other efforts offenders may do for revealing the truth by a such as demonstrating particular gravity in Colombia. Such restorative punishment is ordinarily applied for political violence and to contribute to the broader societal transformation which the Colombian transitional justice system is intended to deal with (Guzman and Holá 2019). Transitional punishment is, therefore, embedded in reconciliation and other transitional justice mechanisms adopted during a particular transitioning period. (See McEvoy et al. in this volume for an in-depth discussion of criminological engagement with transitional justice.)
Recent empirical studies on domestic penal practices have also demonstrated that sentencing practices for atrocity crimes in certain national systems do not differ strongly from sentencing practices applied within the same jurisdiction to other serious offences (Munivrana Vajda 2019; Ristivojević and Radojčić 2019). Further to ordinary criminal sentences for atrocity crimes in national settings as often routinely implemented, execution of particular atrocity procedures which apply to ordinary crimes, without any major effort to tailor them to the particularities of atrocity crimes, without any major effort to tailor them to the particularities of atrocity crimes, without any major effort to tailor them to the particularities of atrocity crimes. Buljubašić (2019) explored rehabilitation practices for atrocity crimes perpetrators. He studied the Bosnian approach to imprisoned atrocity perpetrators in sites in BiH. He argued that the ordinary rehabilitation regime, socio-political needs and challenges of post-conflict settings. Very few atrocity prisoners can be described as typical criminals. Their offence behaviours are heavily impacted by a certain moral, ideological, ethnic, and war-related context prior to their atrocity offending, and those imprisoned tend to have been convicted for crimes committed while in power positions in organizational hierarchies or having limited authority. From the perspective of prison staff, the atrocity perpetrators are ordinary people transformed into perpetrators by extraordinary circumstances. Moreover, the conventional rehabilitation schemes operating in Bosnian prisons are not designed to counter the kind of exclusionary beliefs and destructive ethnic ideologies which contributed to atrocity, and which continue to play a prominent role in post-conflict society and political discourse. In the context of such gaps, restorative punishments of the kind implemented in Colombia could be a more appropriate route for low-ranking atrocity prisoners. Atrocity criminologists need to contribute to the development of new structures and mechanisms for atrocity penalty recognizing needs arising from specific kinds of crimes, perpetrators, and victims.
CONCLUSION: QUO VADIS, ATROCITY CRIMINOLOGY?
In Jasmila Žbanić’s film, Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), we follow Aida, a translator for the Dutch UN battalion at their Potočari base in Srebrenica. Almost constantly on the move, she is desperately trying to understand and navigate the logic of a real time atrocity, doing what she can to protect people in her community and to save her family. She repeatedly encounters the cruelty, indifference, and impotence of those responsible for the genocide taking place, including beyond the soldiers. Towards the end of the film, she returns to her hometown, to her apartment occupied by a family, redecorated but with her belongings still there: the television, the clock on the wall, the sweet jar. These closing scenes capture so much of the harms that remain or follow after atrocity: the hollow man on the street; the shock of encountering a murderer on the stairs; the chasm walking between the carefully laid out sets of human remains and tattered clothes. Among these signs of a society disrupted and destroyed, the final scenes show how life goes on after atrocity, as Aida returns to her work as a school teacher. Young children, perhaps not even born in 1995 when the genocide was enacted, learn in Aida’s classroom or perform for their parents. In the audience we see survivors, mostly women, but also perpetrators of the genocide too. As well as recognizing the film for its careful, harrowing portrayal of genocide, and attentive observation of post-genocide society, we find it speaks strongly to atrocity criminologists’ hope to understand the nature of horror. In seeking to understand, many researchers hope to contribute to the prevention, or recurrence, of atrocity. As those final scenes force us to ask, how does life go on after genocide, we might ask where does criminology go after atrocity? The question was already asked of sociologists by Keith Doubt, “can sociology sustain itself as a viable study of society when it ignores perhaps the most pressing and difficult issues in its time?” (Doubt 2000: 1). In this chapter, we have shown that even if criminologists were generally late to recognize atrocity as one of the most pressing and difficult subjects for the discipline, a critical mass of scholars is now studying genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes from a criminological perspective, collaborating with each other and with colleagues in other disciplines, to push the boundaries of how the field works. The base of criminological research, and a shared academic community of scholars, has grown, it needs to recognize and support those scholars who are essential to the construction of sound criminological knowledge, but who face significant challenges working in an area that is politically and emotionally charged. Here, we think of scholars in atrocity-affected societies. The prevalence of ‘outsidered’ research on atrocity is notable. This is attributable, in part, to the role of the Global North in controlling dominant modes of knowledge production and dissemination. But the particular intensity of the political and emotional charge surrounding atrocities in the societies where they were conducted can make it a challenge, in the same way that transitional justice initiatives are challenged to navigate the politicization of victimhood. Atrocity criminologists in institutions away from sites of atrocity need to consider what they can do to open spaces for, and to support, colleagues in post-atrocity societies.
In our attempt to provide a concise, introductory account of the field, we left out much and touched only lightly on more, including the gendering of atrocity crime, and of atrocity justice (O’Brien 2017), developments in cultural criminology (Brown and Rafter 2013) or the ‘importing’ of specific sub-disciplinary approaches such as the micro-sociological study of unfolding atrocity processes (Kluseman 2012). Having reviewed the field, we remain sceptical about the need to define a uniquely criminological approach to the problem of atrocity, but recognize through the account above, that criminologists do contribute meaningfully to a shared scholarly endeavour. From the other side, while more criminologists engage with the problem of atrocity, it is not yet clear how this work, beyond addressing a gap, feeds back into, and shapes, wider disciplinary conversations within a criminological mainstream.
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Du Bois explores the “colour line” as the central problem of the 20th century.
He Introduced the concept of “double-consciousness” – the internal conflict of black identity in a white-dominated society.
Reflects on a childhood experience of racism and being “shut out by a vast veil.”
He analyzed the role of The Freedmen’s Bureau’s aim to help freed slaves. He argued it fell short of true justice.
He argued Segregation laws (e.g. Plessy v. Ferguson) reinforced white supremacy post-Civil War.
Du Bois later saw racism as a global issue, reshaping his views after visiting the Warsaw Ghetto.
His work inspired the civil rights movement and Pan-Africanism.
In the 19th century’s later years, Frederick Douglass was a US social reformer and a freed slave. He highlighted the persistent divide in the USA. He argued that although blacks had ceased to belong to individuals, they had nevertheless become slaves of society. Out of the depths of slavery, he said, “has come this prejudice and this colour line.” It was stitched into white dominion in the workplace, the ballot box, the legal courts, and everyday life.
The Souls of Black Folk
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois investigated the idea of the colour line in The Souls of Black Folk.
This book is a literary, sociological, and political landmark. It examines the changing position of African-Americans from the US Civil War and its aftermath to the early 1900s. This is analyzed in terms of the physical positions of black and white political life in the South. It also considers their economic and moral positions. It concludes that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line. This refers to the continuing division between the opportunities and perspectives of blacks and whites.
Du Bois begins his study by pointing out something important. No white person is willing to talk about race with blacks. They choose instead to act out prejudice in various ways. But what they really want to know is “How does it feel to be a problem?” he asks.
Du Bois finds the question unanswerable. A problem makes sense from a white perspective. A black people see themselves as “a problem.” He then examines how a double set of perspectives has occurred. He provides the example of his first encounter with racism. While at primary school, a new pupil refused to accept a greeting card from Du Bois. This was the moment when it dawned on him that he was different from the others.
He felt like them in his heart, he says. But he realized that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Initially, he was undaunted. He says that he felt no need to tear down the veil at first. Then he grew up and saw that all the most dazzling opportunities in the world were for white people. They were not for black people. There was a colour line, and he was standing on the side that was denied power, opportunity, dignity, and respect.
Identity crisis
Du Bois suggests that the colour line is internal too. Black people, according to him, see themselves in two ways simultaneously:
Two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.
The unfolding history of the black person in the USA is the history of this inner conflict. Du Bois claims this inner conflict is a result of the external, worldly battle between black and white people.
He suggests that a black person wants to merge the double-consciousness into one state. They seek to find a true African-American spirit. This spirit “does not Africanize America, nor bleach his African soul in a flood of white Americanism.”
The reflection of the white world views them with amused contempt and pity. Their own sense of self is more fluid and less well-defined. These factors combine to form what Du Bois calls a double-consciousness.
Double-consciousness
Double-consciousness is Du Bois’ term for the peculiar problem of “two-ness” faced by African-Americans. They must develop a sense of self. At the same time, they need to be aware of how they are seen through the eyes of others.
A young black man may be a doctor (above and right). However, he will also be acutely conscious of white society’s stereotyping of black males. They are often seen as dangerous and threatening. They are also stereotyped as, for example, criminals or ghetto gangstas (far right).
The Freedmen’s Bureau
How had black people become the “problem”? Du Bois attempts to explain this issue. He looks to the history of slavery in the USA. He also examines the turning point of the Civil War.
According to him, slavery was the real cause of the war, which started in 1861. As the Union army of the northern states marched into the South, slaves fled to join it. At first, slaves were returned to their owners, but the policy changed and they were kept as military labour.
In 1863, slaves were declared free. The government set up the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau issued food and clothing to the “flood” of destitute fugitive former slaves. They provided for men, women, and children. Abandoned properties were also distributed. However, the Bureau was run by military staff ill-equipped to deal with social reorganization. The Bureau faced challenges due to the task’s enormous scale. The promise of handing over slave-driven plantations to former slaves vanished. This happened when it became clear that over 800,000 acres were affected.
One of the great successes of the Bureau was the provision of free schools for all children in the South.
Du Bois points out that this was seen as a problem. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. Opposition to black education in the South showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood.
At the same time, the Bureau slowed down in legal matters. According to Du Bois, it used its powers for other purposes. It did not help the weak. Instead, it allowed the strong to tyrannize the feeble. It let the nation return to normal industrial methods – the methods of 1840. In doing this, it broke the new ground of human freedom.” In other words, the Bureau reinforced the old slave system under a new name.
Du Bois says that the Bureau was, on the whole, a success. “It was the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted.” But the Bureau was run by military men. They were not trained for the task. It was a loss in funding, and that was a loss….that a nation which today menaces the world as a “model” of democracy has not yet made good”.
The Bureau had set up a system for reviewing cases under ex-slave proprietorship. It secured the recognition of black people in courts of law. It also founded common schools. However, the freedmen felt the Bureau was too soft. It did not establish justice for the ex-slaves. In fact, it increased the feeling of injustice. The Bureau was impartial instead of being explicitly set up to operate in more positive terms.
Compromise or agitation?
Following the post-war period of reform was the Reconstruction era. But some of the newly won black rights started to slip away. A ruling of the US legal case (Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896) made segregation in public places permissible. It set the pattern of racial segregation in the South. This lasted until Brown vs Board of Education, 1954. Modern military loss led to a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. They spread a nativist white supremacist message. This period also saw a rise in racist violence, including lynchings.
In 1895 the African-American politician Booker T Washington had given a speech now known as “the Atlanta Compromise”. He suggested that black people should be patient. They should adopt white middle-class standards and seek self-advancement by self-improvement. Education was also recommended to show their worth. Washington argued that social change would be more likely in the longer term. He believed this could be achieved by foregoing political rights in return for economic rights and legal justice. This accommodationist view became the dominant ideology of the time.
Du Bois disagreed strongly, and in The Souls of Black Folk he explained why. He did not expect full civil rights immediately. However, he was certain that people do not gain their rights by wronging them away voluntarily. Du Bois had hoped that social science could eliminate racism and segregation. He believed that only political agitation was an effective strategy.
Stretching the colour line
In 1949, Du Bois visited the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. Two-thirds of the population had been killed during the Nazi occupation. Additionally, 85 per cent of the city lay in ruins. He was shocked by the experience, which he said gave him a “more complete understanding of the Negro problem”. Faced with such absolute devastation and destruction, Du Bois reassessed his analysis of the colour line. He knew it was a direct consequence of racist stereotyping and violence. He declared it a phenomenon that can occur to any cultural or ethnic group.
In his 1952 essay for the magazine Jewish Life, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”, he writes: “The race problem… cuts across lines of color. It also crosses lines of physique.” It transcends belief and status. It was a matter of… human hate and prejudice.” It is therefore not so much about who is on each side of the “line.” The line can be drawn to articulate difference and hatred in any group or society.
Activist and scholar
Du Bois was a founder member of the civil rights organization. This organization is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His ideas were concerned with people of African descent everywhere. During the 1920s, he helped found the Pan-African Association in Paris, France. He also organized a series of pan-African congresses around the world. However, at the time of writing The African soul in the early 1900s, he noted some limitations. He said that the conditions were not yet in place to achieve a true and unified African-American spirit.
Du Bois applied systematic methods of fieldwork to previously neglected areas of study. The use of empirical data to catalogue the effects of racism on lives enabled him to collect widely held assumptions. For example, he produced a wealth of data on the effects of urban life on African-Americans in Philadelphia. He wrote in detail about the ill health, low income, poor housing, and lack of education suffered by black people. In his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), he suggested that the difficulties facing black communities are not innate. Crime is a product of the environment. His pioneering sociological research and thinking hugely influenced later prominent civil rights leaders. This included Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Du Bois is recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century.
W E B Du Bois: biography
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, philosopher, and political leader. He was born in Massachusetts, USA, three years after the end of the Civil War.
After graduating from high school, Du Bois studied at Fisk University in Nashville. He also studied at the University of Berlin, Germany, where he met Max Weber. In 1895, he became the first African American to receive a PhD. He gained a doctorate in history at Harvard University. From 1897 to 1910, he was a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University. From 1934 to 1944, he was chairman of the department of sociology.
In 1961 Du Bois moved to Ghana, Africa, to work on the Encyclopaedia Africana, but died there two years later. He wrote numerous books, articles, and essays, and founded and edited four journals.
Key works
1903 The Souls of Black Folks
1920 Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
1939 Black Folk, Then and Now
Signposting
This material is extension work for Race and Ethnicity, a theme which runs all the way through A-level sociology
This question appeared in a recent AQA A-level sociology paper, The Education with Theory and Methods paper.
This post considers the question, mark scheme and then suggests a top and middle band answer.
Top band answers should address all of ethnicity, gender and class in terms of educational achievement.
EXAM QUESTION
Read Item B below and answer the question that follows.
Item B There are differences in patterns of educational achievement between groups of pupils. These differences can be based on class, gender or ethnicity, or a combination of these. Some sociologists argue that cultural factors are the main explanation for differences in educational achievement. Differences in primary socialisation may mean that some groups find it easier to engage with the culture of the school. However, other sociologists argue that material factors, such as access to resources, are also important.
Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate the importance of cultural factors in explaining patterns of educational achievement [30 marks]
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Mark Scheme
Top Band
Answers in this band will show sound, conceptually detailed knowledge of a range of relevant material. This knowledge will include the importance of cultural factors in explaining patterns of educational achievement. Sophisticated understanding of the question and of the presented material will be shown. Appropriate material will be applied accurately and with sensitivity to the issues raised by the question. Analysis and evaluation will be explicit and relevant. Evaluation may be developed. For example, a debate can occur between different perspectives such as functionalism, Marxism, feminisms, interactionism, and the New Right. Alternatively, one can examine how cultural and material factors are important. One can also explore how these factors interrelate in explaining patterns of educational achievement. Analysis will show a clear explanation. Appropriate conclusions will be drawn.
Middle Band
Answers in this band will show largely accurate knowledge but limited range and depth, eg a broadly accurate, if basic, account of some ways that cultural factors explain patterns of educational achievement. Understands some limited but significant aspects of the question; superficial understanding of the presented material. Applying listed material from the general topic area but with limited regard for its relevance to the issues raised by the question, or applying a narrow range of more relevant material. Evaluation will take the form of juxtaposition of competing positions or one or two isolated stated points. Analysis will be limited, with answers tending towards the descriptive.
Top Band Answer: Evaluating the Importance of Cultural Factors in Educational Achievement
Educational achievement varies across different social groups, with differences observed based on class, gender, and ethnicity. Some sociologists argue that cultural factors primarily explain these differences. They shape students’ attitudes, values, and engagement with education. Others, however, emphasize the role of material factors, such as economic deprivation and access to resources. This essay will evaluate the importance of cultural factors in explaining educational achievement. It will also consider the role of material factors. Furthermore, it will examine their interrelation.
The Role of Cultural Factors
Cultural factors refer to the norms, values, and practices that influence students’ attitudes towards education. Cultural capital, cultural deprivation, and differing socialization processes all contribute to patterns of achievement.
Cultural Deprivation Theory
Cultural deprivation theorists argue that working-class children underachieve because they lack the cultural resources necessary for educational success. Bernstein (1971) identified differences in speech codes. Middle-class children use the elaborated code. This aligns with the language of the school. Working-class children tend to use the restricted code. This limits their ability to engage fully with academic content. Similarly, Douglas (1964) found that working-class parents placed less emphasis on educational achievement. They were also less involved in their children’s schooling. This led to lower attainment levels (Revisesociology, 2014).
Cultural Capital
Bourdieu (1984) introduced the concept of cultural capital. He argued that middle-class students benefit from the knowledge, skills, and experiences. These align with the education system. Middle-class parents are more likely to engage in cultural activities, such as museum visits. They also favor reading. These activities enhance their children’s intellectual development. Research supports the idea that middle-class students use their cultural capital to navigate the education system more effectively than their working-class peers (Revisesociology, 2015).
Ethnicity and Cultural Attitudes to Education
Ethnic differences in educational achievement can also be explained by cultural factors. Research suggests that Chinese and Indian students often achieve high academic results. This is due to strong parental expectations and a work ethic emphasizing discipline and perseverance. In contrast, some Black Caribbean students may experience conflicts between their home culture and school expectations, contributing to underachievement (Revisesociology, 2015).
The Role of Material Factors
While cultural explanations are significant, material factors also play a crucial role in shaping educational outcomes.
Social Class and Economic Capital
Material deprivation affects access to educational resources, such as private tutoring, high-quality schools, and extracurricular activities. According to government statistics, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds consistently achieve lower GCSE grades than their wealthier peers (Revisesociology, 2020).
Gender and Educational Inequality
While girls now outperform boys at most educational levels, gender disparities remain in subject choices and career aspirations. Socialization processes encourage girls to be more diligent and compliant, contributing to their academic success. However, boys may be influenced by laddish subcultures that devalue academic effort (Revisesociology, 2020).
Interaction Between Cultural and Material Factors
Cultural and material factors often interact, reinforcing educational inequalities. Working-class students may lack financial means. They may also lack cultural capital to access high-achieving schools or engage with enrichment activities. Similarly, ethnic minority students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds may face additional challenges, such as institutional racism and lower teacher expectations (Revisesociology, 2020).
Conclusion
Cultural factors play a significant role in explaining educational achievement. This occurs particularly through differences in cultural capital, socialization, and attitudes toward education. However, material factors cannot be ignored, as economic deprivation significantly impacts students’ access to educational opportunities. A comprehensive understanding of educational inequality must consider the interplay between cultural and material influences.
Middle Band Answer: Evaluating the Importance of Cultural Factors in Educational Achievement
Educational achievement differs among students based on class, gender, and ethnicity. Some sociologists believe that cultural factors are the main reason for these differences, while others argue that material factors, like poverty, are also important. This essay will examine the role of cultural factors in educational achievement and consider the impact of material factors.
Cultural Factors and Education
Cultural factors refer to how children are brought up and what values they are taught at home. Some sociologists argue that differences in upbringing affect how well students do in school.
Cultural Deprivation
Cultural deprivation theory suggests that some working-class children do not have the skills or knowledge that help them succeed in school. Bernstein (1971) identified two speech codes: the elaborated code, used by the middle class and schools, and the restricted code, used by the working class. Because the school system favors the elaborated code, working-class students may struggle to succeed (Revisesociology, 2014).
Cultural Capital
Bourdieu (1984) argued that middle-class students have cultural capital, meaning they have experiences and knowledge that help them do well in school. For example, middle-class parents are more likely to take their children to museums and encourage reading at home, which helps their academic success (Revisesociology, 2015).
Ethnicity and Cultural Differences
Different ethnic groups have different cultural attitudes towards education. Chinese and Indian families often place a high value on education, which can help explain why their children perform well in school. On the other hand, Black Caribbean students may experience cultural clashes with the school system, which can contribute to lower achievement levels (Revisesociology, 2015).
Material Factors
Although cultural factors are important, material factors also impact educational achievement. For example, students from poorer families may not have access to resources like private tutors, a quiet study space, or good schools. Statistics show that students from low-income backgrounds generally achieve lower grades than wealthier students (Revisesociology, 2020).
Conclusion
Cultural factors such as speech codes and parental attitudes play a key role in educational achievement. However, material factors also have a strong influence. A full explanation of educational differences must consider both cultural and economic factors.
It’s extraordinary how little we talk about Covid, given how profoundly it continues to shape our society, economy, and public services.
From Furlough to Fallout: The Lasting Economic Impact of Pandemic Spending
As Heather Stewart et al. note in The Guardian, the pandemic marked a dramatic – though temporary – expansion in the role of the state. Almost overnight, the UK government introduced measures on a scale unseen in peacetime, including the furlough scheme, which covered up to 80% of workers’ wages to prevent mass unemployment. At a cost of £70 billion, it kept millions of people afloat during months of lockdown and business closures.
Alongside furlough came business grants, bounce-back loans, emergency increases to Universal Credit, and funding for PPE procurement and vaccine rollout. Altogether, these interventions added approximately £400 billion to the national debt, placing enormous strain on public finances.
Today, the cost of borrowing has risen sharply, and the UK now spends over £100 billion annually just to service its debt – more than double the pre-pandemic figure. That’s more than the entire education budget, and comparable to defence and welfare spending.
A Health System Under Strain: The Hidden Legacy of Lockdown
Meanwhile, the long-term effects of the pandemic continue to ripple through essential services. NHS waiting lists remain at record highs, with over seven million people in England alone awaiting treatment. Many of these delays stem from care postponed during lockdowns, compounded by workforce shortages and underinvestment.
Mental health services, too, are stretched to breaking point. The psychological toll of isolation, grief, economic insecurity, and the trauma of the pandemic itself has led to a 36% rise in demand for mental health support compared to pre-Covid levels. Young people, in particular, report unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. Yet services remain chronically underfunded, with long waits for counselling or specialist care.
What Happened to Big Government? The Vanishing Vision of a More Supportive State
While the pandemic briefly raised public expectations about what the state could and should do – such as supporting livelihoods, housing the homeless, or delivering food to vulnerable families – those ambitions have since withered. The political resolve to tackle major systemic issues, such as the crisis in social care or the housing shortage, appears to have evaporated. Promising initiatives like online GP consultations have been retained, but broader reforms have stalled.
Other countries have grappled with similar questions. In the US, President Biden’s stimulus packages echoed the logic of emergency spending, but attempts to extend that logic to a permanent expansion of the welfare state – through free childcare, improved healthcare access, and better housing support – have faced strong political resistance.
In the UK, the temporary nature of Covid-era interventions stands in contrast to their lasting consequences. We face a paradox: the pandemic revealed that rapid, large-scale government action is possible – but we seem to have retreated into an era of austerity, even as the social and economic fallout of Covid lingers. If we don’t confront this mismatch between expectations and delivery, we risk entrenching inequality and allowing essential public services to degrade even further.
Relevance to A-level sociology
The Nation state’s response to Covid and the fact that if anything we are still more reliant on the nation state than ever as we struggle to overcome its legacy suggests that we live in a late modern rather than a post modern society.
Postmodernism emphasises individual freedom from social structures, whereas late modernism criticises this pointing out that structure is still important, which is clearly the case here.
HOWEVER, the fact that the Nation State, or the Welfare State has struggled to maintain support at the level it did during the Pandemic reminds us that we are living in a firmly neoliberal era, in which State support for individuals is relatively limited.
This is also an interesting reminder that macro-style sociology is still important to understand the personal crises individuals face….. for example one legacy of Covid is the increase in individuals suffering poor mental health.