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.

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💡 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.
  

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
  
• Meso-level: organizations (e.g. military, bureaucracy)
  
• Micro-level: individual psychology, emotion, opportunity
  

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.

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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.

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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
  

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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.
  

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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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