Timothy Williams
May 21, 2021The Complexity of Evil
Perpetration and Genocide
Rutgers University Press 2020
Why do people participate in genocide? In The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (Rutgers UP, 2020), Timothy Williams presents an interdisciplinary model that shows how complex and diverse, but also how ordinary and mundane most motivations for participating in genocide are. The book draws on empirical examples from the Holocaust and Rwanda and introduces new data from interviews with perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia. On my latest episode, we discuss all this and more.
Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.