Ethical Terrorism Front (original) (raw)

The Nature of Mass Murder and Autogenic Massacre

Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 2010

Incidents of mass murder have gained considerable media attention, but are not well understood in behavioral sciences. Current definitions are weak, and may include politically or ideological motivated phenomenon. Our current understanding of the phenomenon indicates these incidents are not peculiar to only western cultures, and appear to be increasing. Methods most prominently used include firearms by males who have experienced challenging setbacks in important social, familial and vocational domains. There often appears to be important autogenic components (Mullen Behavioral Sciences and the Law (22)3, 2004), including dysthymic reactions and similar antecedents. There have been observations of possible seasonal variations in mass murders, but research to date is inadequate to establish this relationship. It is recommended behavioral sciences and mental health researchers increase research efforts on understanding mass killings, as the current socioeconomic climate may increase vulnerability to this phenomenon, and the incidents are not well understood despite their notoriety.

Mass murder: An analysis of extreme violence

2003

Mass murder involves the slaughter of four or more victims by one or a few assailants within a single event, lasting but a few minutes or as long as several hours. More than just arbitrary, using this minimum body count-as opposed to a two-or three-victim threshold suggested by others (e.g., Ressler et al., 1988, Holmes and)-helps to distinguish multiple killing from homicide generally. Moreover, by restricting our attention to acts committed by one or a few offenders, our working definition of multiple homicide also excludes highly organized or institutionalized killings (e.g., war crimes and large-scale acts of political terrorism as well as certain acts of highly organized crime rings). Although state-sponsored killings are important in their own right, they may be better explained through the theories and methods of political science than criminology. Thus, for example, the definition of multiple homicide would include the crimes committed by Charles Manson and his followers, but not those of Hitler's Third Reich, or the 9/11 terrorists, despite some similarities in the operations of authority. 4

Rethinking Serial Murder, Spree Killing, and Atrocities: Beyond the Usual Distinctions

Multiple killings by serial or spree killers and the mass violence seen in war crimes and other atrocities have typically been understood as discrete category types, which can foster the view that there are fundamentally different kinds of human beings, including "deviants" who are born evil and innately given to sadism or a callous lack of empathy. In contrast, this book considers the violence of these "deviants" in terms of larger questions about human violence. Therefore, in addition to describing the life histories of a sample of individual serial and spree murderers, the book includes analysis of macro-level phenomena, such as genocide, mass rape and killing, and torture occurring under conditions of war, state authorization, or political upheaval. The chief claim of the book is that, given the "right" combination of factors occurring at different levels of analysis, virtually anyone can emerge as a killer or perpetrator of atrocities. While it is crucial to understand individual killers in terms of the details of their biographies, it is equally crucial to understand political atrocities in terms of the details of their histories, and to see that persons and groups are always the product of complexly interacting assemblage processes. was an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgia Southern University.

"Theorizing Self-Destructive Violence"

International Journal of Middle East Studies 45:4 (2013): 804-806, 2013

Department of Politics, New School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: bargub@newschool.edu The first image that the question of violence in the Middle East conjures up, especially in the West, is that of the suicide bomber. This association, etched into the political imaginary particularly over the course of the last two decades, is due neither to the number of victims suicide bombing creates (more conventional weapons of war can claim as many or more victims), nor to the identity of its victims (conventional weapons are also often directed at civilians). Rather, the potency of the image of the suicide bomber is connected to the simultaneously self-destructive and other-directed form that this act of violence takes. If the Orientalist impulse that has raised the image of the suicide bomber to iconic status is deeply problematic, it nonetheless constitutes an involuted acknowledgement of a reality: the significant rise in self-destructive violence (and not just in the Middle East). I have in mind practices such as hunger striking, self-immolation, and fatal self-mutilation, which constitute an emergent repertoire of struggle that has come to mark a certain current of radical politics around the globe. Those modalities of self-destructive violence that are not directed at others are overshadowed by suicide bombing.

Extreme mass homicide: From military massacre to genocide

Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2005

Several examples of genocide from Armenia, the Ukraine, and Rwanda, of systematic political slaughter (Cambodia), and of massacres in Nanking, My Lai, Viet Nam, and El Salvador are examined. Massacre typically occurs during wars, genocide, and political slaughter typically after a war has occurred and further conflict is feared. Political and historical factors shape the selection of a target group. One prominent feature is the belief that the target group obtained unfair advantage in the past. The social violence is then justified as revenge. Symbolic restructuring of the target group leads to their being viewed as viral or cancerous. This perception justifies the killing of nonviolent target group members on the basis of future risk. Whereas most genocides emphasize befficientQ slaughter, massacres are generally more cruel. Rape, torture, and mutilation typically precede killing. Many soldiers engage in these actions, although no information suggests they have propensities for rape, sexual sadism, or sadistic violence in civilian life. The extreme cruelty is therefore hard to explain using forensic trait theories. Social psychological theories of state-determined violence explain the transition to violence, if not the extremity observed. A suggestion is made for a form of forensic ethology that

Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence_preview.pdf

As the most comprehensive edited volume to be published on perpetrators and perpetration of mass violence, the volume sets a new agenda for perpetrator research by bringing together contributions from such diverse disciplines as political science, sociology, social psychology, history, anthropology and gender studies, allowing for a truly interdisciplinary discussion of the phenomenon of perpetration. The cross-case nature of the volume allows the reader to see patterns across case studies, bringing findings from inter alia the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the civil wars in Cambodia and Côte d’Ivoire into conversation with each other. The chapters of this volume are united by a common research interest in understanding what constitutes perpetrators as actors, what motivates them, and how dynamics behind perpetration unfold. Their attention to the interactions between disciplines and cases allows for the insights to be transported into more abstract ideas on perpetration in general. Amongst other aspects, they indicate that instead of being an extraordinary act, perpetration is often ordinary, that it is crucial to studying perpetrators and perpetration not from looking at the perpetrators as actors but by focusing on their deeds, and that there is a utility of ideologies in explaining perpetration, when we differentiate them more carefully and view them in a more nuanced light. This volume will be vital reading for students and scholars of genocide studies, human rights, conflict studies and international relations.

Autogenic massacre as a maladaptive response to status threat

Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 2010

Autogenic massacres are killings of two or more individuals in a single spree, motivated by personal problems or psychopathology (Mullen, Behavioral Sciences and the Law 2004, 22(3), 311–323). No attempts known to us have been made to explain autogenic massacres from an evolutionary psychological perspective. We sought to determine whether these massacres were likely committed by males who experienced status

Criminal or Revolutionary? Determining the Ethical Character of Emergent Terror

For the broader community, both organized crime and organized resistance elicit a mixture of fascination and apprehension. This of course is most obviously indexed not only by the multitude of literary and cinematic dramatizations of phenomena and identities that pertain to organized crime or social and political revolution, but also by the newsworthiness of those phenomena and identities. The simultaneous appeal and intimidation exerted upon us by -'real' and imagined -incarnations of organized crime and organized resistance is in part a function of the fact that both operate according to codes not commensurable with those bureaucratically implemented to sustain normative moral-civic Law and Order. In this sense, both organized crime and organized resistance can be understood to occur as instances of aberrant or abject particularism; collectivities that are repudiated by, and repudiating of, the ruling order. That is, not only are organized crime and organized resistance groups interdicted against by the Law, but their outlaw status is in fact one that is actively sought.* In contemporary world politics, the dialectic between so-called 'fundamentalist' terror networks -such as al-Qaida -and dominant Western economic powers can be read in similar terms. Beyond the self-evident interdicted and criminalized status of terror groups, suffice to observe the sensationalism with which terrorist acts and the appending 'War on Terror' have come to be framed by the gaze of the mainstream Western media. 1 Recalling Jacques Lacan's famous dictum 'Truth has the structure of fiction', it is expedient to consider the possibility that this gaze is indicative of our own unacknowledged (and unacknowledgable) libidinal investment in phantasmal figurations of cataclysmic disaster visited upon the West in general and America in particular. Indeed, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek posits that this paranoiac fixation upon images of catastrophic violence visited upon the United States, is borne out in a range of Hollywood films from Escape to New York to Independence Day, which seem to uncannily anticipate the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks (15). In light of these contiguities between the ways in which organized crime, revolutionary groups, and emergent terror are apprehended, should the latter be properly Nebula 1.3, Dec. 04 -Jan. 05 Cleveland: Criminal or Revolutionary?… 80