Out now: JPR Issue 8.1

We are pleased to share our December issue of the Journal of Perpetrator Research with you! This substantial issue brings together both historical examples and contemporary cases, from Nigeria to Romania, showing how the interaction of legal, extra-legal, institutional and ideological regimes and practices define perpetration of mass violence.

The issue features four standalone articles, a special section comprising five articles, and six book reviews. The standalone articles cover a wide range of themes from authoritarian governments’ different responses to nonviolent resistance; theoretical interventions that rethink the concept of dehumanization; analyses of how perpetrators explain their own and others’ actions; and close readings of theatre plays that highlight perpetrator trauma, implicated subjects, and the limits of a simple perpetrator–victim binary. The special section on Holocaust Perpetrators and the Law examines the ways in which legal frameworks, judicial practices, extra-legal mechanisms, institutional cultures and perpetrators’ legal awareness shaped the enactment and justification of violence in Germany and Romania.

The issue concludes with six book reviews, including Hagar Abdalbar’s review of Maged Mandour’s Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge (I.B.Tauris, 2024); Sabah Carrim’s review of Bruce Robbins’ Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford University Press, 2025); Cora Cuenca-Navarrete’s review of Vicente Sánchez-Biosca’s The Death in Their Eyes: What Perpetrator Images Perpetrate (Berghahn Books, 2024, trans. by Martin Boyd); Ivan Stacy’s review of Stephanie Bird’s Responses to Nazi Perpetration in Fiction: Complicity and Continuities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); Donald L. Wallace’s review of Brett E. Sterling’s Hermann Broch and Mass Hysteria: Theory and Representation in the Age of Extremes (Camden House, 2022) and Maximilian Wegener’s review of The Oxford Handbook on Atrocity Crimes edited by Barbora Holá, Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, and Maartje Weerdesteijn (Oxford University Press, 2022).

You can download the full issue or individual articles here.