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The Helen Bamber Centre for the study of conflict and mass violence is a multi‐disciplinary research centre based at Kingston University, UK. It has a research team working on a range of regional conflicts and themes in the study of conflict, particularly genocide. In each issue of PPR, the team will report on what they see as the major issues in international conflict and human rights and how they will unfold over the next quarter.

Annotation Remembering Mass Violence breaks new ground in oral history, new media, and performance studies by exploring what is at stake when we attempt to represent war, genocide, and other violations of human rights in a variety of creative works. A model of community-university collaboration, it includes contributions from scholars in a wide range of disciplines, survivors of mass violence, and performers and artists who have created works based on these events. This anthology is global in focus, with essays on Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. At its core is a productive tension between public and private memory, a dialogue between autobiography and biography, and between individual experience and societal transformation. Remembering Mass Violence will appeal to oral historians, digital practitioners and performance-based artists around the world, as well researchers and activists involved in human rights research, migration studies, and genocide studies

Liminal Minorities addresses the question of why some religious minorities provoke the ire of majoritarian groups and become targets of organized violence, even though they lack significant power and pose no political threat. Güneş Murat Tezcür argues that these faith groups are stigmatized across generations, as they lack theological recognition and social acceptance from the dominant religious group. Religious justifications of violence have a strong mobilization power when directed against liminal minorities, which makes these groups particularly vulnerable to mass violence during periods of political change. Offering the first comparative-historical study of mass atrocities against religious minorities in Muslim societies, Tezcür focuses on two case studies - the Islamic State's genocidal attacks against the Yezidis in northern Iraq in the 2010s and massacres of Alevis in Turkey in the 1970s and 1990s - while also addressing discrimination and violence against followers of the Bahá'í faith in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan and Indonesia. Analyzing a variety of original sources, including interviews with survivors and court documents, Tezcür reveals how religious stigmatization and political resentment motivate ordinary people to participate in mass atrocities.

This multidisciplinary review links three areas of legitimate inquiry for practitioners of medicine and public health. The first is occurrences of mass violence or genocide perpetrated against vulnerable populations, with a focus on the failure of national and international mechanisms to prevent or predict such violence. The second is evolving concepts of national sovereignty and an emerging framework in which the imperative to assist vulnerable populations supersedes a state's right to self determination. The last is how medical, public health, and other systems of surveillance and rapid assessment of mass violence can accelerate public awareness and facilitate structured, consistent political decision making to prevent mass violence and to provide international humanitarian assistance.

This article examines the formulation and implementation of Indonesian Army policy regarding the detention of communists and other leftists in Indonesia from 1965 to 1968. The article highlights the relationship between the two primary forms of violence-killings and detentions-in the aftermath of the failed September 30th Movement. Placing detentions at the center of analysis changes our understanding of the mass violence in several ways. First, it demonstrates that the policy to detain and "classify" large numbers of suspected communists helped to fuel the attack on the political Left. Second, it shifts the locus of analysis away from identification of the perpetrators and victims and instead seeks to highlight the processes that enabled and shaped the violence. Third, by examining the ratio between the estimated number of individuals killed and the number of individuals who remained alive in detention at a particular point in time, the article proposes a new explanation for variation in the scale and intensity of mass violence across Indonesia. This analysis encourages comparison across a much wider range of cases within Indonesia than has previously been attempted and provides a framework for future work on the mass violence in Indonesia as well as in other cases in which mass detentions or forced relocations preceded mass killings. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

After more than a decade of armed conflict in Syria, few perpetrators of mass violence have been held accountable for their actions. The Assad regime is the prime sponsor of impunity for these human rights abuses, but global and regional powers also bear responsibility for allowing the perpetuation of atrocities.

Within a year, the Syrian uprising in March 2011 developed into a civil war that gradually escalated and within 9 years killed over half a million people, displaced half the country's prewar population, devastated the economy, and destabilized the entire region, and even the world. The Syrian civil war split the country into four factions that were continuously at war with each other with intermittent, unstable ceasefires: the Assad regime, the various rebel groups, the Kurds, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The Assad regime was responsible for the bulk of the violence against civilians, qualitatively and quantitatively. Its violent crackdown on the mass protests in Syria became more extensive and intensive throughout the first years of the conflict. A key aspect of the regime's repression against the population was its use of paramilitary forces, the so-called " Shabbiha," a catch-all category for irregular, pro-government militias dressed in (semi-)civilian gear and linked organically to the regime. From 2012 onward, they gradually became formalized, first in the Popular Committees (اللجان الشعبيه), and then in the National Defense Forces (قوات الدفاع الوطني) (NDF). Their violence strongly polarized sectarian relations in Syria, and therefore the Shabbiha are vital to understanding the broader conflict. This article will look at the mobilization and violence of the Shabbiha in the city of Homs. It is based on a combination of sources including ethnographic research, interviews with Shabbiha members, social media content, video clips, leaked documents, and testimonies of victims and other eye witnesses.

Mass violence—killings and other forms of violence that aim at exterminating large groups of people—is often called a tragedy. The trope can be found in testimonies of victimization, justifications of perpetration, journalistic, political, and academic language as well as in popular parlance. The article examines the divergent usages of the travelling trope of tragedy with particular emphasis on its role in forming justificatory discourse. The issue at stake is that the trope of tragedy does not remain confined to outright justifications such as juridical legitimization, moral vindication, political propaganda etc., but permeates condemnation and critique as well. The rationale of the analysis is that justifications of acts of mass violence that are negotiated in key areas of the cultural canon give a culturally specific, often identificatory, meaning to acts that are, from a critical perspective, mostly either considered senseless or comprehended in economic and sociopolitical terms. Yet it is largely owing to justificatory discourses that acts of mass violence do not remain single, exorbitant events, but have a lasting impact by shaping the linguistic and heuristic framework of their subsequent evaluation. When condemnation and critique adopt these terminologies and frameworks—such as the notion of purity underlying the term 'ethnic cleansing', or the ethnopolitical paradigm informing the concept of genocide—this effects an uneasy mimetic participation in transmitting justifications of mass violence. The trope of tragedy makes it possible to address the issue of mimetic participation by drawing attention to the audience as an indispensable element of the discourse.

This work critically examines standard assumptions of transitional justice through the lens of survivors' standpoints, and argues for more responsive and place-based approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations.

This striking compilation of essays surveys a variety of views about the 1965 mass violence in Indonesia and current efforts to understand it. The book is the product of an oral history project involving senior and young researchers from Yogyakarta. The accounts it presents include a military man who continues to see the violence as justified and refuses survivors the status of victim; two Muslims who believe that the Communist were and continue to remain a threat to society; and a Catholic activist who reflects on how they were manipulated to support the violence. These accounts are complemented by the views of survivors of the violence, some of whom see this as a national problem that goes far beyond individual suffering. This book provides a valuable window into why this past remains contested today and some of the obstacles to reconciliation and full rehabilitation of survivors.

How do interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court influence representations of mass violence? What images arise instead from the humanitarianism and diplomacy fields? How are these competing perspectives communicated to the public via mass media? Zooming in on the case of Darfur, Joachim J. Savelsberg analyzes more than three thousand news reports and opinion pieces and interviews leading newspaper correspondents, NGO experts, and foreign ministry officials from eight countries to show the dramatic differences in the framing of mass violence around the world and across social fields.