Emotions have been neglected in the study of political mass violence

The study of mass atrocity abounds with references to emotions: fear, anger, horror, and hatred. Yet experts on genocide and political mass violence have had surprisingly little to say about emotion. Wary of reducing history to matters of individual psychology, historians and social scientists have rarely made emotion an object of study in its own right. But emotions are not merely psychological phenomena; they are also powerful social and political forces, deeply involved in the history of mass violence.

In a new book, Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang have brought together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to provide an in-depth analysis of emotions as they relate to the causes and dynamics of mass atrocities. The result is a new perspective on the social, political, and moral dimensions of emotions in the history of collective violence and its aftermath.