Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT)

Global Community Engagement presents Dr. Alexander Hinton speaking about "Perpetrators: Genocide and the Dark Side of Humanity"

Part of the Global Community Engagement Program’s Spring 2024 “Focus on Cambodia,” marking the 45th anniversary of the end of the Cambodian genocide

Wednesday, March 20
2:30 – 3:45 pm
Zinner Forum, the Heller School

Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who usually lead unsettlingly ordinary lives. Drawing on his co-authored book Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (Stanford, 2023), and decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide and mass violence in Cambodia, and more recent research on white power extremism in the U.S., Professor Alex Hinton's talk will discuss what his research reveals about the dark side of humanity.

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Bio and Books

Dr. Alexander Hinton is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention at Rutgers University. He is the author or editor of numerous books including Why did they Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (California, 2005), which won the 2008 Stirling Award for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology, Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Links to many of his other books are below: 

• 2023 (Co-author) Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side, Stanford University Press.
• 2023 (Co-editor) The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, Oxford University Press.
• 2022 Anthropological Witness: Lesson from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Cornell University Press.
• 2021 It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US, New York University Press.
• 2019 Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation, and Dialogue, Rowman & Littlefield (Giorgio Shani and Jeremiah Alberg, co-editors).
• 2018 The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia. Oxford University Press.
• 2016 Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer, Duke University Press.
• 2015 Genocide and Mass Violence: Memory, Symptom, Recovery, Cambridge University Press (Devon Hinton, co-editor).
• 2014 Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, Duke University Press (Andrew Woolford and Jeff Benvenuto, co-editors).
• 2014 Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, Rutgers University Press. (Thomas LaPointe and Douglas Irvin, co-editors).
• 2010 Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence, Rutgers University Press.
• 2009 Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation, Duke University Press (Kevin O'Neill, co-editor).
• 2002 Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, University of California Press.
• 2002 Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, Blackwell.

Co-sponsored by the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Anthropology, and English Departments, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program, and Heller School for Social Policy and Management.