Conclusions: I summarize some of the shortcomings of current international legal regimes for dealing adequately with grand corruption, summarize some promising avenues for doing so; evaluate the proposal to create an International Anti-Corruption Court, tackle some of the admitted shortcomings of my approach and note the convergence of current anti-corruption struggles with other social movements.

Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.

Victims’ rights, whether they take the form of a procedural right of access to justice or participation, or a substantive right to reparation, fulfil a number of important functions. Ideally, they allow victims to assert their rights, redress power imbalances manifest in violations, provide a measure of justice and furnish the victim(s) with the means to cope and rebuild their lives. They may also lead to a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing that recognises unlawful suffering, demonstrates society’s respect for, and solidarity with, the victim(s), and affirms the rule of law. In addition, victims’ rights play an important role in contributing to prevention through deterrence (punishment and/or payment of damages or other forms of reparation) and systemic changes to counter violations, such as legislative and institutional reforms. A series of open questions and challenges remain. Do the rights granted in various treaties and declarations translate into a right to reparation under international law, and, if so, does this apply in relation to all or only some particularly serious human rights violations? Who are the rights-holders and what are their entitlements? Recent developments also raise questions of coherence and effectiveness in light of the proliferation of victims’ rights in various bodies of international law.

This chapter turns to the legendary “Road to Buenos Aires,” which was widely considered the most significant trafficking route of the era. This case study illustrates how both coercion and choice functioned in the discourse and practice of migratory prostitution. When French women made official statements to the police, they strategically employed themes common to the trafficking narrative, including coercion, victimhood, and abuse. Their personal correspondence with family, in contrast, expresses how moments of both exploitation and agency punctuated their lives. Letters describe tender ties with mothers, sisters, and goddaughters; how poverty and unhappiness marked their existence in France; the everyday trials of poor migrants abroad; and expressions of wonder at the first ocean crossing. The lives of French women oscillated between moments of profound vulnerability and perceived opportunity, as reflected in their experiences of migrating and selling sex.

The book’s final chapter is a nuanced study of how political screening engaged with and altered German memory, identity, and community, as well as the national process of coming to terms with the Nazi past. This research challenges the traditional single-frame interpretation of denazification by revealing how many respondents, especially those complicit with Nazism, actively used political screening for their own benefit. It views the questionnaire as a rich and revealing record of autobiography. The emotional annotations written into Fragebögen are a window into the mind of the common German citizen and a means to understand individual mental processing of the Nazi era. This chapter argues that men and women undergoing political investigation were not passive subjects of a mandatory denazification program, but active and engaged participants who used the questionnaire, consciously and subconsciously, for their own benefit. The Fragebogen was therefore not simply a bureaucratic screening instrument of the occupying armies, but also an unintended emancipatory device that gave voice to Germans, inviting them to participate in the determination of their own fate.

Continuing with Lina’s story, this chapter looks into the various ways in which the FARC victimhood frame is contested. Starting with the government, and drawing on interviews with soldiers, psychologists, police officers, and other disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration experts, this chapter outlines the government’s main contestation of the guerrilla victimhood frame: specifically, that they are perpetrators against their own comrades, especially the female ones. But the paramilitaries – illustrated by stories from various former AUC members – also contest the guerrilla victimhood frame with frames of their own, saying that they are the true self-defense forces and that they never would have had to take up guns if not for the guerrillas. This chapter shows the complexity and blurred lines between perpetrators and victims and analyzes the problematic outcomes of such contentious and highly gendered framing contests when ex-combatants demobilize and try to become civilians alongside each other.

This chapter lays out the background of the current conflict in Colombia, explaining why, despite the peace agreement in 2016, Colombia is far from a “post-conflict” country. This chapter discusses the disputes around the peace agreement, the history of previous peace agreements and attempted disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs in Colombia, and the ongoing problems with ex-combatant unemployment, reintegration, and recidivism into violence and illegal activities. The chapter also discusses how hierarchies of victimhood have become a flashpoint in the Colombian peace process, especially regarding the government’s resistance to including victims of state violence in reparations process.

Enns reflects on the meaning of guilt and responsibility in the context of Indigenous struggles in Canada. While rarely uncomplicated, the question of who is to blame poses a unique challenge in the case of historical atrocities with enduring legacies. When those guilty of the original violations are long dead, yet leave behind institutions that perpetuate the conditions for oppression and privilege, it is tempting to assign collective guilt. With the help of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who argued in the aftermath of World War II for a robust understanding of collective responsibility, distinct from individual guilt, Enns navigates the effects of oversimplifying these concepts. Central to her discussion is the dramatic shift in contemporary scholarly and public discourses on victimhood and identity – on victimhood as identity – since Arendt famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, no one is.” With reference to the parallel ways in which victimhood is assumed as a permanent state and granted moral authority in North American Indigenous and anti-Black racism struggles, Enns notes the limits of an identity-based politics, and argues for a richer understanding of collective responsibility – one that will create a future world with a better inheritance.

Akenroye and Clarke discuss the difficulties of fitting the moral ambiguities of violent conflict into the neat victim/perpetrator binaries of international criminal law. At center stage in this chapter is a discussion of the trial of Dominic Ongwen in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The trial centered on the culpability of a man whose horrific acts of violence in the Ugandan civil war of the early 2000s led the ICC to issue 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity against him. The ambiguities of the case and the reference point of the trial’s arguments center on Ongwen’s recruitment as a child soldier under the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army headman, Joseph Kony. At what point does a child’s transition into adulthood change the conditions of their responsibility for crime? At what point is a child soldier expected to repudiate his or her superiors and escape the scene of atrocity? And if repudiation and escape are called for in this and other cases of this kind, how might this example extend to other forms of aberrant socialization, the “brainwashing,” for example, that can lead an entire nation to accept and act on ideas of the inhumanity and need to eliminate a national minority?

Research has well established that narrative was used prior to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a tool to construct enemies and facilitate genocidal violence. Political leaders, radio narrators, and newspaper editors especially influenced these narratives through the use of propaganda and dehumanizing language. In light of new research, this chapter asks a different question: What is the role of narratives in the post-genocide construction of victim identity? Through in-depth interviews conducted with 100 Rwandan genocide survivors, former perpetrators, ordinary citizens, and key informants, this chapter finds that people perform their experiences and recall their identities differently in national, local, and private commemorative spaces. Rwandans negotiate between official memorialization and alternative forms of remembering in order to make meaning of their experiences during the genocide. Narrative analysis shows the complicated interplay between the “big story” expressed by the state, and other stories told in different spaces and places. As these stories coincide, coexist, compete, and change over time, they reshape victim identity as complex, dynamic, and dependent on whether victimhood is defined by the law, the state, or individual self-perceptions. The chapter presents broader implications of the multiple relationships between narratives and victim identities for other post-atrocity settings.

Chapter 2, “The Killing Years,” explains the two-wave Nazi police genocide against the intelligentsia in 1939–1940, its fallout, and how these initial killing campaigns shaped the Nazi German occupation administration for Poland. German anti-intelligentsia campaigning was bloody but ultimately drove the resistance it attempted to thwart. The first campaign, codenamed Operation Tannenberg, was coordinated with the military campaign in 1939 but delayed in Warsaw because of the siege. Tannenberg went awry and was complicated by the circumstances of the invasion and incoming occupation. After Nazi Germany established a civilian occupation under general governor Hans Frank, Frank revived anti-intelligentsia killing with his new campaign, the Extraordinary Pacification Action (AB-Aktion). This campaign’s violence shocked Poles and provoked the resistance it was intended to achieve. This chapter argues that the two Nazi genocidal campaigns failed but shaped the nature of Nazi occupation administration, and encouraged the first violent Polish resistance in response.