As Russia's War Crimes Mount, a Look Back at Pathways Toward, and Away from, Atrocity

Is there a way to stifle the cascade of societal decisions that turn one man's craven strategy into a slaughter?

As Vladimir Putin’s mass invasion of Ukraine enters its second year, I’m reposting this piece from the early weeks of the war, which centers on this question:

Is there a way to substitute societal circuit breakers for the trigger points that turn one man's strategy into an atrocity?

It's one thing for an autocrat to order an invasion, or should I say "special military operation." It's another for controlled media to foment hate, for generals and lieutenants to pass the order along. It's another for each soldier to pull a trigger or pilot to drop a bomb or missile operator to punch a key. And then there it is - an atrocity.

In the third week of the Ukraine invasion, as wrenching images emerged showing how a bomb blast shredded a Mariupol maternity hospital, reportedly killing three and injuring many more, the path from strategy to atrocity came up in a remarkable Zoom event with Ukrainian scholars describing the invasion's impacts from their vulnerable vantage points on the ground. (Watch below.)

The participants explored a range of urgent issues, including scholars dropping laptops to pick up rifles, Ukraine's efforts to deploy cyber defenses, the huge and still-unfolding impact of the invasion on global grain flows (I'll be writing more on that soon) and concerns that Ukraine could lose its vital human capital in the flood of refugees, including hundreds of scholars and scientists. (A specific plea was made to universities across the West not only to host scholars in exile but build programs with Ukrainian schools so they can return.) I encourage you to watch the discussion on YouTube below.

But one moment stood out for me, raising the question I highlighted above.

Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ @Revkin

Of all the reflections on #putinswar and the path from one man's depravity to #warcrimes, none sticks with me more than that of 🇺🇦's @Mylovanov: 🧵 "What Russia is doing is some kind of disease. It gets the people. It got to..the Germans who were Nazis in the 20th century...

"Some kind of disease"

Toward the end of the hour, Tymofiy Mylovanov, the president of the Kyiv School of Economics, an adviser to the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky and former minister of economic development, trade, and agriculture for Ukraine, reflected on the simple horror of this moment, widening out to spasmodic violence as something that emerges in human societies like a disease:

It's a humanitarian issue. It's really not politics. What Russia is doing is some kind of disease. It gets the people. It got to Nazis, the Germans who were Nazis in the 20th century, It was with Stalin in Holodomor and other atrocities he committed to his own people. And Russia is known for committing atrocities to their own people.

And what are they doing to their own people right now? They're slaughtering their military. And they are also kind of taking the soul, the humanity, out of the future generations for Russia.

This is really, really damaging. And it's a really fundamental public health issue, when a country gets sick. So it's not just politics. It's not just economics. It's really something that we as humankind have to learn to prevent so it doesn't get to that stage where humans, some individual humans, press buttons and make orders to kill hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of other humans and everyone in the chain of command just executes it as if it were an order, or 'I am apolitical; I'm staying out of it.'

You know, you can't stay out of it. You have to take a side because it's about humanity. And it's a public health issue. It's threatening humanity as a species. It's a big issue. We just forget it and we need to make sure we learn to prevent it. It's like climate change. We have to learn so we survive as humankind. We have to learn to prevent it in the future. Thank you for your solidarity and thank you for empathy.

Here's the full hour, queued up to the relevant section (and here's a super rough transcript):

I was deeply struck by Mylovanov's comments, given my focus for decades on weak spots in human thinking and systems that I and others worry could be our species' undoing as our capacities for harm seemingly outrun our wider awareness and ethics.

But I also paused to check my reactions against the work and sentiments of experts more deeply dug in on dangerous decision making, the conditions that spark atrocities and its most monstrous form - genocide. I sent Mylovanov's comments to several scholars and practitioners in this arena.

The complexity of evil

The first response came back from Timothy Williams, who holds the remarkable title Professor of Insecurity and Social Order at the Bundeswehr Universität München and is author of “The Complexity of Evil - Perpetration and Genocide” (click the title to read the introduction). He expressed deep concern with the framing and sentiment:

Thanks for reaching out and sharing this with me. I find this kind of rhetoric deeply disturbing and quite worrying. Nothing in the research on atrocity, political violence or even genocide suggests that there is such a thing as a pathological state that countries can enter into that make them inherently more likely to be violent or commit atrocity.

This is a little reminiscent of the Goldhagen debate in the 1990s in which Daniel Jonah Goldhagen suggested his ideas of ‘eliminationist antisemistism’ that was supposed to be inherently part of the German nature and Germans in and of themselves. The great work of Christopher Browning and many others since has categorically shown this to be problematic and false. [AR: Explore that debate here and here.]

Yes, certain types of ideologies can come to be dominant in specific states that allow atrocities to happen. Certain kinds of discourses become speakable and practices actable, but these are never pathological or permanent, but will thrive or retreat as political and other societal elites choose to forward them or distance themselves from them.

My research (e.g. my book Complexity of Evil) shows that at the low level perpetrators of atrocity participate for myriad reasons, ideology only being part of this (and pathology thus a highly problematic idea); while at the same time, atrocities are tied into political strategy. Suggesting a pathology of the Russian people removes the agency [that] very much needs to be put on Putin and his highest leadership, it ignores dynamics of increasing isolation around him; political strategic, social dynamical and emotional explanations are much more important to understand this.

Quite to the contrary, this kind of rhetoric that pathologizes entire peoples is more common by people about to commit atrocity themselves, as it can serve a justificatory function.... I am not suggesting this is the function that it is fulfilling in this conversation but I would say that this kind of rhetoric - if widely known among Ukrainian troops - would facilitate the commission of war crimes against Russian soldiers or prisoners-of-war.

Williams added, "As Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars I co-signed this statement, condemning the Russian pre-text of genocide; it is not directly related to the comments you shared, but it does highlight how this conflict is rhetorically being embedded in ‘larger’ contexts and referrals to genocide on both sides."

Williams gave an insightful talk [before the war] for the Kyiv-based Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center building on the themes in his book, centering on deep research he did in Cambodia:

Watch the talk here

I included Michele Wucker in the same email query. Wucker is a writer and consultant whose focus is crisis anticipation. (Read The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore.)

Here's her reply:

I see this differently from Tim. It’s not pathologizing people per se but rather the ideas and ideologies that take over and represent as symptoms like violence.

The war as a disease analogy can be useful in a different sense. Here in Chicago, a respected nonviolence group, Cure Violence (formerly known as Ceasefire), uses “gun violence as virus” language in its compelling work.

Also, when we were working on Dangerous Speech at the World Policy Institute, one of our partners was a Dutch NGO that used language around “inoculating” against misinformation and incitement to mass atrocities.

I'll be adding more input.

Please post comments with your thoughts, experiences and links to other useful information or tools.

I'm adding a batch of resources and readings below, but before you scroll down please do circle back and watch the entire discussion of Vladimir Putin's catastrophic attack on Ukraine with the Kyiv School of Economics scholars. Setting aside high-level debates about what triggers atrocities, the people of Ukraine urgently need your help right now. The school also has a fundraising campaign under way.

The webinar was arranged by Oxana Shevel, a Ukraine-born professor of political science at Tufts University who, among other efforts, studies "challenges to democratization in the post-Soviet region." Panelists from the Kyiv School of Economics included Tymofiy Mylovanov, Anna Bulakh of the school’s Hybrid Warfare Task Force, Tymofii Brik, dean of sociological research, Nataliia Shapoval, vice president for policy research at the school, and Oleg Nivievskyi, a professor and coordinator of the UaFoodTrade research project.

They all encouraged people outside of Ukraine to reach out to them directly.

Here's a fresh tweet from Anna Bulakh:

Anna Bulakh @Bulakh_Anna

You can’t underestimate the strongest fabric in #Ukraine national security building — the network of citizens unified by one big idea — defend their homeland and families.Their will to keep fighting, institutionalised engagement with the gov, ie. territorial defence, volunteering

Resources

Making Atrocity Prevention Effective - a March 2018 conference organized under the Atrocity Prevention Research Project, sponsored in part by the Columbia Global Policy Initiative. Here's the final report.

The Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, with help from Columbia University, produced a series of reports on “National Mechanisms for the Prevention of Genocide and other Atrocity Crimes" in recent years, with examples of prevention initiatives and projects in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Paraguay, Costa Rica and the United States. Please see their other resources here.

Organizations and initiatives

• Cure Violence Global

• PeaceDirect

• The Sustaining Peace Project (Columbia University)

• Alliance for Peacebuilding

Finally, I greatly appreciated the advice and roadmap that were offered in 2018 at a U.N. event on genocide by Agnès Callamard, who last spring became secretary general of Amnesty International and was previously, among other activities, director of Columbia University's Global Freedom of Expression initiative.

Her speech was on "The prevention of atrocity crimes and social media: challenges and opportunities," but her capping comment resonates far beyond the internet:

A friend of mine once told me that it is not enough to challenge a perverse narrative, you have to replace it with another and the only thing that can displace a story is a story. That too is part of how we respond to genocides and prevent them. We tell a compelling, empowering and dignified story; more powerful than that told by the perpetrators of yesterday’s and today’s genocide.

A Story of connection across neighborhoods

A Story of humanity across differences

A Story of empathy against indifference

A Story of hope against hatred

Read Jeremy Faust's dispatch providing an American emergency doctor's view of the attack on the Ukraine hospital.

Parting wisdom

For moments when there is still dialogue, when language might still determine if a path is toward violence or accommodation, here's the Irish poet and conflict mediator Pádraig Ó Tuama from a recent Sustain What episode on "language as a conflict trap or peace pathway":

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