My War Criminal

An investigation into the nature of violence, terror, and trauma through the lens of conversations with a notorious war criminal Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War. Though Stern was used to interviewing terrorists in the field in an effort to understand their hidden motives, the conversations she had with Karadzic would profoundly alter her understanding of the mechanics of fear, the motivations of violence, and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities at a state level and who--like the terrorists she had previously studied--target non-combatants, in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbors?

What is the "ecosystem" that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders? Could anything about their per