REPERCRI RESEARCH GROUP

This research group has as its objective to promote the interdisciplinary study on the figure of the the perpetrator and the perpetration of acts of mass violence, particularly in the forms of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism. From the final decades of the 20^th century the synonymy between victim and trauma has fractured and the perpetrator has acquired the status of an entity in and of itself in social and academic reflection, particularly as a consequence of the growing participation of ordinary executioners in the committing of this type of crimes.

Although the phenomenon brings together the interest of a varied number of disciplines (history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, law and criminology), the cultural sphere (art, literature, popular and media culture) is especially revealing as far as the symptoms, fantasies and reworkings around a figure who embodies evil. Our project proposes to map out some of the emotions such as empathy, fascination, fear and heat that stem from the emerging (and threatening) figure of the perpetrator. The research in question seeks to respond to three questions: who is considered a perpetrator, what are the narrative forms in which the perpetrator interacts with others (victims, witnesses) and how is the perpetrator incarnated through images which migrate unceasingly in the media world. These three questions are expressed in the triad ‘concepts, narrative and images’.