Abstract
Robert Kraft’s book, Violent Accounts, offers readers both more and less than its subtitle, Understanding the Psychology of Perpetrators through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, suggests. This book provides a study of former perpetrator’s rationales but even more, Kraft valuably considers how challenges to perpetrators, especially by victims, further shapes individual and societal understandings about facts of the past and possibilities for the future. Readers get less understanding insofar as Kraft pays insufficient attention to some of the specificities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and its context, South Africa.
The primary source materials upon which this book is based are the transcripts and videos of testimony by people who self-identified as perpetrators to South Africa’s TRC. Under the TRC’s enabling legislation, perpetrators offered truth in exchange for amnesty from criminal prosecution for their violent crimes in upholding or challenging apartheid prior to South Africa becoming a democracy in 1994. Kraft situates his research as critically building upon qualitative studies by researchers such as Stanley Milgram (1963, 1974), Philip Zimbardo (1973, 2004, 2007), Christopher Browning (1998), and Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher (2007) who have sought to understand how and why systemic abuse occurs or is developed. Kraft adapted a phenomenological approach (which he terms a “progressive phenomenological analysis”) and drew on a wide range of models, concepts, and theories, such as Moghaddam’s (2005) staircase model of terrorism, Baumeister’s (1997) magnitude gap, and Žižek’s (2006) parallax, to deepen—effectively, in my mind—his interpretation of the accounts.
The heart of the book’s contribution are in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapter 3 presents and analyses the remembered accounts of perpetrators to argue that their collective violence can be explained through Moghaddam’s three-level model that highlights three processes: platform (a person’s baseline memories, experiences, and social knowledge), priming (more immediate and focused events or messages that politicize and galvanize), and trigger (an immediate impetus to action). Each of these processes has multiple components. Platforms include ideology, specific memories, a belief in inevitability or lack of choice, and dignity, pride, status, or satisfaction in aligning with an organization and its cause. Priming includes indoctrination and training, “memories of specific events … [that] supported the prevailing ideology” (p. 71), intellectual and moral justifications to use violence, war as an imperative, the power of slogans, moral righteousness, incremental or cumulative engagement in ever more serious violence, the esprit de corps of belonging, being an innovator in following organizational imperatives that are not spelled out explicitly, and experiencing agency (and recognizing interactionist rather than merely situationist explanations for behaviour). Triggers involve near automated responses, largely facilitated by platforms and priming. Furthermore, triggers to actually engage in the work of violence differ depending on an actor’s location in a complex hierarchical organization. In violent organizations, triggers for executives are agreements about problem resolution, whereas for midlevel managers of violent groups, “the trigger is the specific directive to solve the problem by any means necessary, with the clear implication that secrecy and extralegal methods are required” (p. 83). Rationales and motivations are part of priming so that there is technical focus on successful action when it is time for the violent trigger.
Chapter 3 offers valuable insights to understanding perpetrators but is marred by the author’s failure to explore important distinctions between and among the perpetrators, probably based in the newness of the South African reality to Kraft. His analysis of testimony revealed that liberation movement forces and apartheid government forces had much in common structurally: testimony included “the same discernible themes about perpetrating violence, about the reactions to this violence, and about its justification, with explicit commonalities in the experiences of the perpetrators and in the influence of their organizations” (p. 18). Both the liberation movement and apartheid organizations were hierarchical, and Kraft found that perpetrators enjoyed similar relationships with their respective organizations. (The violence of those in grassroots groups was less likely to be structured or planned.) Parallels also included unquestioning beliefs in ideology and moral righteousness. At a bird’s eye view, Kraft’s emphasis on structural commonality makes sense.
In contrast, a closer reading of some of the evidence Kraft provides suggests that which organization a particular perpetrator belonged to may make a difference. Frequently, when Kraft provides examples as evidence of specific points within the elements of platform, priming, and trigger, the particular substantiation comes only from one “side” in the perpetrator triangle of state, liberation movements, and spontaneous grassroots. For instance, although Kraft correctly notes parallels in state and liberation movement actors’ perceptions of threat and being at war, threats (e.g. communism) are often more abstract for state actors but more visceral (e.g. repression) for their anti-apartheid counterparts. Moreover, profoundly shaping memories tend to occur at quite different moments in their paths to violence work. Analysis of actors’ backgrounds also deserved more nuance: the relatively homogeneous backgrounds of state actors versus the greater sociological, demographic, and ideological contexts of anti-apartheid forces invite questions about differences and well as similarities in shaping platform and priming.
I had other questions that I thought needed probing. In highlighting early experience and specific memories in the creation of platform, Kraft tantalizing notes, but unfortunately does not pursue, that the state perpetrators were not especially healthy psychologically, something that was cultivated by their insular socialization and ‘dogged unwillingness to conceive of another person’s humanity’ (p. 64). He also notes, but does not sufficiently develop, the important fact of adolescence and youth in many of the perpetrators aligned with the liberation movements. There are other lacuna. Is “sustained violence work” (e.g. p. 69) as generic and ubiquitous as Kraft suggests? Is there, for example, a difference for being trained for insurgent warfare versus torture? There is almost no consideration of how race in particular, but also gender, language, and other crucial factors that shaped the organizational cultures of the liberation movements, apartheid police agencies, and other groups, may have affected how “violence work” was and was not undertaken. Why were the majority of qualifying applicants for amnesty from the African National Congress and its allied organizations when the majority of illegal apartheid violence was state-sponsored violence, rather than the violence of the liberation movements? (Kraft correctly notes that new information about violence, especially state violence, was learned because of perpetrator testimony. But the paucity of high-level state officials who testified means that there is much we still do not know.)
Chapters 4 and 5 were my favorite parts of the book. Chapter 4 concerns the problems of truth. One of Kraft’s fine contributions is his emphasis that the nature and kinds of truths that were revealed (including to dispel lies) resulted from the format of the Amnesty Hearings which allowed survivors and victims of the perpetrator to challenge the perpetrator’s testimony: “Allowing the victims and their counsel to confront the perpetrators and ask questions provided impetus for unprecedented revelations” (p. 41). The TRC itself identified four kinds of truth—factual, personal, social, and restorative truths—and to some extent recognized that different truths could coexist. Kraft takes these insights further, whether showing how victims reshaped narratives and perceptions, how contradictory truths may be irreconcilable parallax truths, and how the problems of truth go to the heart of the challenge of reconciliation.
Chapter 5 examines the subject of reconciliation in a number of useful ways. I very much appreciated the distinctions clearly drawn between forgiveness and reconciliation, and then, using the work of Andrews (2000), the employment of the categories of unilateral forgiveness and reconciliation as negotiated forgiveness. Using the testimony of perpetrators and survivors or victims, Kraft further offered nuance in exploring why there is no necessary relationship between forgiveness, reconciliation, and supporting amnesty. Additional themes of value included the role of religion, especially Christianity, in shaping ideas of reconciliation, how different perceptions of truth inevitably haunt reconciliation for both individuals and societies, and how the multiple truths that emerged or remained hidden varied responses. Consistent with the multiplicity of truths were a multiplicity of ideas about reconciliation, a reality that is inevitable.
In the final chapter and Conclusion, Kraft takes somewhat of a policy turn to offer recommendations for future truth commissions, directly and indirectly addressing some of the weaknesses of the TRC identified both by himself and by many other commentators. Given his focus on perpetrators, one noteworthy recommendation was his call to recognize and respond to the “emotionally punishing and potentially endangering” (pp. 140–141) consequences testifying has for perpetrators. That humanizing impulse is especially challenging in our current period of demonization and division.