This thesis offers a comparative study of the My Lai massacre perpetrated by American soldiers during the Vietnam in War and the massacre in Bialystok carried out by a police unit operating under the Nazi regime. Using theories from social psychology in combination witha careful scrutiny of sources from criminal investigations, it seeks to elucidate the social mechanisms of perpetration in the two cases and explores how their divergent macro-level contexts facilitated distinctions in the perpetrator’s behavioural patterns and motivations. The study demonstrates that despite commonalities at the micro level, the massacres were organized in distinctive ways, featured divergent perpetrator behavioural patterns andencompassed disparities in the number of abstainers due to different macro-level contexts. The thesis provides explanations for these case variations, and it argues that new insight into the phenomenon of perpetration can be gained by adopting a comparative perspective.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-255898 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Kjerte, Emil |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Hugo Valentin-centrum |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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