Jessica Stern [CANCELED]

UPDATE:

This event has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome JESSICA STERN—acclaimed scholar of terrorism and author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill—for a discussion of her latest book, My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide. She will be joined in conversation by author and scholar JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN, former Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International.

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 and who became an inspiration for white nationalists. 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 noncombatants, 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 personal histories, personalities, or exposure to historical trauma shed light on the formation of a war criminal’s identity in opposition to a targeted Other?

In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, a brilliant and often shockingly charming psychiatrist and poet who spent twelve years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader—and what can happen when you spend many, many hours with that person.

Praise for My War Criminal

“A gripping look into the psychology behind racialized violence and how it’s carried out, My War Criminal is a powerful and timely book. Jessica Stern draws a chilling portrait of Radovan Karadžic, giving us an eye-opening new context not only for the Bosnian War, but also of how fear can be harnessed and diverted to violent political ends.” —Senator Chris Coons

“This book is a remarkable blend of biography, history, and psychiatry—only Jessica Stern could have written it.” —Howard Gardner, author of Leading Minds

“Based on extraordinary access to a notorious Serbian leader, Jessica Stern has produced a remarkable study that both Illuminates the psychology of an individual war criminal and incisively analyzes the dynamic behind ethnic hatred and violence. Timely and compelling.” —Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security