Rethinking Serial Murder, Spree Killing, and Atrocities

Multiple killings by serial or spree killers and the mass violence seen in war crimes and other atrocities have typically been understood as discrete category types, which can foster the view that there are fundamentally different kinds of human beings, including "deviants" who are innately given to sadism or lack of empathy. This book considers the violence of these "deviants" in terms of larger questions about human violence, including analysis of macro-level phenomena such as genocide, mass rape and killing, and torture occurring under conditions of war, state authorization, or political upheaval.