An investigation into the nature of violence, terror, and injury through conversations with a notorious war offender and hero to white nationalists.

Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held some conversations inside a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war offences during the Bosnian War and who became an inspiration for white nationalists. Though Stern was used about My War Offender: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide to interviewing terrorists in the field in an effort to understand their concealed motives, the conversations she acquired with Karadzic would profoundly alter her knowledge of the mechanics of fear, the motivations of violence, and the mindset of these who perpetrate mass atrocities at a state level and who-like the terrorists she had previously studied-target noncombatants, in violation of honest norms and international law.

How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbors? What’s the “ecosystem” that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders? Could anything about their personal histories, personalities, or contact with historical trauma shed light on the forming of a battle criminal’s identity towards a targeted Various other?

In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her very own deeply taken into consideration reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, a brilliant and often shockingly captivating 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 as well as seductive powers of a magnetic leader-and what can occur when you may spend many, many hours with that person.