Response to Christian Gudehus

Abstract

In response to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Perpetrator Research, and in particular the Editors’ Introduction, we received an essay from Christian Gudehus, the editor in chief of Genocide Studies and Prevention, in which he raised a number of important points regarding the terminology, heuristics, focus, and ambit of JPR and of perpetrator studies as a field. We welcome this intervention and decided to take it as a starting point for an ongoing conversation about theoretical and methodological questions pertaining to the study of perpetrators and perpetration. For this issue, we invited a number of scholars from different disciplines to engage with our Editorial and the points Gudehus raised in a virtual roundtable. We hope that these kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations will become a regular feature of our journal.