The essays in this volume provide rich fodder for reflection on topics that are of urgent interest to all thinking people. Each one suggests new ways to contemplate our own role(s) in the production and promotion of evil. The authors encourage the reader to be challenged, outraged, and disturbed by what you read here. The eighth gathering of Global Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, which took place in Salzburg in March 2007, provided a look at evil past, present, and future, from a broad spectrum of disciplinary perspectives. Papers were presented on the Holocaust, genocide, violence, sadism, paedophilia, physical, verbal, and visual weapons of mass destruction, and on the effects of a variety of media on our apperception of and responses to evil. One of the overarching themes that emerged was the ethical role of the observer or witness to evil, the sense that all of our writings are, in an echo of Thomas Merton's salient phrase, the conjectures of guilty bystanders. The notion of complicity was examined from a number of angles, and imbued the gathering with a sense of urgency: that our common goal was to engender change by raising awareness of the countless and ubiquitous ways in which evil can be actively or passively carried on and promoted. The papers selected for this volume provide a representative sample of the lively, provocative, and often disturbing discussions that took place over the course of that conference. This volume also contains a few papers from a sister conference, Cultures of Violence, which was held in Oxford in 2004. These papers have been included here because of their striking relevance to the themes that emerged in the Evil conference of 2007.

This volume offers new and fascinating insights into some of the most urgent and relevant dimensions of violence in our time. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines explore some of the reasons and ways in which humans choose to harm one another. The two sections of the book engage a common theme, namely how ideological constructions influence, facilitate, and shape the understanding of our own involvement in violence. Whilst the first section focuses on one specific form of violence, namely genocide, the second explores our construction of violent images: verbally, visually, aurally, legally, socially, imaginally. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the multi-faceted and complex dimensions of violence in our contemporary, global world.

This volume is an interdisciplinary exploration of the modalities, meanings, and practices of silence in contemporary social discourse. How is silence treated in different cultures? In a globalized world, how is silence managed between and across cultures? Co-authored by a philosopher and an economist, the text draws on interviews with scholars and practitioners in fields as diverse as marine biology and African American history. International case studies are presented in operational contexts from the Black Lives Matter movement to the creation of art installations to the struggles of transgender people in Southeast Asia. The authors examine the relationship between ethics and silence, and suggest strategies to transform social praxis through greater attention to silence.