Conclusions and Lessons

Within perpetrating structures, elite architects are able to manipulate domestic and international prejudices by perpetuating myths of non-state violence as part of their imagined exclusionary narrative, in order not only to legitimise violence but seemingly to explain or even predict it. This dimension of atrocity architecture has emerged in part as a response to the apparent rise in proxy wars and the perceived prevalence of irregular structures of violence around the world. Atrocity crimes are political acts, increasingly framed in a context of uncontrollable civilian struggle. In the modern world, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide often require a significant degree of social complicity. Perpetuating narratives of non-state violence enables state elites to encourage and sanction a spectrum of actors—civilian or otherwise—to participate in armed struggle while themselves remaining on the margins. When identity-based crimes are committed by combatants claiming to represent the perpetrating identity rather than the state, the objectives of the crimes are fulfilled as much by the symbolism of their implementation as by their violent actualisation.