Bystanders:

The notion of bystander has become an established part of the way we talk about conflict situations. The concept is widely used to discuss situations when people are in proximity to a situation of conflict, and questions arise about moral responsibility to intervene. But the focus on the actors in the trilogy tends to deflect attention from the context of action. This chapter raises questions rooted in the distinction between individually motivated acts of violence, and systemic, state-sanctioned, collective violence. While the former may be viewed as discrete incidents in which perpetrators and victims constitute a core conflict situation and bystanders in some sense ‘stand outside’ the conflict arena, in the latter the system of violence encompasses far larger numbers of people over extended periods of time and across vast swathes of territory. It is harder, when looking at systemic collective violence, to identify what might legitimately be seen as ‘outside’ the specific conflict situation. The concept of an individual bystander may therefore not be so useful in relation to a system of statesanctioned collective violence. Classic and recent approaches to bystanders suggest that it has functioned as a catch-all concept, and something of a residual category that is inherently unstable. The term may however be an appealing alibi, relevant to understanding selfrepresentations in accounts since 1945. Moreover, for historians a focus on the conditions under which bystanding behaviors are prevalent may assist in