HOW DESPOTS BECOME MASS MURDERERS

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Julia Ebner

HOW DESPOTS BECOME MASS MURDERERS

As recently as 23 February 2022, hardly anyone thought that Russian President Vladimir Putin would actually send his soldiers towards Kiev the next day. Couldn't that have been predicted? How seriously should we take the aggressive rhetoric of statesmen? Austrian extremism expert Julia Ebner is currently researching the early detection of mass murderers at Oxford University: "When Despots Become Deadly" at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Science (Magdalen College). Ebner is building on her previous research. She has analysed the language of violence used by extremists online. Her very own research method of going under cover into extremist circles has given her deep insights into the radicalisation mechanisms of groups. She has analysed how explosive it can be when personal identity is fused with a group identity. And how these could be de-radicalised before the actual use of violence. Could wars be prevented if the socio-psychological motivations of potentates were analysed?

Julia Ebner, researcher, investigative journalist, author and political consultant; works at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Science at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her books Anger (2018), Radicalisation Machines (2019), Mass Radicalisation (2023) were bestsellers.

Tessa Szyszkowitz, Falter columnist and author, was a correspondent in Moscow, Brussels, Jerusalem and London. Curator of the Philoxenia series at the Kreiskyforum, Senior Associate Fellow Royal United Services Institute in London.