Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing
| Published date | 01 November 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002234330604300628 |
| Date | 01 November 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
challenges facing Ethiopia today: contradictory
images of Ethiopian history, failure of actual
political decentralization and the application of
local languages. This is further illustrated in the
last two chapters, where the management of
Ethiopian federalism at the regional level is
described. The highly interesting and compre-
hensive volume is a product of a seminar focusing
on the challenges posed by ethnic federalism in
Ethiopia where the focus is not on comparative
aspirations, as is the explicit intention of this
book. This divergence is reflected in the volume,
and it could have benefited from an improved
overall coherence with the emphasis on the com-
parative aspect of Ethiopian federalism. Some
chapters contain a wealth of local details while
partly lacking the larger perspective. Even so, the
volume successfully gives insight into ‘the experi-
ment of ethnic federalism’ in Ethiopia and is
relevant for scholars interested in institutional
design in ethnically diverse societies.
Kathrine Holden
Vetlesen, Arne Johan, 2005. Evil and Human
Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. 313 pp.
ISBN 0521856949.
What is evildoing and why do some people
perform evil acts? Curiously enough, evil remains
a poorly understood phenomenon. One of the
few contemporary scholars who have analysed it
systematically is Arne Johan Vetlesen, professor of
philosophy at the University of Oslo. In Evil and
Human Agency, he investigates the question of
evil, paying special attention to collective evildo-
ing. Although Vetlesen has a philosophical back-
ground, he adopts a highly interdisciplinary
perspective, ranging from the psychological
approaches on evil by C. Fred Alford to the socio-
logical perspective on collective evil of Zygmunt
Bauman and the philosophical accounts by
Hannah Arendt. In combining these approaches,
Vetlesen creates a rich discursive climate, wherein
the cause of collective evildoing is understood as
a combination of individual character, situation
and social structures. Underlying the argument is
an ever-present awareness of the complexity of the
phenomenon of collective evildoing. Theoreti-
cally, this challenges the reader, as the argument
does not provide a simplistic understanding of
evildoing. Yet, Vetlesen’s presentation of the
theoretical frameworks he combines in his
analysis is astonishingly clear, resulting in a com-
prehensive and solid argument on collective evil-
doing. He analyses two empirical cases of
collective evildoing: the Holocaust and the ethnic
cleansing in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Here, he analyses the roles of the perpetrators,
victims and bystanders, showing how they relate
to each other in terms of human agency. A core
idea is that collective evildoing should not be
understood as a phenomenon of the past, but that
it is an ever-present possibility. All in all, Vetlesen
has developed a solid, well-structured and
groundbreaking argument that merits a core
position in the literature on collective evildoing
and genocide.
Joakim Hammerlin
Wainer, Howard, 2005. Graphic Discovery: A
Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 232
pp. ISBN 0691103011.
Data do not speak for themselves but must be dis-
played appropriately before they can yield infor-
mation. The first part of this book provides an
overview of the history of visualizing data.
Although fascinating in its own right, the real
value of this book lies in the second part, which
provides a survey of useful suggestions and pitfalls
in the display of data that everyone can learn
something from. Wainer details how tables
should be arranged to convey information in
more interesting ways and explains how common
statistical paradoxes and misunderstandings can
arise for unsuspecting analysts. For example, if
both black and white students have better maths
test scores in New Jersey than in Nebraska, how
can Nebraska have overall higher average test
scores than New Jersey? In this case, the Simpson
paradox arises since comparisons are collapsed
over a relevant third variable: a much greater
proportion of students in Nebraska is drawn
from the higher-scoring white group. Likewise,
well-intended efforts to identify ‘strivers’ from
underprivileged backgrounds who perform
better on performance tests than would be
expected are doomed to fail, as they have ignored
the regression-to-the-mean phenomenon. A core
message emerging from the book is how taking
time to explore and visualize data before plunging
into regression analysis can go a long way in
helping to understand the phenomena of interest
and avoid problems and misinterpretations due to
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 43 / number 6 / november 2006
760
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