The Ethics of Representing Perpetrators in Documentaries on Genocide

Current discourse on the representation of genocide claims that we are experiencing “the 
shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator” (Morag, 2020: 3). This raises ethical 
concerns over why and how documentaries engage with perpetrators. Based on an assessment of 
203 documentaries on 7 genocides, my paper makes three kinds of contribution in addressing these 
concerns: 1) It discusses the ethics of representing perpetrators in archival footage, reenactments, 
or interviews in a wider corpus than those covered in recent discussions (Canet, 2019; Morag, 2020). 
2) It uncovers a broad range of ethical reasons for why documentary filmmakers engage with 
perpetrators, rather than seeking to establish a singular ethical ground for this engagement. This 
approach can do better justice to the varying cultural, historical, and political contexts of the 
respective genocides, the different production contexts and target audiences of the documentaries, 
and the different styles and types of documentaries that inform the ethics of perpetrator 
representation. 3) It introduces two broad categories of perpetrator representation in 
documentaries that conceptualize the ethical purposes of this engagement differently.