Keele Research Repository

The problem of complicity in regime violence has remained prevalent in trials against heads of state as well as in attempts to promote justice and reconciliation programs following civil wars where a majority of the population is implicated in the commission of crimes against humanity and genocide. By re-defining complicity as 'social' complicity, this project aims to provide a different lens for understanding the ways in which regime violence is legitimized. In doing so, the project uses the work Leopold Sacher-Masoch to look at social complicity through the lens of 'transubstantiatory violence. It is argued throughout that transubstantiatory violence produces social complicity and in doing so provides legitimacy to otherwise illegitimate violence. Furthermore, this project will take Iraq as a site of investigation in order to think through the relationship between regime violence and social complicity. In this sense, regime violence is looked at within the space of chthonic security as opposed to that of war. Overall, the aim of this project is to provide a means through which it is possible to begin understanding the aestheticization of violence as a legitimizing tool for regime violence undertaken in the name of 'security'.