‘’Back then, in the Corona…’’ As numbers of the COVID-infected were rising across Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), over the summer and into the autumn of 2020, this phrase appeared as a common opening to individual stories and a new temporal reference that replaced “the war” as the major landmark in personal and collective lives. Corona had already become the past, equated with the days of the lockdown, even though more COVID-19 infections came after the lockdown ended. After lockdown, the death...

A conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist revolutions and politics followed the regime changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. The transition moved away from the initial demands for the democratization of socialism, towards capitalism and procedural democracy. In the process, the political experience of the democratic practices of socialism was obscured, as well as the anti-fascist resistance and revolutionary experience of a century-old struggle against authoritarian tendencies and for equality, which was also the driving force of the movement behind the 1989 uprisings.The chapter looks into the case of Yugoslavia and the mechanisms of erasure to argue that a political debt to the socialist past of Europe has been incurred by a deliberate politics of oblivion and discreditation both nationally and supranationally, within the EU institutions. The Yugoslav example is particularly significant given the direct democratic practices it developed despite the bureaucratization of the Communist party in its final decades. The debt thus incurred is however making itself felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit and the rising Far Right.

This book investigates the phenomenon that has become a landmark of the past century, the phenomenon of collective evil, in an attempt to construct an explanatory conceptual framework that would acknowledge the heterogeneity of this occurrence and not reduce it to a singular cause. The underlying philosophical assumption of this inquiry is acknowledgement to evil, individual as well as collective, of positive ontological status, in contrast to the mainly theologically-grounded denial of ontological substance to evil, the understanding of evil as an absence or lack of good rather than a presence itself (p. 59). The main argument thus relates evil to the existential, arguably ontological, vulnerability of human beings and the subject’s dependence upon others, which can, however, be encouraged, exploited, manipulated and instrumentalized in specific socio-historical circumstances for the purposes of collective evildoing. The book is divided into three main parts or levels. The first level, composed of the first three chapters, is Vetlesen’s conceptual inquiry into three different theories of evil: sociological (Zygmunt Bauman), philosophical (Hannah Arendt) and psychological (Fred Alford). In the second level, Vetlesen brings into this conceptual discussion a recent example of collective evildoing – atrocities committed in Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s. Through the conceptual investigation and historical analysis, Vetlesen finally arrives at the normative theory of human agency in the third level of the book. In Chapter 1, Vetlesen engages in a critical reading of Bauman’s theory of collective evildoing as an offspring of the dehumanizing project of modernity. He finds Bauman’s main argument on evil, as a consequence of distantiation of one group from the other, through which the victim-group is deprived of humanness and hence rendered unworthy of humane treatment, problematic when confronted with historical evidence from the Holocaust on which it is based but also through the more recent cases of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, when proximity never did generate ethical impulse in the perpetrators but was in fact what aggravated the atrocities. The distantiation argument is grounded in Bauman’s thesis that collective evil is a product of modernity – sterile, inhuman, highly organized as these crimes were, they are seen by Bauman as flowing directly out of modern bureaucratic structures and dominant instrumental rationality. Vetlesen finds this debatable on historical account, as the evidence suggests that ‘the Nazi regime parasitically and progressively transformed and (even) revolutionized the institutional apparatus it had inherited from the democratic Weimar era’ (p. 44). Pursuing it further, however, Vetlesen demonstrates that the analysis is problematic also conceptually since Bauman presumes the equation of totalitarian regimes and modern society, neglecting the important pluralistic tendencies in modernity. The outcome is, Vetlesen concludes, a highly depsychologized sociological account of collective evil as a product of ideologized institutional structures which ignores the fact European Journal of Social Theory 9(4): 559–563

Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI), Early Assessment Risk Lists for Boys and Girls (EARL-20-B and EARL-21-G), and the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), the authors report that although the field lacks consensus about the range of risk factors resulting in youth violence, there is nonetheless a small percentage of males who engage in such delinquency at an early age and later display antisocial behavior as adolescents and adults. They state that it is this segment of the population who commit more than 50 percent of all crimes. There were several chapters in Section V that I particularly liked and found effective. The discussion comparing the terms “clinical judgment,” “actuarial assessments,” and “structured professional judgment” was excellent, as was the review of the guidelines necessary for effective implementation of the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI). The latter requires reflection in the agency’s mission statement that screening and assessment tools are necessary and that all relevant personnel, including judges and lawyers, receive training in the utilization of the tool. This type of an implementation process helps to promote cooperation, collaboration, and effective communication throughout the system. Again, significant information is included for administrators comparing various tools prior to purchase. The Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) was also reviewed in Section V. The authors suggest that, while not intended as a measure to assess risk, it can be valuable in identifying those youth who may pose serious institutional problems and require more resources. The stigmatization of adolescents as “psychopaths” is also addressed, and the reader can easily connect this discussion to Chapter 2 with its review of childhood psychopathology and the instability of youth. The last section of the book is entitled “Forensic Assessment Tools” and focuses on forensic and legal questions posed by the court. Chapter 21 reviews the Risk-Sophistication-Treatment Inventory (RST-I), which targets three specific areas: a juvenile’s level of dangerousness, the child’s level of maturity or sophistication, and the degree to which the child is amenable to treatment. Chapter 22, entitled “Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights,” is equally interesting, as the authors provide an outstanding case review surrounding police interrogation and “perception of coercion.” In it they describe a young boy who during a police interrogation understood a “right to remain silent” as an obligation to remain silent until he was questioned by officers. At that point, he believed he was obligated to speak with the police. He further believed the judge would order him to answer questions and that his lawyer had no right to argue the judge’s order. Examples like this are clear and pragmatic and make their points cogently. As a caveat, the authors remind us that tools intended to measure a youth’s capacity to understand his or her rights at the time of the evaluation were typically not made available until months, or even years, after the interrogation took place. In this context, a child’s understanding and appreciation of his or her rights may have improved due to attorney contact and/or maturation, among other possibilities. While this concept may seem basic to a forensic examiner, it is extremely important information for those whose focus is in other areas such as policy, mental health, corrections, or law enforcement. In summary, this is an excellent book and one that provides an outstanding overview for mental health professionals, judges, lawyers, and others involved with youth and the juvenile justice system. The organization of the book allows the reader to translate complicated material into practical terms, as all too often books reviewing psychometrics leave readers caught in a web of statistical detail and vocabulary for which they are ill prepared. While this book may be somewhat elementary for a forensic examiner, it provides a comprehensive review of screening and assessment tools and should stand as one of the premier desk references for mental health and legal professionals alike.