Abstract

What do perpetrators think when they kill? How is an perpetrator’s sense-making world constructed? What does his or her daily life consist of? Various explanatory models have attempted to answer these questions. In the present article, however, starting from the work of Richard Rechtman, an analysis scheme of the empirical object based on the notion of Lebensform (form of life) will be presented, highlighting how the dimension of ordinariness and everyday life give concrete expression to an understanding of the other no longer, or not only, based on universal sociological models, but on the intimate relationship that connects the subject (the individual) to his world, his context, his own life. We shall therefore illustrate how the notion of form of life has heuristic value not only regarding the lived lives of the perpetrators in the era of genocide but, more generally, within the more general conceptual equipment of the social sciences