Perpetrators 2.0: Rethinking Violence and Violent Actors in the Digital Era?

In recent years, digital technologies have become increasingly important in the perpetration of violence. Online spaces facilitate not only violence in solely digital spaces (e.g. hate speech, cyber-bullying, conspiracy theories) but are also constitutive of hybrid violence, when physical violence and digital violence intersect. Here, online spaces contribute to the recruitment of potential violent actors, incitement and motivation of participants, polarisation of discourses, and concrete logistics of implementing violence, among other things. As yet, however, there has been no evaluation of how the concepts of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘perpetration’ that were developed for physical violence can – or cannot – be mapped onto these new forms of digital and hybrid violence. It is important to consider the question of ‘digital perpetrators’ though, as this is a useful starting point for thinking through issues such as culpability and implication in digital space, as well as thinking about how to prevent such action in digital spaces and who should be held responsible for this. This article pursues several avenues of inquiry that are necessary to understand whether and how the concept of perpetrator can be useful in digital spaces. The article develops specific criteria for defining 'Perpetrators' and 'Perpetration' for physical violence (nature of harm; degree of participation) and reflects on how these can be applied to digital and hybrid violence, while also demarcating and specifying the idea of perpetrator vis-à-vis other types of actors in online spaces (bystanders; upstanders). The article is not an attempt to finally settle these issues, but sketches first ideas on how to think about perpetrators and perpetration in online spaces and identifies key issues for further discussion.