In contrast to the extensive literature on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, surprisingly little political science research has been done on Japanese war crimes during World War II. The Japanese War Crimes project (with Dr Hyein Han) combines a number of historical materials to understand how different repertoires of violence against civilians are intertwined with one another.

Referring to official histories of each military unit, the project maps war crimes across not only space and time but each military unit’s accumulated history of violence. This methodological approach allows the project to develop new theoretical insights about how a unit’s perpetration of one type of violence affects its future behaviour. The research design also allows for more fine-grained incorporation of battlefield dynamics into the study’s analysis of wartime violence against civilians.

The project’s end goal is to analyse macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors that impact the relationship between different repertoires of violence through an empirical investigation across the entire Pacific theatre.