International Humanitarian Law Commons^™

Does Propaganda Incite Violence?, Richard Wilson, Christine Lillie

Richard Ashby Wilson

In America and abroad there is a renewed impetus to prosecute propagandists who incite others to commit acts of war, terrorism and genocide. While we may feel intuitively that the inciters should bear criminal responsibility, thus far the science supporting the position that extreme speech directly influences attitudes and behavior has been quite inconclusive. Therefore we set out to test the concrete effects of propaganda for war, drawing on the actual speeches of Vojislav Seselj, a Serb political leader presently awaiting judgment in The Hague for instigating murder, torture and deportation of Croat civilians in the early 1990s. We divided …