Morag Grant: Music in War, Torture, and Genocide

In this interview, musicologist Morag Grant, specializing in the intersections of music, violence, and human rights, discusses the ways music has been used in contexts such as mass violence, torture, and genocide. She examines its role in shaping group identity and facilitating acts of violence, as well as its presence in both historical and contemporary detention practices. This conversation provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between music and social behaviors.

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The Mandela rules that were passed in 2015, they make some references to the environmental conditions of detention. They make no references at all to the sound environment, nothing on the acoustics of the environment, very little on light and very little on on things like heat and temperature and absolutely nothing on sound at all. To me, that seemed really shocking because this came after a period in which there was so much media attention on the subject of how music and sound had been been used in torture. And it was it seemed a little bit strange to have no reflection at all of that This is Not to Forgive, but to Understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Morag Grant is a musicologist whose work explores the intersections of music, society and human rights. Morag has conducted pioneering research on the use of music and collective violence, including its role in torture and military contexts. Currently, she is leading a project with her colleague Kasey McCall-Smith on the environmental conditions of detention and their implications for human rights. Join us as we delve into her insights on music's complex role in human, social and political life. Your research on music and violence crosses multiple disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and musicology. What initially motivated you to explore the intersection of music, violence and social issues? I think it basically came from the fact that I was already interested in issues to do with human rights violations, to do with war and conflict. That's a longstanding interest I've had even since before I began to study musicology and also around about the time that I started to move into this field, I was also involved in quite a lot of human rights activism. So I was doing campaigning work against torture, against other human rights abuses. And I think basically through that, I could see on on the one hand, I kept noticing within the terms of the human rights campaigning work that was involved and maybe references to music as I was using reports, I would maybe be coming across things that were, mentioned often just in passing. But that jumped out to me as a musicologist, as references to music always do. I was also involved in a project in which I was looking specifically at song studies at that time, and there was a lot of research in not fields in Germany, where I was living at that point, specifically looking at the ways that music generally, but also song in particular had been used during the Nazi regime in the 1930s, 1940s. And so all of those things kind of started to come together for me. I started to kind of look into the drawn it for my teaching and the more and more that I looked at it, I could see that there were a lot of issues still to be addressed in the and in particular, what I found that was at that point more or less, with the exception of the work that was being done on the uses of music by the Nazis directly, there was a tendency when talking about music and war and the music and human rights to always focus on the positive uses of music and to automatically assume that music was something that promotes freedom and promotes peace and conflict resolution and those kind of things. But there wasn't nearly enough work done on the opposite side of the equation, and particularly not when we move closer to actual violence arts. That would explain what you discover very quickly when you look into the topic, which is that music is very, very often used well, not very, very often used, but much more often than you would think. It is used in those contexts and seems to play play a significant role in facilitating these these these violent acts to happen. So that was that was kind of the multiple roads that led me into this topic originally. I definitely see that, especially with regard to music, that's communication as you've discussed before, and that it is not inherently bad or good. The tool is used in that behavior or in the means of communication for it to be bad prosocial, anti social. However one would want to characterize it. In your research you discuss how music can be used to promote and facilitate and accompany acts of collective violence, especially in contexts like Nazi Germany that you just mentioned. Can you explain the mechanisms through which music becomes a tool for normalizing violence or a tool and that communication and reinforcing ideologies in such genocidal regimes? I think that the first key to that is what you said there was the music and the context of collective violence in the word collective I think is the one that's that's really crucial here because whether or not it's in the context of propaganda or if it's in the context of different rituals that we find to enable acts of great violence to occur or even to detain people to to come together and be able to inflict that violence. We find music being used here because it is such a powerful tool in terms of consolidating, forming and underlining processes of group formation, processes of identity formation and those kind of things. And I think that is that is really, really crucial. And you can see this very much. For example, there are more formalized ways in which this happens in terms of martial organizations, military organizations, you will often find music being used in recruitment campaigns. For example, there's a very long history of the music halls have been used in the context of training in drill, partly to help coordinate the movements when learning how to manage weapons, for example, but also to consolidate this feeling of group identity within the fighting unit itself. And also then any number of rituals that are used at every stage really, of military life to provide a kind of a framework within which that that violence is then found. Even if you move over those more formalized systems. I think that the formalized systems are interesting because it demonstrates that it is important enough that it becomes an essential part of of military life and warrior cultures and war societies. When we move beyond that, again, it has to do with the ways that music can be be used for identity formation and therefore for the feeling of collective identity, which again and again has been demonstrated to be really, really important in enabling these acts of violence through the they are ones that are carried out and on behalf of a particular collective identity and by a group that understands itself as associating that collective identity and music is important in many ways, music is important because it is a really useful way of coordinating activities and attention and time, and that has been shown to be something that again, tends to bring people together in a group formation. And we also know, I think all of us know just from thinking about the role of music in our day to day lives. It is very closely linked to to emotional lives, to an emotional memories as well. We tend to be very, very attached to music that has played some kind of a key role in terms of our life stories and the identities of I thought these are things that are very elicit, very strong reactions from people as well. And for that reason as well, music can be really, really useful precisely in, I would say not even so much the formation of ideas of out-groups. Although that comes with as well. But I think particularly it's really important in the formation of those and groups, whether they be positive in-groups or in-groups that ultimately are going to be then utilized to inflict great acts of violence. I think that's something that is, if you then jump on to think about how music is approached in human rights discourses around things like freedom of speech and fear of expression, that tends to become quite complex because within those contexts we are always looking for the very straightforward idea of hate speech is something that very clearly is an incitement to violence is a way of framing the out-group as such, and there's not enough understanding. I think of the other aspect to that, which is at least as important, which is how the end group itself is, formed and consolidated and made to hold together as a group. And that is something where I think music can be really, really important. you touched on several different topics that you had prior, prior mentioned in your 2015 work music. The third Reich and the eight stages of Genocide, which is quite comprehensive and talks about music in each of these stages of genocide proposed by Gregory Stanton, of which I was most surprised of how present it is in each of them, especially in in denial in the last stage, as well as in the stages, like preparation and certain things come into my mind, such as music policies and organizations that were formed. I think it was the Reichsmusikkammer the music cultural chamber under the Nazi regime. But I do want to dive into the actual presence of music in acts of Violence where in your work you focus on musical activities in concentration camps, such as in my Majdanek and Sachsenhausen. You described how music was weaponized. Could you expand on the psychological and emotional or let's say, myriad of uses of music by the perpetrators? It's in fact its effects on the perpetrators and its appropriate effects on the victims. Let's start with the perpetrators, I think as well they should say. So the article that you mentioned, that was one that I co-wrote with the members of my former research group, and we had actually started to look specifically at the work that had been done on music under Nazism, precisely because it was such a wide body of research available there. And it seemed to us the best place to going to start to draw these different individual and very detailed case studies together and to see what you could develop theoretical from that. And the Gregory Stanton model, then, as it was in the 8 stages when we started work on this, provided a good frame to kind of test these things. So we were also surprised to find that you could actually map things on not 1 to 1, but there were definite ways in which you could see music being used really at every stage in the preparation and also in the carrying out of the genocide in terms of when you move into that last but one stage, the stage before denial as, as in so many systems, not just just in Stanton's I think that music is something that and I already mentioned that rituals are very important in, in martial organizations, military organizations, and there are a number of reasons for that. And one of the reasons is that violence is normally not something that is easy for human beings to carry out against one another. There are certain exceptions to that, but generally speaking, it is something that we would shy away from. We might threaten violence but actually carrying through to physical violence is a little bit more more difficult. And it is also something, especially when you go into that context of being directly confronted with, a violent act, it has impacts on you mentally, psychologically as well in military organizations. Have you always known this, have always known that you need to be able to somehow in the one hand, enable that violence, enable people to to overcome the inbuilt barriers that they have or the cultural barriers that have been created, the social barriers that normally prevent us from inflicting violence. But also we need to be able to contain that violence as well, contain it both within making sure that the limits remain within which violence is carried out, but also limit it in terms of the psychological impacts on those who perpetrate it as well. And these are the reasons why we have the rituals developing, because rituals are a reason for which we manage very, very difficult situations. We manage transitions into the situations in back out of them, and we give them certain forms of meaning. And again and again, the more that you look at music in these terms, you will find music being used not just in the context of very conscious rituals of transition into violence again, but as ways of and indicating certain frames of reference within which that violence is actually being carried out. And I think that is something that is very, very important. There are a lot of incidences in the context of genocide as well that that could be understood in that connection as well. That's the one aspect. Another aspect, however, as well, and it's very, very closely linked to that. If you think about rituals as being a form of performance. So Victor Turner has famously talked about the transition of from ritual to theater, where theater is a kind of a secularized form of rituals. And we know as well scholars of violence are quite used to to thinking about violence as being a form of communication and itself a performative act, because it's also a form of communication. And I think that in that context as well, if you start to understand, look at these acts in terms of a performances, as horrible as that seems, but in terms of personas that people adopt in that context of roles that they feel as if they are carrying out of ways that they want that violence to be understood by others. Again, this is something here that music then starts to play a role it can play a role in the ways that people able to psych themselves up for it will play a role in the way that they then, as it were, transition into these these personas to personas of the, you know, the killer or the perpetrator and also come back here again, there's been a lot of work that's been done as well in terms of, again, the Nazi concentration camps that has looked at what seems to be this for many people, this cognitive disconnect between the horrific acts of genocide that were being carried out and the officers, the commanders of the camps then being reported to in the evening sit down and listen to Beethoven, to Schubert or whatever. But again, from another perspective, you can see that as the way in which those acts are relativized by, as Juliane Brauer has talked about, kind of shoring up this sense of self by retreating to these markers of civilized personality and of civilization as a way of kind of internally, mentally justifying what has happened within that particular frame. And I think that in terms of the perpetrators being offered those existing frameworks within which to carry out these actions, it is a way as well where people can they can adopt the personas, they can adopt the roles, but they also to some extent can kind of maybe think less about what it is that they're actually doing, because what they are actually doing is just carrying out this role or going through the motions of this activity within this framework that has already been set up for them. They just have to kind of carry out and not really think too much about what it is that they're doing. So I think in terms of the perpetrators, that is that is something that's very important and is not really hasn't been adequately explored and I think addressed because we do obviously have this an inbuilt tendency, I think, to want to distance ourselves very much from the perpetrators of these acts to think that there is something mentally different with these people that are able to do these things and we want to distance them from all of the things that we think again are markers of civilization and markers of freedom and justice in these kinds of things as well. So it's a very, very complex, very, very complex question, but one that I think and does need to be explored in more detail. To that point that you were mentioning about ritualizing the role of music and as ritual to perpetrators. I think we had a prior guest on the podcast, Edward Westermann, who in his book Drunk on Genocide. He mentioned something to the same effect of music being used in this way, but in tandem with alcohol consumption by the Nazis in the Near East. What I want to ask if you could speak further about, because you mentioned very briefly there that these perpetrators would be listening to certain kinds of music they'd be listening to and whether it's Strauss or whether it's Wagner or whether it's even more rococo, let's say era music that also serves to other their victims, but also give them the sense that their culture is in some superior way to the others. However, this is a very interesting situation I find as a musician, because in these cases, especially within the Holocaust, everybody associated in this context, it is coming from that same culture. They would have heard and they would have all known the Lieds of Schubert and Schumann. I'm wondering if you can speak more to the point of how the Nazi perpetrators differentiated and marginalized Jewish composers and music in that time. They did their best to do it with great difficulty. It has to be said, particularly when they were dealing with composers that were very integral to the German tradition. So people like Mendelssohn, who had also very, very popular composers as well. And what you see in terms of the official Nazi policy is, a starting point for their great ideals of how they're going to cleanse German music of these foreign influences and particularly these Jewish influences, and then also American influences and the influences of African-American music and these kind of things. But as things progress, and particularly once you actually come into the time of the war itself and you then find a lot of exceptions to be made to the general rules because it was understood that the most important thing was to keep your own population on board, to keep them happy, and distracted. And if they wanted, you know, to to listen to swing music, then that would that would have to be provided for them, albeit by, you know, German swing bands that you decided to, to invent for that for that very purpose I think is and it's quite complex but it's obviously the same as with everybody with the other aspects of life in Germany from the time that the Nazis took over in the early 1930s, you found Jewish cultural organizations been set up within which context Jewish musicians, for example, could perform in, or that was the only context in which they could they could perform. And what was interesting is that these kinds of initiatives and again, we see this later on in some of the early years of the camps, a similar started to being adopted of consciously creating these cultural institutions constantly also, for example, forming the camp orchestras as well, or allowing certain musical activities theatrical activities to take place in the ghettos as a way of deflecting from actually what was going on there by basically saying, but you know, we are allowing Jewish resistance to carry on performing, but we are seeing that they have to do this within their own cultural milieu. And some of early in the context of the camps, we are obviously promoting cultural life because these camps are, you know, stick in whatever justification, we always have for putting civilians in camps in of wartime, this is this is what these camps are about. And it's and you're deflecting the attention away and making it seem as if there is something more positive going on with this life there. And so I think it's an interesting case as well, because that there were again, the attempts to erase Jewish music from German life, that was relatively easy in the case of a composer like Arnold Schoenberg because very few people liked his music anyway. It was much more difficult in the case of Mendelssohn because his music was simply so popular, even though the were official bans you will actually find, and a lot of researchers that have looked in detail at the archival material and have basically found the they talked a good talk, but in actual practice it wasn't nearly as simple to try to eradicate Jewish composers and Jewish musicians from German life. Thank you. I have a question about, you know, music and torture specifically. I think in your research, including the discussion of Nazi concentration camps and you work on contemporary detention settings, you've drawn parallels between historical and modern uses of music and torture. What are some of the key similarities and differences you've identified between the use of music in these settings? I think one of the basic similarity is that music has very often been used in these contexts, and that was something that was and is very important to emphasize, because we tend generally to think about the use of music and torture as having occurred in a very small set of circumstances. Most people associate it with what happened in the US war on terror. Some people might also know a few more examples, such as again, what happened in the context of the concentration and the extermination camps in Nazi Germany. But to actually point to its still a problem, you know, since allegedly the torture practices were shut down in the war on terror is also something that has a much longer history stretching back. It's very, very important to understand and in order to understand also the scale of the problem is, and also because it gives us a different way into thinking about what some of the roots of these different traditions are and why they are used and get beyond some of the the slightly simplistic ideas that you often find about why music is used and what kinds of music are used. For example. So if you look at again, if you look at the Nazi concentration camps and there are also some similarities as well to what happened in the Stalinist Gulags as well. What is interesting there, not just in terms of what happened with music, is that there are certain similarities to the way that the camps were organized, to the way the military camps in barracks would have been organized as well. So similar to the way that the military organizations would have had their own bands. And there were musicians that would play in certain occasions, similar to the fact that you had a parade ground which was used for roll call and music had a role to play. The music was had a role to play. Musicians had a role to play during punishment and that kind of thing. These are all things that you find again, being used, for example, in the context of the concentration camps and sometimes, you know, with very similar terminology being used to describe what is actually happening. So you see from that perspective, you can see this line carrying through or the way that music has been used in the military, which has certainly in European modernity, always been very closely associated with ideas of discipline and discipline and order. And obviously then following on from that with ideas about punishment and justice within the context of the military. So you do see, again, those kind of frameworks that are that are following through and that may explain some of the ways that music is used within these contexts, albeit ultimately with in some very, very definite ways and these little context where specific music is being used as a form of torture. But you also find as well, if you look back through history, the connections between different processes of shaming people, humiliating people, degrading people, and that used to also be a very central part of punishment practices in the era when these were things that were carried out very, very much in the public eye. And again, you will see again and again music being used in those contexts in sometimes quite different ways depending on the context. But the whole way through, you do have this connection of music being used in some situations to draw attention to what's happening, to draw attention to this person who is being, you know, pilloried and shamed in this context and also in some cases to to directly humiliate that person as well. So there are little aspects of this that you do find carrying on the whole way through even the longer scope of history, if you go right back to the Middle Ages and possibly even even further back as well. And if we move into the more recent past as well, we know that, for example, the ways that music was used in torture in the case of the US war on terror, these were by no means a new invention. In fact, the US Department of State itself had a few years previously and called this a method of torture. And we're talking about other countries who had carried out these methods. And these methods go back at least to the aftermath of the Second World War into the period of the early Cold War. They're linked to different experiments that have been carried out at that point with methods of sensitivity deprivation, different methods of psychological torture. And we find similar methods popping up in a number of places around the world, not least where American and British forces had been involved in training and supporting certain regimes. We've seen similar practices being used again and again even before to then become really famous in the context, as I said, of the war on terror. So there again, there there is there is a longer historical line here, which unfortunately also doesn't stop. But the US fought in terror. It is still carrying on to do, which is something that we managed to establish in the work that my former research group did, that for example, in certain prison camps in in the Russian Federation, for example, and particularly in cases in solitary confinement, exposure to to loud music is still used and other forms of forced music making. And so forcing people to sing for some people to march to music, those kind of things are still very, very prevalent right up to the present day. To that point of music being use and involved in torture, considering the role of music and various forms of torture and violence within this regard, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that the United Nations put out a press release only, I think two months ago in August, saying that there's plenty of testimonies and that this is currently happening in conflict zones currently. What are some of the steps that are being taken to ensure accountability and prevention in the future? Because certain names come to mind like the Bikindi trial with regard to some of the music that was put out on the RTLM radio during the Rwandan genocide, where his music was inciting violence, or at least was seen as inciting violence. The Clinton administration, I think you noted that the Clinton administration had means to block or jam these radio signals, but didn't, however, did go ahead and do so in Burundi. And the ethics of that are still in question. So as a general question, with regard to music in mass and violence, what accountability measures have been taken in the past and what may be taken if we were to see it around the world now? Yeah, not enough. I think a straight answer to that question. And again, I think there are two different aspects to that question. I think the the the question of the role of music in incitement and in the promotion of violence and how it's actually used in the context of torture, those are different things than they have to be obviously approached differently in terms of of accountability or in prevention as well, in terms of human rights laws and human rights standards. The context, I think, with freedom of expression and freedom of speech and the limits of that, right. I've already indicated, I think are particularly complex when it comes to music, because it is not the case that we can always point to a very clear lyrical reference or a very clear, you know, use of imagery along with music or something that would be proscribed in any national setting, for example. And that obviously is different depending where we are in the world, even though we know that, for example, in the in the context of extreme white supremacist music, white power music, there are very, very well established networks of this music. And that movement very much understands how important music has in terms, again, of not so much getting the message across to new potential members although that as well, particularly kidnaping younger people and children are being targeted, but more as a way to to emotionally charge the existing in-group and to meet them, you know, to consolidate that group and make them more likely to then carry out acts of direct or indirect violence. And I think that is something that is very difficult for us to talk about, particularly in the West, because we find it really difficult to think of there being any necessary limits to freedom of expression. We think that allowing complete freedom of expression is going to be the key to what is what is going to to stop all the evil in the world. And unfortunately, it doesn't quite work like that. And so that is that is a very, very complex issue. And I think there is that that has to be addressed very much in the context of looking at how we can do this, this tightrope walk of being able to protect freedom of expression, but also to be able to protect and promote the right to life, the right to freedom from discrimination. All of these all our human rights, because obviously we can't see them individually. They have to interconnect potentially looking at this through the lens of musical practice and through cultural practice generally is a way to start those conversations and to start and moving away from this, the idea of a very clear causal statement of intent or incitement in those contexts, in the context of how music is used in torture. I think basically awareness raising is the most important aspect of this, because that is what we come up against time and again and time and again, even amongst human rights advocates. And I say, you know, this is somebody who has reached out to two human rights activist organizations a number of times, sometimes with a lot of success and sometimes with with no success at all. I think that unless people have either themselves had direct with survivors of this kind of torture or who have otherwise been very, very closely involved with, for example, survivor testimony, I think without that being there, people don't understand how important this has. The do tend to see it as being slightly more trivial than than other aspects of torture, even though survivors themselves very often have come out and in some cases say this is the worst thing that they experienced in this context. And even that we know and the UN Committee Against Human Rights, you know, has said as much, that in particular contexts, some of these acts do count as violations against the prohibition of torture. So I think it's all about awareness raising. It's also about raising general awareness of the sounding environment, the sonic environment, and how important that is for health and wellbeing and because particularly when you're looking at a context of prevention, you are wanting to prevent any possibility that harm can be done intentionally, but also unintentionally as well. And this is why I've recently launched a new project on the environmental conditions of detention together with Dr. Kasey McCall-Smith who is my colleague in the law school here at the University of Edinburgh, and that is a project that specifically geared towards drawing attention to the physical environment of detention and all the things that go towards making up environment, the air that we breathe, the light that we have to see or know the sound as well. All of these aspects, temperature as well, which is very, very important obviously for for wellbeing and as essential for for life to have the temperature regulated, basically to draw attention to these things amongst prison monitors, including in cases where they're not necessarily looking at cases of torture as such, but also other cases that may amount to have been forms of cruel and degrading treatment or punishment or just generally, you know, not acceptable standards. And one of the reasons why we also started to adopt that project is because even in the guidelines that we have for minimum standards in prisons, so the latest set of standard minimum rules known as The Mandela rules that were passed in 2015, they make some references to the environmental conditions of detention. They make no references at all to the sound environment, nothing on so on conditions, nothing on the acoustics of the environment, very little on light and very little on on things like heat and temperature and absolutely nothing on sound at all. To me, that seemed really shocking because this came after a period in which there was so much media attention on the subject of how music and sound had been been used in torture. And it was it seemed a little bit strange to have no reflection at all of that in this new document. And so this is where we are now trying to kind of latch on and work other organizations and other partners to continue raising awareness of this topic and to make sure that the scholarship that there is now on this topic, there's this quite a growing body of research from within academia that has looked at this topic in various different historical contexts, that that is then actually is used to kind of gain an awareness and hopefully longer term, we will see some moves towards guidelines, adjustments to existing standards. For example, to ensure that some steps are taken to make it much more difficult for music to be used or any form of saying to be used in this context at all. With context of music and incitement for violence, can we see music as a tool in preparation, preceding incitement or coming after? Because I think about one of the examples that you gave, which is music, fostering national identity to go ahead and build a sense of, I don't want to say constructive patriotism. It's it's more so a isolationist patriotism that is going to go ahead and exclude certain groups and creating a distinct outgroups and in-groups. So as a question, does that preparation precede incitement? Is it necessary for incitement? Is it something that is very prevalent? It's not necessary for incitement, but it's necessary for the incitement. Actually welcome for people to follow that. I would say very definitely. And as I say, again, you talk the in-group in the out-group, what's really important here is the establishment of the in-group. And there are numbers of studies that, again, have looked specifically at the dynamic of social movements and in all contexts, not just in the context of violence and have pointed to again and again to the importance of cultural practices, including music or cultural practices that sound very like they might have a musical component in terms of, the dynamism of these social movements, the idea of coming behind a central message and in terms of getting that message across as well. Music can be very important. Music is useful, not least because, it tells us how to receive the information that we're hearing through other channels or seeing through other channels. A great example of this would be music and film, for example, or television. You can have one in the same set of scenes that we interpret emotionally and in terms of the narrative completely differently depending on what the music is actually telling us to do and telling us to think and telling us to feel as well. So obviously music can be used in that context of preparation as well. In terms of setting the emotional groundwork for how a message then is going to be perceived. Another aspect of this is very important is that if you are going to to proceed to a stage of, for example, incitement, you have to get your audience here in the first place. How do you get your audience there? Well, one of the ways that you do that is, is through music. This is exactly how the radio station RTLM functioned in the run up to the Rwandan genocide for example, you created a radio station that was much more modern and much more popular than the state broadcasters at that time, playing a very, very wide range of music and basically that meant people would tune into that station and when they are there, then you can slip all of these other little nuggets of disinformation as well as going similar ways to which the White Power movement organizes as well through music, through tying people in again, forming these emotional communities around and through the music as much as the messages that are then transported within that music or alongside that music. So I think that to some extent I would see the music is if anything, potentially more important in those contexts of preparing the groundwork. You find relatively few instances of music that is carrying an explicit message of incitement, for example. That isn't really how music tends to work, and that's why it becomes difficult for people to understand the role it plays. And similarly to what happens again in the Third Reich, you send many more pieces of music to try and underline that idea of the volksgemeinschaft to the in-group and relatively few examples of music outside of specific contexts that were deliberately then targeting the out-group or actually suggesting in outside to be perpetrated against them. Some exceptions to that would be, for example, in the context of things like film music. And this is unfortunately not just an issue that you have in the Nazi era that we will present certain characters along with racialized stereotypes, are communicated through music as well. But other than that, I would say that really film music's impact is the greatest in these contexts, is in how it manages to console the in-group and gather them together at all, get the audience together, and then help to package that message in a way that somehow makes it more more palatable than it might do in other contexts. How do you see your work contributing to our broader understanding of these interdisciplinary fields that are associated with music and violence, including anthropology, sociology I'm hoping that it is able to help demonstrate just how important cultural practices are in this context. We tend in our societies nowadays to think of music as being not really essential for society it's a form of leisure, it's a form of entertainment. We've kind of lost that sense of music as being something that is really fundamental to our ideas about ourselves, to the ways that we communicate. And that in itself is a dangerous situation. If, we lose the that focus of that understanding, that awareness ultimately, and I think that there is very much more a move towards trying to understand violence in this interdisciplinary context in connection with ideas about ritual and performance and human behavior more generally. And that is very much read. I think that it's essential also to to talk about music because as such is such an essential part of human social life. And through that, through looking at music, through looking at lanes, get a perspective that you don't necessarily get from looking at other forms of communication and interaction. I think that's what the newest scholars are trying to do in the sense of like, you know, not restricting our conversation and on anything for that matter, to just genocide studies, but expanding it because we're talking about violence and violence. It can be underlies at the macro and micro level as well. And I think his music is interesting there because you can use it to analyze both. I think some of for me the most interesting aspects come if you analyze at the micro level as well of the actually how these situational dynamics develop. And that's why I'm particularly interested in understanding why music ends up in this context of what is actually doing in those contexts as well. And I think absolutely that that is the way that discussion has to go into into what is actually happening, really happening in these situations and not what we like to think is maybe going through people's heads at that time. But but the actual dynamics that are contributing there. Wonderful. Thank you so much Morag for your discussion today and thank you so much for your work. Yeah, I'm very happy to help This was Not to forgive, but to Understand with our guest, Morag Grant. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. as I can. Absolutely. Well, that should be that should be it for our interview. my goodness. Really? I can't appreciate it enough. I think that. I feel as I have been very, very vague today and we have not been very specific in terms of examples and stuff. But I don't know, it's just straight out, you. Know, it allows it allows for us to have that curiosity to make you further. And I think you absolutely to give wonderful details and examples. Yeah. I didn't I didn't actually answer the question on the impacts on victims occurred to me because you had the you asked me a question about the perpetrators and then the victims and I started on the perpetrators and then meant to come back to the victims. We didn't talk about that. I don't know if that's something you feel, but. I think I think that there had been because we did discuss regarding perhaps not the effects, the psychological effects like like such conditions and music torture has on those individuals. I think the general discussion on it was still extremely insightful for that, for that point of view as well, because really I think that that deserves also in whole hour that to speak about it and I'm excited to hear about this prison sorry in our prison detention conditions project that you mentioned. Can I go ahead and include that in that out? Yes. You kind of let me know when this is going to be released, because we're working on the website very slowly. But I'd like to kind of get up there and running before the. The earliest the earliest that this would go up is in two weeks. Notice that at least that would. Take some stuff on there. Yeah. Okay. And I think usually what happens is that many people who just get in touch with, you know, our interlocutors, our interviewees, and then so that the discussion, that's what usually happens with a lot of hours. So I think that's a very good starting point. Whatever we have to be. Good. Excellent. Very good. What is the name of the group so that I can just write it down? So the website is detention conditions dot org. If you go into that, you'll just find a landing page saying nothing to see you come back here soon. But that is the website and its environmental conditions of detention is kind of the name of the project. Can I just ask you, you said something about a un, a UN report, a press release that came out a couple of months ago, and I was it didn't want it to look like, I don't know what you were talking about. But no, no. So actually it came out August 5th, such as in a little over two months ago. It's a press release. I can put link in the in the chat here or I can go to you. But the name of the press releases Israel's escalating use of torture against Palestinians in custody, a preventable crime against humanity, and the quote in particular to music notes, notes that the countless testimonies by men and women speak of detainees, quote, victims spoke of loud music until their ears. But amongst other tortures. Can do that. So. Right. Okay. So specifically in that context, I thought it was maybe a more general lesson, Jason, because that has been the Israeli case was, gosh, back in the nineties, that was something that came before the Committee Against Torture and was specifically discussed. really? I guess that was in 1987. There was a shadow report the to the in the the periodic review process and un basically there had been a number of different practices used that were then similar to the war on terror practices. So the kind of the whole sense of deprivation techniques but the use of like music was something that a lot of the organizations had talked about at that time. And that was really, we know happened in the concluding observations and not that is where we have it laid out in black and white by the UN Court that these practices particularly often used in combination, constitute a yeah, a contravention of one court. So yeah, so that's interesting that it's has reemerged in this context and often not the voice at that point the Supreme Court had banned the use of those practices and in Israel after that. So but we still come back again. Yeah, this was, I think in August. This is where a lot of a lot of worrying images and videos have been coming out from this particular Israeli detention sites, this prison time in prison. And so so that's what initially, of course, like came on my feet for now. So I'm happy to see about what comes out of the new project. Thank you so much again for talking to us, talking to us today. And nobody is not interested to see your I support of your work. Actually, I would love to hear more about your neuroscience aspect of that as well, because it's that's absolutely fascinating. Is that a longer postdoc project you've got now or. So basically I already published a few articles on that and it just seemed to be out and, and I'm currently working on the book, so yeah, let's see it goes it principally I'm interested in, you know, on one hand perpetrators and then on the other victims. So the basic needs like introducing neuroscience to expand the meaning of mental harm because so far mental to debate behavioral psychology, the DSM and all of that. So we have to expand because to neuroscience, because neuroscience has unveiled neurological conditions beyond just once recognized true behavioral psychology. So that's for the victims and their families, but perpetrators as well. I don't know if you knew about the case of Dominique Owen when he was a child soldier in Uganda and case was decided in the ICC in 2015 and 2022, and they brought in neuroscience evidence to say that he was very young when the perpetration happened and he was physically schooled into becoming a perpetrator himself. And so that we have to be a bit more lenient on the sentencing. So in that particular case, there were some judges who were actually very receptive to neuroscience evidence. The point is that I'm just anticipating scenarios in the future where your ideas would bring up this as a defense and say, well, I was going to what was meant to be something long term, but depression or whatever it is, because that's already being done at the state and federal level in countries countries. But what if it started to seep into the international era that arena and yeah, yeah, the way in which defendants framed their defense. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's really challenging because we have to keep anticipating scenarios. And I'm not a neuroscience expert, but from a legal background and of course genocide studies. So it's just trying to use trying to come from that direction into it. It's interesting because I give testimony to the the Guantanamo hearings as well in the case of one of the detainees who was the most badly affected by the use of music and torture and this is in one of the pretrial hearings where they're basically trying to, you know, say you ever sit in was gained under torture. And he has no overt mental state that you can't actually stand trial and but one of the things I started looking at at that point was some research done by Stefan Kose in Cognitive neuroscience. And he's particularly interested in emotions and and using music as a way to then be able to to, to, to study the neuroscience of emotions and that kind of thing. And, and he actually in some of the articles I was using by him and interestingly he tweets basically kind of confirmed using I do think it was comparison but he pointed to similar and if MRI studies that had actually indicated that actually do process music in different parts of our brain, depending on whether or not we relate to music and want to listen to or we don't like the music and don't want to listen to, and it's a new kind of colleagues of mine doing studies on music in everyday life have talked about that. A law that there's not a good form of music or a bad form of music in terms of your health. It depends on your relationship to the music. And but what was interesting in that context was that in the case of music that people didn't like or didn't want to listen to, and the areas of the brain that were being most targeted were the campus amygdala. So all of the areas that deal with the stress as well. And I remember kind of second that in there because when I talked to the lawyers initially, it was kind of say, okay, what what kind of what kind of evidence is a judge going to go for? Because I reckon if I come up with, you know, kind of like cultural reframes and that kind of thing, it's not really going to work. And they suggest as much kind of like man in high courts as possible to make it through. But it was very interested in that because I thought, yeah, this is actually we're finally developing the tools where you can see, you know, in terms of good old rational Western science. This is what we've kind of known from all the forms of studies we know understand better exactly what's happening in the brain and why it's having these impact. So it's it's very interesting in terms of what kind of quote unquote, psychological torture. And it's really very much hope that that will be something that will help. yeah. I guess if I can if I can add on to that. So that's benefit is that Stephan Koch recently published an article. I don't know if this is the one that you're referencing, but recent published an article in Nature where with regard to stress response when listening to music, it produced even more robust. So there were several different conditions that he had laid out. I don't think they included music that the person didn't want to do, but it was a change from prior study. He in fact used a musical stimulus that was completely neutral. It was just serial music, if you can imagine it just completely atonal, nothing really. Right. And and that was. A designated. Self-perceived self received by the participants as neutral. And so and so that actually created a more of a robust stress for most neuroendocrine oud and anchored in sort of research and endocrinologists perspective. So I'll share that study with you too. So. Yep. Yes, please, please do that. I actually didn't know about this. So this is very this would actually be pretty pertinent to what I'm doing because it's just exploring how, you know all of these different defenses and, you know, the judges are really open. It's surprising, but they're not resistant to any of this new evidence being. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as it's done. Done in the right way. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. It's been lovely to all your work as well. So I've made some notes of things. I have to go and take notes. So I'll send, I'll send you a version of the video once we have, it all added up and just touch back in with you in a couple of weeks for it. Okay? All right. Okeydokey. Thank you so much for. Take care. Okay. Goodbye. Have a good weekend.