Antonius C. G. M. Robben

Antonius C.G.M. Robben is an anthropologist with a long-standing interest in the study of violence, trauma. and death. In addition, he has been involved in raising anthropology’s awareness of the empirical and emotional difficulties of conducting ethnographic fieldwork on violence. His book Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005) won the Textor Prize for Excellence in Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association in 2006 for debunking the age-old notion that violence begets more violence. Instead, he demonstrated that violence leads to trauma, and trauma to more violence. His book Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018) analyzes how the dynamics of trust ad betrayal that characterized the military dictatorship persisted in the decades after the regime fell from power in 1983. His latest book, co-written with Alex Hinton, is Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side (2023), which discusses the complexities of the fieldwork relations with perpetrators of mass violence and genocide in Argentina and Cambodia. Antonius Robben is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology.