Faculty Spotlight: Mark Drumbl Professor Mark Drumbl's latest research focuses on informers in repressive societies.

By Jeff Hanna
August 2, 2024

Ever since he worked as a defense attorney in the genocide trials in Rwanda, Mark Drumbl has been intrigued by this question: What motivates ordinary people to participate in movements of mass atrocity?

Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and director of the Transnational Law Institute at W&L Law. His initial interest in the question began when he encountered a group of New York City public defenders who had been seconded to Rwanda to represent accused perpetrators in the 1994 genocide.

At the time, Drumbl was taking a break from his work in Manhattan and Toronto as a lawyer in international arbitration and commercial law and was attending the graduate program in law at Columbia University. The Rwanda-bound lawyers needed a French-speaking lawyer to join them. Drumbl, a Montreal native, chose to go and soon found himself defending women and men accused of terrible crimes in the massacres that killed more than 800,000 civilians.

Why, he wondered, did these otherwise meek and marginalized individuals who were at the bottom of the social hierarchy participate in gruesome acts of violence?

That question has animated Drumbl’s research and teaching for more than two decades. He’s published numerous papers on the Rwandan genocide and is the author of the 2007 book “Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law” (Cambridge University Press). He has explored other examples of individuals who occupy marginal roles in society and participate in terrible acts, including child soldiers whose lives he examined in a ground-breaking volume, “Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy” (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Drumbl’s latest research focuses on informers in repressive societies — i.e., individuals who form the bulk of the state’s surveillance network. Using communist Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1989 as a case study, Drumbl investigated the people who informed on their friends and neighbors for the secret police, known as the Státní bezpecnost (StB).

“The common thread between this work and my previous research is asking why and how ordinary people commit terrible acts,” Drumbl said. “And then what do you do about them afterward?”

With co-author Barbara Holá, a law professor from The Netherlands who was Frances Lewis Law Center Scholar-in-Residence in 2022, Drumbl published “Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague” (Oxford University Press) earlier this year. Using secret police archives and oral histories, they seek to understand the informers’ motivations.

“By and large, these informers are meek, weak, marginal, insecure, anxious folks who are simply trying to get through to tomorrow,” said Drumbl. “They get caught up in the machinery of the state, and they do it because of emotions.”

Specifically, Drumbl identified four emotions as the driving factors: fear (of the state or of the “enemy”); resentment (getting even and settling scores); desire (getting things or getting ahead); and devotion (to the Communist ideology or the Czechoslovak state). These four emotions are not mutually exclusive but each may be more or less influential at various moments.

“From our reading of the files, we found these emotions stood out in explaining why ordinary people do these terrible things. Unless we appreciate that this is the case, we will never be able to prevent this kind of violence or put in place effective mechanisms to bring justice and reconciliation after the fact,” Drumbl said.

After the fall of communism, many post-communist governments opened their archives to the public. The Czech Republic’s parliament passed a law requiring full public disclosure of the more than 100,000 individuals who helped the StB build cases against supposed dissidents. The law was controversial because the informers often became pariahs when their role was made public.

“It’s easy to scapegoat informers,” Drumbl said. “After all, ‘snitches get stitches.’”

As Drumbl and Holá pored through files, they developed biographical narratives, or “file-stories,” that offer detailed portraits of informers. Six file-stories are featured in this highly-acclaimed book and another 17 are in an online appendix. The narratives feature personal anecdotes and insights into the informers’ lives — from the time they were initially recruited by StB through evolving relationships over many years and often decades.

The StB often forced cooperation from informers by threatening to expose compromising information about them, but Drumbl said informers sometimes turned the tables on handlers and gained some control over the secret police as well.

“What we find really interesting is how informers, even though they’re marginalized in society, will bargain by saying, for instance, ‘I’ll talk about people in my workplace, but I won’t talk about my neighbors or my family.’ That’s one way they exert control,” Drumbl said. “It creates an interesting interplay between the agency of the informers and of the secret police.”

Drumbl also examined similarities between informers working with the StB in communist Czechoslovakia and informers in liberal democratic states who help with police investigation. In both cases, Drumbl said, informers are essential for the state to maintain authority.

“Secrets are everywhere; informing is everywhere,” he said. “No movement, no political entity, no state, no corporation, nothing can exist without the information that is surreptitiously provided by informers.”

That includes individuals who call corporate hotlines to inform on neighbors or friends. Two examples Drumbl cited are COVID hotlines some cities created to report people disregarding mandatory lockdowns and the now-defunct website that had been created to report abortions in Texas in response to the Heartbeat Act.

“In both situations, data show most people reported on others not because they were committed to public health in the case of COVID, or to the Heartbeat Act, but because they wanted to settle a score. The motivations were emotional, not philosophical,” Drumbl said.

“The motivation to informing has some universalism, and that raises another question about how to separate good informing from bad informing — Fredo Corleone in The Godfather vs. Deep Throat in Watergate,” he said. “We have to be careful about how harshly we judge or value people when it comes to informing because it is often politically contingent.”

For Drumbl, the research, publishing and consulting he does on these issues are helpful to his teaching by ensuring that he stays current with practical applications. “Through the research and consulting, I share my experiences with clients with my students and remain on top of newer and cutting-edge developments,” he said.

In addition, the Transnational Law Institute offers W&L law students summer internship opportunities, many of which have come to fruition through the personal contacts Drumbl, and valued colleague Professor Speedy Rice, have made with lawyers at not-for-profit groups, firms, the United Nations, and officials within U.S. agencies. Drumbl has taught a mass atrocities seminar at W&L and was instrumental in developing the transnational law course that is required of all 1Ls.

“We treat international law no differently than we treat contracts, torts, property, criminal law and professional responsibility,” Drumbl has said. “It is central to our vision of how a lawyer of the 21st century needs to think.”

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