The book applies a unique mix of psychosocial methods to understand the complexity of emotional, cognitive and ideological responses to human rights violations and examines the banal quality of the everyday vocabularies that people use to make sense of human rights and their violations, and justify not intervening. In Passivity Generation, Irene Bruna Seu offers a vivid and compassionate account of how past experiences of trauma and suffering affect individual (un)responsiveness, and explores the psychodynamics of passivity and its underpinning defence mechanisms.

Irene Bruna Seu is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her books include Who am I? The Self and the Ego in Psychoanalysis and Feminism and Psychotherapy: Reflections on Contemporary Theory and Practice (co-editor). Her main research interests are human rights, social responsibility and helping behaviour, gender, and psychoanalysis, reflecting an intellectual interest in Western culture and values, and a political commitment to the attainment of a just society.