'If only people knew, they would do something.' Every day we see evidence that, when it comes to human rights violations, knowledge is not a guarantee for action. What stops people from doing more to protect human rights? What factors generate passivity or are we simply a passive generation? Passivity Generation addresses these important questions and reports on a series of studies exploring what happens to the knowledge related to human rights violations when it reaches the public.

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.