Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War and who became an inspiration for white nationalists. Though Stern was used to interviewing terrorists in the field in an effort to understand their hidden motives, the conversations she had with Karadžić would profoundly alter her understanding of the mechanics of fear, the motivations of violence, and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities at a state level and who's like the terrorists she had previously studied in 2014: target noncombatants, in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbors? What happens when an ethnic or racial group loses its dominant position in society? How do leaders harness fear and weaponize it, inciting the group that worries it will be "replaced" to target minorities with violence? In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadžić, a brilliant and often shockingly charming psychiatrist and poet who spent twelve years in hiding disguised as an energy healer, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader - and what can happen when you spend many, many hours with that person.