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Abstract
This dissertation explores what I name as the rhetoric of agency attribution. I consider agency to be a consequential judgement made by institutions/actors with material interests at stake regarding the culpability and responsibility of others. I also claim that humans—as both symbolic and biologic creatures—possess a drive to account for and explain behavior; I name this drive the “virtuality of agency”, and then suggest that processes of agency attribution are guided by specific rhetorical techniques that actualize agency in localized vectors. To explore these processes of agency attribution I explore three case studies involving the defense of Superior Orders concerning wartime atrocities. In each case, I explore the rhetorical means by which that defense of Superior Orders was rebutted and show how various courts attribute agency to guilty parties. Chapter One of this dissertation outlines its research project and introduces the legal history of Superior Orders and the subsequent chapters. Chapter Two analyzes the criminal trial of the Einsatzgruppen at the close of World War II and explores how a subset of rhetorical enactment (what I term “rhetorical entrapment”) was used by the prosecution and the court to undercut the accused’s defense of duress by baiting/goading them into personally invalidating it. Chapter Three analyzes the court martial of Lt. William Calley Jr. of the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and explores how “common sense” was wielded to “invoke the literal”, invalidating the opinions of psychiatric experts who had diagnosed Calley as mentally incompetent (and therefore lacking the agency requisite for a criminal judgement). Chapter Four takes as its focus the trial of Dominic Ongwen before the International Criminal Court and shows how the court and the prosecution engaged in a rhetoric of adultification, including a two-pronged strategy involving what I term as a “temporal punctuation” and the “trope of violent reproduction” to render Ongwen an adult, culpable subject. Chapter Five elaborates on core-lessons learned about the rhetoric of agency attribution as a virtual process and synthesizes three recurrent techniques for agency attribution: the vividness of the banal, the severity effect, and the displacement of revirtualization.