The Psychology of Documentation in the Age of Blood: When the Camera Becomes an Accomplice to Crime

By Abdulaziz Yaqoub

War has many mirrors. Some reflect blood; others reveal humanity’s collapse into itself. In the mirror of the Sudanese war, it was not the bullet alone that became an instrument of death — the camera did, too. A cold lens captured scenes of violence with a chilling smile, as if celebrating the extinguishing of life.

When members of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) raised their phones to film acts of killing and torture, they were not documenting the truth — they were documenting their own descent into its depths. They sought to appear powerful, only to be exposed, naked before history and conscience.

In war psychology, documentation is never a random act. It is understood as a complex defensive mechanism. Filming gives the perpetrator the illusion of control over reality, restoring a false sense of power after war has stripped away their humanity.

According to psychoanalytic theory on “defense mechanisms,” the perpetrator engages in rationalization — justifying his crimes as duty or rightful revenge — and displacement, venting aggression on those weaker: women, children, and unarmed men. He also resorts to denial, avoiding confrontation with the horror of his actions.
The act of filming itself is a manifestation of aggressive narcissism — a perverse pleasure in seeing oneself as the ultimate authority, even while sinking into meaninglessness and fear.

From a social-psychological perspective, members of armed groups often document their crimes out of loyalty to the group or the desire to belong. Documentation becomes a symbolic ritual — proof of one’s participation in the “herd” and a declaration of total obedience to the leader.
This is what psychologists call deindividuation — the dissolution of personal identity within the collective, where responsibility and guilt are erased, and violence becomes normalized, even celebrated. The camera, then, unites the group around acts of killing and embeds violence into its collective psyche.

This pattern was starkly visible in the behavior of the RSF. For them, documentation was not incidental; it was part of the symbolic structure of violence. The images produced terror as effectively as weapons, constructing a myth of power upon the ruins of the innocent.
They wanted the camera to bear witness to their heroism — instead, it became a witness against them. They sought to intimidate others — yet their recordings condemned them before all humanity.

From the standpoint of criminal psychology, such behavior reflects emotional numbing — the loss of natural empathy, where violence becomes an automatic act that no longer stirs inner conflict. Killing turns from crime to routine, from exception to habit. Filming, then, becomes merely a way to record a “normal” moment — a psychological shield against guilt.

Yet the lens meant to terrify others has instead exposed the void within the perpetrator. The image they intended as proof of strength became an admission of weakness. The silence they sought for oblivion became an indelible memory.
The camera betrayed the conscience they had forsaken, revealing the death of their humanity even before the death of their victims.

No matter how long the night endures, memory preserves a light that does not fade. Every clip filmed to instill fear will remain a testament to truth. Every innocent face that fell under a treacherous lens will one day rise from the museum of memory — not to recall violence, but to affirm that humanity cannot be erased by an image or a clip, but is, in fact, immortalized through it.

When the archive of memory is opened and history is read through the eyes of justice, those who filmed the killings will realize they did not silence conscience — they gave it a voice. The camera they thought was an instrument of humiliation was, in essence, the eye of postponed justice, seeing what they tried to hide.
And when those scenes are revisited in the courts of conscience, the victims will stand in solemn silence and tell a world that has finally understood their message: “They filmed our death — let it, then, be the beginning of a life more just, more humane, and worthy of Sudan and its noble people.”