The sociologist Stanley Cohen offers a wide-ranging study of denial—the many ways individuals, organizations, and whole societies avoid confronting uncomfortable truths. Cohen, who coined the term "moral panic" and spent much of his career studying human rights and state violence, examines the common structure beneath phenomena that seem unrelated: the alcoholic who refuses to recognize his condition, the family that fails to see abuse in its midst, the government that plans atrocities to preserve "maximum deniability," and the bystander nations that decline to intervene in distant suffering. He asks whether denial is a conscious evasion or an unconscious defense mechanism, whether there can be entire cultures of denial, and whether some forms of not-knowing are necessary to preserve sanity. The book distinguishes among literal denial (the fact never happened), interpretive denial (it happened but means something else), and implicatory denial (its moral implications are minimized or ignored). Cohen applies this framework to organized cruelty—the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres—and to the way such acts are denied by perpetrators, bystanders, and observers alike. He also turns to the machinery of humanitarian appeal, exploring how organizations like Amnesty International and Oxfam struggle against public indifference and compassion fatigue, and why images of suffering so often fail to move us to act. Rigorous and unsettling, States of Denial is a foundational work on the psychology and politics of looking away, and on the conditions under which people finally choose to acknowledge what they would rather not know.