Final Solutions

Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass...

Benjamin A. Valentino is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.

Valentino's analysis is flawless. His empirically rooted case studies are appropriate and interpretive strategies rigorous.

In trying to make sense of such violence, scholars have tended to look within societies: at collective psychology, ethnic and racial hatred, and the character of government. In this astute and provocative study, Valentino argues instead that leaders, not societies, are to blame. In most cases, he finds that powerful leaders use mass killing to advance their own interests or indulge their own hatreds, rather than to carry out the desires of their constituencies.... Valentino cleverly notes that if mass killing is not deeply rooted in society but a tactic of state power, the rest of the world has fewer excuses for inaction.

In this brilliant study of genocides and mass murders, Valentino analyzes conditions leading to such monstrous crimes based on more than eight cases.... Valentino's extraordinary scholarship provides a challenge to conventional wisdom about what can and should be done about genocide.

John Mueller, Ohio State University:

I find Final Solutions to be superb—even brilliant—in its consideration of the mass killing that took place in the bloody twentieth century. Benjamin Valentino's reasoning is tight, his care with nuance and definition is exemplary, his exploration of the literature is both deep and amazingly broad, and his conclusions are stunning, unconventional, provocative, and convincingly developed.

Norman M. Naimark, author of Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe:

Final Solutions deftly focuses on the responsibility of the strategic calculations of political leaders for mass killing in the twentieth century. By examining a wide selection of cases, including a number in which large-scale massacres and genocide did not occur, Benjamin A. Valentino is able to test his ideas about the prevention of one of humanity's most dire problems.