Benjamin Valentino

Benjamin Andrew Valentino (born 1971) is a political scientist and professor at Dartmouth College. His 2004 book Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, adapted from his PhD thesis and published by Cornell University Press, has been reviewed in several academic journals.

Analysis

Analysis of genocide and mass killing In Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, Valentino sees ruler's motives, rather than ideology, as the key factor explaining the onset of genocide. Valentino says that ideology, racism, and paranoia can shape leaders' beliefs for why genocide and mass killing can be justified. Valentino outlines two major category of mass killings, namely dispossessive mass killings and coercive mass killings. The first category includes ethnic cleansing, killings that accompany agrarian reforms in some Communist states and killings during colonial expansion, among others. The second category includes killings during counterinsurgency warfare and killings as part of imperialist conquests by the Axis powers during World War II, among others. Valentino does not see authoritarianism or totalitarianism as explaining mass killing.

Valentino develops his mass killing concept through eight-case studies, three of which fit the legal definition of genocide (the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide), while the other five are about politicide cases of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Communist China under Mao Zedong, Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge, the anti-communist regime in Guatemala (the Guatemalan genocide), and Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. Although he does not consider ideology or regime type as an important factor that explains these killings, Valentino outlines Communist mass killing as a subtype of dispossessive mass killing, which is considered as a complication of original theory his book is based on. In regard to Communist mass killings, Valentino does not connect them and only discusses the Stalin era, the Mao era, and the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia, and excludes counter-insurgency mass killings, which he groups in his book with similar killings by capitalist regimes; they were not ideologically driven but resulted from the same motivations as non-Communist states.

Power transition theory Writing with Richard Ned Lebow and critiquing power transition theory, Valentino states, "Power transition theorists have been surprisingly reluctant to engage historical cases in an effort to show that wars between great powers have actually resulted from the motives described by their theories."

Selected works