[2] 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.
In his view, mass killing represents a rational choice of elites to achieve or stay in political power in the face of perceived threats to their dominance.
He instead traces these terrible outcomes to small sets of committed rulers, for whom mass murder is an instrumental means to such ends as regime security from suspect or threatening minority groups.
As such, his thesis touches directly on the question of whether such regimes require the active support of at least important segments of the general population in order to carry out genocides.
In arguing they do not, he categorizes most citizens of afflicted societies as bystanders and frontally challenges Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's claim that a committed regime and an 'eliminationist' culture are both necessary conditions for a genocidal outcome.
This matters because if he cannot explain in rationalist terms why Nazis believed they had to kill Jewish grandmothers in Poland, then Valentino risks inviting ideational explanations for genocides in through the back door, preserving the form of an instrumentalist account but not its content.
Not only is it beyond our capacity to end human nastiness and misery, but in any case, leaders not structural conditions or the wrong cultural values are responsible for mass slaughter.
They are calculated strategies by powerful elites, sometimes even by single dictators who feel that they and their cherished programs are gravely endangered by the existence of hostile enemies who must be either terrorized into submission or eliminated entirely.
In all three cases, a small cadre of leaders led by a dedicated revolutionary chief was driven by utopian fantasies and ideological certitude that made it see enemies everywhere and kill millions.
"[21]"Valentino argues for a 'strategic approach' to understand the etiology of mass killing that 'seeks to identify the specific situations, goals, and conditions that give leaders incentives to consider this kind of violence' (p. 67).
All that is needed is a group of people — large or small — having the requisite resources: political power, the ability to employ force, and opportunity to work their murderous mayhem.Valentino's typology of mass killings is well supported by persuasive examples of episodes of violence against civilians.
These cover a wide historical sweep, from the former Soviet Union, Turkish Armenia, and Nazi Germany, to the more recent examples from Cambodia, Guatemala, Afghanistan and Rwanda.
In each chapter, relevant cases of mass killings are subjected to thorough historical process tracing in order to highlight the role of the elite decision-making calculus.