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 killing usually originates from a relatively small
group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the active support
of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political or
military strategy designed to accomplish leaders' most important objectives,
counter threats to their power and solve their most difficult
problems.

In order to capture the full scope of mass killing during
the 20th century, Valentino does not limit his analysis to violence directed
against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as
do most previous studies of genocide. Rather, he defines mass killing broadly
as the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants, using the
criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five years as a quantitative
standard.

"Final Solutions" focuses on three types of mass killing:
communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union, China,
and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and
"counter-guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala and
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by arguing that
attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from
power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing
the killing.