This is the first in what we hope will be a long series of Q&A sessions with people doing interesting and important work on atrocities early warning or prevention. We thought it fitting to start the series with Ben Valentino, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, who got the ball rolling on what would become the Early Warning Project while on a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide.
The idea to create a public early-warning system on mass atrocities was yours. Where did this idea come from?
Since the late 1990s I have collaborated on developing a mass atrocities early warning system used by the U.S. government. That system has been put to good use, but I always regretted that there were many groups that might make use of this kind of early warning—such as human rights organizations, academics, foreign governments, and the general public—that did not have access to it. I hoped that a public early warning system would help these groups prevent or respond to mass atrocities and help focus public attention on those countries at greatest risk for mass violence. So it’s very gratifying to have the opportunity to help make that a reality.
What do you see as the single most important finding from your own research on mass atrocities?
Most of my work has focused on trying to demonstrate that mass atrocities are not irrational outbursts of ethnic hatred, as many people assume. Rather, massive violence against civilians is usually a calculated strategy implemented by powerful political and military elites designed to accomplish their most important objectives—usually maintaining their political power or prevailing in a military conflict. Mass atrocity, in other words, is usually a means to an end, not an end in itself. Most of the time, perpetrators resort to mass atrocities only after they try and fail to achieve their ends in less violent ways. Sometimes people find it hard to believe that leaders could see unarmed civilians as a threat to their authority. But leaders often perceive civilian support as the key to their adversaries’ military or political power. So a lot of my research has been devoted to trying to understand the situations in which leaders are most likely to view civilians as critical threats.
When did you start working on this topic, and what initially got you interested?
I first started thinking about mass violence against civilians at the end of the Cold War, when it seemed like the greatest threat to humans by other humans was from the prospect of nuclear war. When the Cold War ended, however, the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda reminded all of us that nuclear weapons were not required to kill tens of thousands of people. Although we had managed to avoid using nuclear weapons since 1945, mass atrocities were far more common than most people appreciated. So I wanted to understand how this kind of violence could happen and what might be done to prevent it.
How do you see research on genocide and mass atrocities evolving in the next 5–10 years?
The good news is that mass atrocities and genocide (along with many other forms of violence) appear to be on the decline in the last 10 or 15 years. But we don’t really know why. Hopefully, understanding the causes of this decline in violence could help us devise new policies and approaches that will help make it even less common in the future.