The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Manus I. Midlarsky

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 480 pp., $75 cloth,

$28.99 paper.

In his recent contribution to the growing

literature on comparative genocide stud-

ies, Manus Midlarsky offers a comprehen-

sive theory to explain the causes or

‘‘etiology’’ of genocide, including the mag-

nitude of victimization. His mostly struc-

tural explanation stresses the impact of

security policy and security crises on the

decision by elites to commit genocide

against specific groups. Preferring the lan-

guage of probability rather than necessity

and sufficiency, and drawing on prospect

theory, Midlarsky argues that genocide is

more likely to occur when a state responds

to the experience of a loss, especially of

territory, in a particular way. Genocidal

situations occur when elites engage in ‘‘loss

compensation’’ by pursuing risky, ‘‘impru-

dent’’ policies or ‘‘brute force realpolitik’’

(p. 93), typically in the form of external

wars or adventurism to regain lost terri-

tory. When such policies create additional

security, economic, and often refugee cri-

ses, elites try to manage them through a

new policy of ‘‘risk minimization,’’ involv-

ing the targeting of groups who are

blamed for the initial loss as well as the in-

creased risks and crises associated with the

regime’s own reckless policies. The physi-

cal liquidation of victim groups is, in this

process, rationalized as ‘‘altruistic punish-

ment’’ (p. 107) in which members of the

group are ‘‘punished’’ for the good of the

wider political community.

Concerning the magnitude of victimiza-

tion and the ‘‘manner of dying’’ (p. 209),

Midlarsky highlights the importance of

international actors as facilitating bystand-

ers: perpetrator elites are strongly influ-

enced in their calculations to commit

genocide by the ‘‘cynical realpolitik’’ of

powerful states that, for their own self-

interested reasons, do not intervene to

protect the victims. Midlarsky further

suggests that victimization rates are

highest when there is a lack of mutual

identification between the perpetrators

and the victims, and among the victims

themselves.

To test his theory Midlarsky compares

three cases: the genocide against the

Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during

World War I, the Nazi ‘‘final solution’’

against the Jews of Europe during World

War II, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Concentrating his efforts on the Holo-

caust, Midlarsky further compares the per-

petrator states of Italy, France, and

Romania (a controversial claim since it is

not clear that these states would have par-

ticipated in genocide had the Nazis not

initiated the policy or occupied much of

Europe) to other noncollaborationist/per-

petrator states in occupied Europe, such as

the Netherlands and Hungary. Finally,

Midlarsky includes several cases of what

he argues are ‘‘nongenocides’’ in order to

control for the dependent variable.

recent books on ethics and international affairs 533

On the plus side, Midlarsky offers a

thoroughly comparative study and pays

careful attention to the process of theory

creation—particularly the definition of

concepts—the explicit articulation of the

relationship between variables, and meth-

odological considerations, such as the in-

troduction of borderline cases or cases of

nongenocide to control for the dependent

variable. The Killing Trap also introduces

into the study of genocide such exogenous

variables as international and regional se-

curity and the role of international actors,

which are not found in most explanatory

models of genocide.

Despite his theoretical innovation,

Midlarsky’s analysis encounters difficulties

on a number of fronts. First, many geno-

cide scholars are likely to contest Midlar-

sky’s restrictive definition of genocide: he

limits the victims of genocide to ethnic

and national groups and argues that kill-

ing is only genocidal if the destruction

involves a relatively high proportion (be-

tween 60 and 70 percent) of a group. The

recent trend in genocide scholarship has

been to expand the definition of genocide

to include victim groups based on politi-

cal affiliation, class, or gender. Other cases

examined in the book, such as Cambodia

(a case often recognized as a genocide but

labeled a ‘‘politicide’’ by Midlarsky),

Northern Ireland, and the Palestinian inti-

fada, are all classified as nongenocides.

Second, there is always a difficult trade-off

to be made in comparative studies between

rich description and theorizing that includes

a consideration of all the possible variables

at play on the one hand, and parsimonious

general theories with few variables on the

other. Midlarsky clearly favors the former,

but at the expense of a felicitously articu-

lated and easily comprehended theoretical

framework. Indeed, a coherent account of

the theory does not appear until chapter 5,

and the most straightforward articulation

does not materialize until page 325.

The third, and most significant, prob-

lem appears in Midlarsky’s testing of his

theory. The evidence presented and the

amount of time spent on the Holocaust

dwarfs the Armenian and Rwandan cases

to such a degree that for much of the

book, and with respect to many of the var-

iables, there is little meaningful cross-case

comparison. The second half of his

theory—on the magnitude of victimiza-

tion—draws solely from the case of the

Holocaust, albeit comparatively across dif-

ferent parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. Fur-

ther problems with evidence include

Midlarsky’s frequent use of speculative ar-

guments, using future events to explain

the past, and indirect evidence as proof of

why perpetrators and victims acted the

way they did rather than using direct, and

available, documentary evidence. Exam-

ples include Midlarsky’s use of the future

creation of the state of Israel to explain the

behavior of the Jewish councils in the

ghettos during the Holocaust, and specula-

tive accounts of the significance of defeats

on the eastern front written by Jews trap-

ped in the ghettos as proof of how the

Nazi leadership calculated the effect of the

war in the east on the evolution of their

‘‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question.’’

There is also more than one instance in

which important factual evidence is simply

wrong (such as the start date of Operation

Barbarossa, on page 206).

On balance Midlarsky’s volume is an

important contribution to comparative

genocide studies, but it requires a patient

reader to appreciate fully the innovation

of his theory and analysis.

—MAUREEN S. HIEBERT

University of Calgary

534 recent books on ethics and international affairs