Hugo Valentin-föreläsningen 2025: Professore Alexander Hinton

The twenty-second Hugo Valentin Lecture, entitled Perpetrators: Why do They Kill? , will be delivered by Professor Alex Hinton. The lecture will be held on 24 September 2025.

Professor Hinton's talk will focus on why perpetrators commit violent acts. For many people, the answer is clear: evil acts are committed by evil people. This intuitive explanation is pervasive and reinforced by historical narratives that highlight mass murderers such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao, and by daily media reporting on the excesses of extremism and the devastation of war. Indeed, evil seems to emerge most clearly in such extreme forms of human destructiveness, particularly genocide. Drawing on decades of research on the subject, including interviews with former guards, executioners and torturers, Professor Hinton will delve into this dark side of humanity in his talk. He will explore whether there is anything more to tell about the nature of human evil.

His research has resulted in seventeen authored or edited collections, including most recently It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU, 2021), Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell, 2022), and Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side (Stanford, 2023). His research, which began with an anthropological study of genocide and mass murder in Cambodia, encompasses topics such as perpetrator motivation, transitional justice, right-wing extremism, and most recently, the Trump MAGA movement.

Alex Hinton is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. He is the most recent recipient of the American Anthropological Association's Anthropology in the Media Award in 2022, the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024 from the International Network of Genocide Scholars, and the HF Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award in 2024.