Hugo Valentin Lecture 2025: Professore Alexander Hinton

The twenty-second Hugo Valentin Lecture, titled Perpetrators: Why do they Kill?, will be delivered by Professor Alex Hinton. The lecture will take place on 24 September 2025.

Professor Hinton’s lecture will examine why perpetrators commit their acts of genocidal violence. It explores the commonly held assumption that such atrocities are the result of inherently evil individuals committing evil deeds. Evidence of this seeming truism appears everywhere. This intuitive explanation is pervasive, and reinforced by historical narratives that emphasise mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao, and by the everyday media reports on the excesses of extremism and the ravages of war. Indeed, evil would seem to be most clearly revealed in such extremes of human destructiveness, especially genocide. Drawing on decades of research on this issue, including interviews with former guards, executioners, and torturers, Professor Hinton will explore this dark side of humanity and whether there is more to the story 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 the Cambodian genocide, traverses topics such as perpetrator motivation, transitional justice, far-right extremism, depolarization, and, most recently, the Trump MAGA movement.

Alex Hinton is a distinguished professor in anthropology, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. Most recently, he received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in the Media Award in 2022, a 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Network of Genocide Scholars, and a H. F. Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award in 2024.