Organized Mass Murder: Structure, Participation, and Motivation in Comparative Perspective

Organizational structures have played a key role in modern state-sponsored mass murder. The author of this article criticizes and synthesizes the existing scholarship, focusing first on historiographical debates surrounding the Holocaust. He then considers the Stalinist purges, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Genocide in the light of this and other theoretical literature. The article sheds light on the ways organizational norms have interacted with other motivational factors to shape the behavior of mass murderers in distinct historical episodes.