Mass Killing and the Oases of Humanity: Understanding Rwandan Genocide and Resistance

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal addresses two main issues. First, at the group level, we seek to understand what accounts for the behavior of those that chose to retain their decency amid the violence around them. While literally hundreds of thousands of people actively or passively participated in the killings and violence, others made the deliberate choice not to; amidst genocide there were oases of humanity and resistance. The decision to opt out varied across both space and time, but we have little understanding of why in some prefectures little killing took place, and why in others the compliance with orders to commit violent acts were heeded regularly. Second, following the analysis above, we will engage in an effort to better understand the reconciliation process that is now being used in Rwanda, by tapping the attitudes of individuals inclined to forgive their neighbors versus those who are not while controlling for the differences in their experiences before, during and after the events of 1994. The effectiveness of reconciliation and national healing programs after large-scale mass-killings depends in no small part on detailed understandings of who the perpetrators were, what the specific crimes were and the victims' role in placing themselves at the scene. Treating all genocides alike, as a binary event/non-event (like that employed within the existing quantitative literature), hinders our ability to tailor specific reconciliation and judicial processes such as the current Gacaca process now underway in Rwanda, which is a local, community-oriented effort, being used throughout the country. In order to design and implement political and judicial processes to allow the victims to move forward with their lives as individuals and to develop as nations, we need to better understand the process by which genocidal activities take place and to be able to understand the variance of the process over both space and time. NSF support will be used for the collection and formatting of additional data to supplement data already collected at the individual level (descriptions of victims and perpetrators of individual violent acts) to be used as independent variables within an analysis of behavioral variation during the of genocide: e.g., measures of power concentration, crisis, and numerous contextual factors that influence the willingness of individuals to participate or to opt out. We rely upon numerous sources for this: NGO reports within as well as outside of Rwanda, the Rwandan census of 1991, country mapping data complied by the Centre for Conflict Management and the GIS Centre at the National University of Rwanda, in Butare, and survey data from several Rwandan, French and Belgium authorities each representing a particular politically interested viewpoint on the genocide. The project proposed here has numerous implications for scholars, policymakers, NGOs and everyday citizens. First, it provides insight into one of the most significant and violent events in human history. Second, it improves our understanding of a part of the world that has largely been neglected by rigorous empirical investigation and one that has repeatedly experienced mass killing - albeit at various levels of severity. This is something of a major limitation within existing social science literature, which should attempt to be generalizable across all parts of the world. Third, and last, the project provides general insight into how one should go about investigating contentious politics/conflict processes in the future - exploring within-case variation. Such an approach influences not simply our study and understanding of conflict behavior, but also our conceptions of when and where we should intervene into such activities in an attempt to stop them as well as where and how we should go about trying to reconcile populations after this behavior has ended.