Political scientists Christian Davenport and Allen Stam provide an unconventional—and thus controversial—answer to the first question. They discuss this research in the most recent Miller-McCune Magazine. (The project’s website is here.) A few excerpts from the article:
In the end, our best estimate of who died during the 1994 massacre was, really, an educated guess based on an estimate of the number of Tutsi in the country at the outset of the war and the number who survived the war. Using a simple method —subtracting the survivors from the number of Tutsi residents at the outset of the violence — we arrived at an estimated total of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Tutsi victims. If we believe the estimate of close to 1 million total civilian deaths in the war and genocide, we are then left with between 500,000 and 700,000 Hutu deaths, and a best guess that the majority of victims were in fact Hutu, not Tutsi…
One fact is now becoming increasingly well understood: During the genocide and civil war that took place in Rwanda in 1994, multiple processes of violence took place simultaneously. Clearly there was a genocidal campaign, directed to some degree by the Hutu government…At the same time, a civil war raged — a war that began in 1990, if the focus is on only the most recent and intense violence, but had roots that extend all the way back to the 1950s. Clearly, there was also random, wanton violence associated with the breakdown of order during the civil war. There’s also no question that large-scale retribution killings took place throughout the country — retribution killings by Hutu of Tutsi, and vice versa.
Mitigating the after-effects of this conflict is the subject of a new article in the American Political Science Review by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Don Green. Their jumping-off point is the notion that a “political culture” of deference to authority and conformity helps produce genocide. They seek to determine what can mitigate such a culture by encouraging the expression of dissent and collection problem-solving. They randomly exposed rural Rwandans to a radio program that encouraged these behaviors, and other Rwandans to a program about health. What did they find?
Our results indicate that although the program did little or nothing to change many domains of individual belief and attitude, it effected profound changes in behavior. Radio listeners in the treatment group became more likely to express dissent with peers and less likely to defer to local officials when solving local problems. These changes were balanced by an increased sense of collective responsibility and local initiative. Our findings suggest that certain aspects of political culture are susceptible to short-term change in the wake of noninstitutional interventions, such as media programs. Evidently, the mass media can influence the set of culturally available behavioral practices that citizens use—the “toolkit” of political cultural conduct.
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Thanks for posting the “radio treatment” article. Wasn’t there another recent article on TMC about evaluating a community organizing intervention in Africa? Might be worth linking the two together.
I really dont agree with this attitude of treating Africans(Rwandans in this case), as guinea pigs where everyone from the ‘enlightened world’ conducts their fancy researches on ‘lowly’ human behavior. By the way, on what did the ‘experts’ base to calcualte the number of ‘tutsi’ and ‘hutus’ that died? please act like intellectuals if you are. Thank you
Some of the things that they highlight – geographical and time-dependent nuances, different motives for violence and kinds of violence are pretty uncontroversial, and things that these researchers and others linked to them helped bring to light. The local, time-dependent motivations for violence that they emphasize are worth thinking about for people everywhere. It is something that is common sense in one’s own society, but nuances that aren’t always recognized in another society.
But… the headline-grabbing assertion of the ethnic breakdown of those killed seems unfounded methodologically, and given the delicateness of the topic seems unseemly. From their article it seems based on a subtraction exercise from a single census and based on one NGOs estimate – particularly a survival organization who (one could imagine) would have an incentive to define its constituency in the broadest possible terms.
There were all sorts of reasons for Rwandans to self-identify as a member of one group before the war, and a member of a different group after, given the makeup of prewar and post-war authorities. Similar to the phenomenon of ‘passing’ when the methodology changed for racial determination in the US census. Particularly feasible considering intermarriage and so forth.
A survival organization (to guess) aimed at helping survivors, would presumably be interested in ‘households’ including children of survivors, whether or not they were alive in 1994 – an academic point not necessarily interesting to a local association aimed at helping people. Not sure when their data point on survivors came about but if it was in 1998 or 1999 when they did their study, there would be some population growth.
Similarly, there were refugee flows into the country from Uganda as well as out during the period (albeit smaller), with many of those moving in having every reason to not claim they recently moved in, or having followed the RPF advance.
From the rough time they seemed to have had in Rwanda and some of the individuals orienting their research, that they might have seen themselves as being ‘onto something,’ and revealing a great untold truth. Maybe they are, but one might also think that the treatment they received from the government might make them less inhibited to make such a controversial statement or more likely to engage in some academic gee-whizzery. I suppose we will see more once the finished product comes out.
Some of the things that they highlight – geographical and time-dependent nuances, different motives for violence and kinds of violence are pretty uncontroversial, and things that these researchers and others like them help bring to light. These are worth thinking about for people everywhere, and particularly when thinking about how events happen in foreign countries. It is common sense in one’s own society that things vary from place to place and time to time, outsiders often focus on a country in terms of one defining event that brought them to focus on it.
But… the headline-grabbing assertion of the ethnic breakdown of those killed seems unfounded methodologically, and given the delicateness of the topic is unseemly. From the linked article it seems this conclusion is based only on a subtraction exercise from a single census and based on one NGOs estimate – a survival organization who (one could imagine) would have an incentive to define its constituency in the broadest possible terms.
There were all sorts of reasons for Rwandans to self-identify as a member of one group before the war, and a member of a different group after, given the makeup of prewar and post-war authorities. Similar to the phenomenon of ‘passing’ when the methodology changed for racial determination in the US census. Particularly reasonable considering intermarriage, mixed heritage and so forth.
Between the genocide and the time of their study there were population flows into the country as well as out, including RPF soldiers wives and children, formerly displaced Rwandans, and refugees from wars in the DRC and Burundi. Many of those moving in would have material reason to not claim they recently moved, or more legitimately to consider themselves survivors of some form of victimization, if not specifically the 100 days in April.
Similarly, a survival organization aimed at helping survivors, would (I guess) presumably be interested in ‘households’ including children of survivors, whether or not they were alive in 1994 – an academic point not necessarily interesting to a local association aimed at helping people. Not sure when their data point on survivors came about but if it was in 1998 or 1999 when they did their study, there would be some population growth of interest to the study, but not necessarily of interest to their data source.
From the rough time they seemed to have had in Rwanda and some of the individuals orienting their research, that they might have seen themselves as being ‘onto something,’ and revealing a great untold truth. Maybe they are, but one might also think that the treatment they received from the government might make them less inhibited to make such a controversial statement or more likely to engage in some academic gee-whizzery. I suppose we will see more once the finished product comes out.
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