Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (review)

Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda Lee Ann Fujii Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009 212 pp, $29.95 (hbk) It remains an enduring challenge, both morally and academically, to compr...

Nations and NationalismVolume 16, Issue 1 p. 198-200 Killing Neighbours: Webs of Violence in Rwanda by Lee Ann Fujii SANDRA JOIREMAN, SANDRA JOIREMAN Wheaton College (Illinois)Search for more papers by this author SANDRA JOIREMAN, SANDRA JOIREMAN Wheaton College (Illinois)Search for more papers by this author First published: 23 December 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2010.00440_5.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume16, Issue1Special Issue: THEMED SECTION ON NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CONSTITUTIONALISM IN EUROPE. Guest Editors: BILL KISSANE and NICK SITTERJanuary 2010Pages 198-200 RelatedInformation

This is the Russian translation of the Introduction to the book by Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University. Translated and reprinted by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Lee Ann Fujii. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009. xi + 212 pp. List of Abbreviations. Maps. Notes. Dramatis personae. Glossary. References. Index. $29.95. Cloth. - Volume 52 Issue 3

The Meaning of Genocide. By Mark Levene. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. 266 pp., $29.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-845-11752-8). Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation. By Alexander Laban Hinton, Kevin Lewis O'Neill, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 331 pp., $23.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-822-34405-6). Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. By Lee Ann Fujii. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 212 pp., $29.95 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-44705-1). To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing. By Sarah E. Wagner. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. 330 pp., $21.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-520-25575-3). Those who study and write on the topic of genocide must begin with the understanding that they are delving into the worst aspects of human nature. The discipline must ask difficult questions and often come to even more difficult answers. Simply put, the study of genocide is not for the weak. Beyond the disturbing nature of the subject matter, genocide has proven to be a difficult research field for other reasons as well. There are definitional questions, genocides are relatively infrequent and performing proper field research can be difficult in that many of the victims are dead or traumatized and the perpetrators unwilling to discuss their crimes. Those who study genocide must decide to approach it either from a purely theoretical/clinical standpoint or from a societal/anthropological framework. If the researcher chooses to work from a clinical standpoint, they are able to look for patterns in tactics and outcomes but miss the realities of those who suffer through the conflict, and those who carry it out. Conversely, if a researcher goes into the field and interviews the victims and perpetrators, they come away with a better understanding of a particular event, but often their compassion for those who suffered skews their impartiality and their ability to provide comparative analysis. To best understand this worst of all human activities then, it is therefore necessary to use a combination of sources across a variety of cases. The four new additions to the literature present an excellent cross-section that gives the reader true insight into the typology, causes and ramifications of genocide. Mark Levene should be commended for his ambitious work, The Meaning of Genocide . The book is the first in what is to be a four volume analysis of numerous aspects of the study of genocide. As the introduction to the series, …

Reviewed by: Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda Eliza Guyol-Meinrath Lee Ann Fujii. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 212 pp. ISBN: 978-0801447051. Over the past decade, anthropologists and other social scientists have begun looking at genocide as a dynamic political process rather than the inevitable result of ethnic tensions. With this shift has come the realization that global, national, and local processes all play a part in effectuating mass atrocity. This book, then, is part of an emerging body of literature that seeks to understand the power of the local and the ways individuals conceive of and participate in projects of mass violence. The result of nine months of field work in Rwanda, this book stands out from the crush of available literature on the Rwandan genocide for a variety of reasons. Exploring the complex relationship between ethnicity and violence, Fujii crafts a smart, succinct piece of literature that is both approachable and academically rigorous. Challenging current theoretical models popularly used to study and explain genocide, Fujii maps a "constructivist theory of mass violence," focusing on micro-level agency, power, and identity "to capture how contexts, identities, and motives shift or transform through the unfolding of violence across time and space" (p. 11). Combining theoretical approaches from the fields of anthropology and political science, Fujii de-mystifies the motives of the group she refers to as "Joiners," those who participated in the genocide but did not plan or organize it. In the introduction, Fujii outlines the inadequacy of the ethnic hatred and ethnic fear models in explaining the actions of local level actors during the Rwandan genocide, as they fail to take into account the critical importance of pre-existing social ties. While Fujii recognizes the central role of ethnicity in fueling the Rwandan genocide, she maintains that "what mediated between the script for genocide and people's actual performances in a given moment were local ties and group dynamics" (p. 19). Chapter one lays out the author's research methodology, while chapter two systematically breaks down the ethnic fear and ethnic hatred models from the bottom up, showing that the principal [End Page 164] conflict in the Rwandan genocide was the Rwandan elites' struggle for power at the national, regional, and local levels. Of particular interest is Fujii's analysis of "state-sponsored ethnicity" as a "dramaturlogical blueprint for violence" (p. 104). Her analysis clearly displays the political nature of the Rwandan genocide and drives home the point, not unique to this book, that Hutu and Tutsi identities were manipulated by the elite. Ethnicity, then, is revealed as a tool of the genocide rather than a cause. Chapters three and four utilize data obtained through interviews to reveal Joiners' rationales for participating in the genocide. These interviews, conducted in two regions of Rwanda with both survivors and Joiners, reveal situational factors and personal motives rather than long-standing ethnic-based hatreds or fears, as reasons for individual participation. In the last two chapters, Fujii explores how and why social ties operated as the main factor in eliciting Joiners to participate in the violence, finding that "it was social ties, not ethnic membership, that patterned processes of recruitment and targeting" during the genocide (p. 129). While Fujii bases her research in large part on the testimony of her interviewees, this book is far more than a collection of personal narratives meant to humanize the perpetrators. Instead, Fujii provides a sophisticated, theoretically informed analysis of events and lays the foundation for an alternative approach to the study and understanding of genocide. By focusing on how violence operates at the most local, intimate levels, Fujii's "social interaction" theory "cautions against assumptions that state-sponsored forms of ethnicity automatically take over or deactivate all other forms of identity" (p. 187). While the basis of the book's argument is not new, with most scholars accepting that ethnic conflict was only one aspect of the Rwandan genocide along with political, historical, and economic factors, Fujii's extensive analysis takes this concept to the next level and sets forth the seeds for a new theoretical paradigm for the study of mass violence. The...

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Reviewed by: Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda E. Ofori Bekoe Fujii, Lee Ann. 2009. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 212 pp. By the end of May 1994, the world woke up from breathtaking apathy and slumber when it came to grips with the reality that, in only a hundred days, the worst human carnage in decades had taken place: in Rwanda, at least half a million Tutsis had been hacked to death by their own countrymen, neighbors, and even friends. The reported genocide began after President Juvénal Habyarimana’s airplane was shot down, in Kigali, on 6 April 1994, ending his twenty-year rule. He had been returning from peace talks related to the Arusha Accords. Researchers and scholars have asked why Tutsis and Hutus—long living as neighbors and friends, sharing a common language, culture, and religion, constituting a single social unit through intermarriage—could end up in a zero-sum conflict, which spiraled into genocide. This anthropological dilemma is what Lee Ann Fujii explores in Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Violence had sporadically been occurring in parts of the country, but not at a genocidal level. The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), based in Uganda and led by Tutsis, had invaded northern Rwanda in late 1990 and had continued to fight the national government, led by Hutus. The thesis of the book is that the genocide did not result from ethnic hatred, as has generally been postulated; instead, ethnic hatred played only a minor part. Fujii suggests: “The principal conflicts is [sic] not between Hutu and Tutsi as corporate entities, but between elites of the same ethnicity who use violence to divert attention from the real threat to their power . . . and in Rwanda, ethnicity was a strategy of politics, not its foundation” (pp. 45–46, 75). Rwandan elites were exploiting perceived ethnic cleavages spawned by decades of political and socioeconomic asphyxiation by whichever ethnic group had been in power. The lethal violence took place in different parts of the country at different times. Political allegiances played a major role in Kigali and its environs, where specially trained military and the Interahamwe paramilitary hunted down and killed Tutsis, moderate Hutus, and political enemies, but the genocide was a gradual process elsewhere, especially in Kimanzi, in the north, and Ngali, in the center-south, where the author conducted extensive interviews with 82 people of whom 28 were prisoners and had witnessed or taken part in the genocide. In the north, people generally rejected the RPF invasion: they saw Tutsis as accomplices and in a minority, and both ethnicities had mobilized against the RPF because mass killings had gone on sporadically in there [End Page 107] for three and a half years; however, the crash of Habyarimana’s plane triggered a sudden escalation of the conflict. That was when the tables turned: henceforth, all Tutsis were seen as guilty by association with the RPF. In Ngali, the inhabitants had heard of the war with the RPF, but they widely assumed that it would not reach them. Overall, the dominant politicians did not want to share power, and, as a result, they targeted Tutsis. This is shown in the career of Jude, the power broker in the center-south. With the power invested in him as the consellier of Ngali, he lured Tutsis to their deaths. The killings continued until May, when the RPF captured the region. The group dynamics in this study show that not all Hutus attacked Tutsis. Some moderate Hutus helped Tutsis escape; others offered safe haven and informed Tutsis of imminent Hutu attacks. That is not to say that there was no enmity between them, as interpersonal antagonisms had long existed; but on the whole, Tutsi and Hutu neighbors coexisted peacefully: they drank beer together, helped build each other’s houses, and intermarried. Fujii has written a useful historical account, which looks at the genocide from a refreshing scholarly perspective to show how group dynamics became a formidable instrument for mass murder: many who killed, raped women, and mutilated bodies acted only in groups, not individually. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to explain mass involvement in genocide is invaluable...

Killing neighbors: webs of violence in Rwanda

Seated at the famous horseshoe table in the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York on 25 October 1962, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson presented fellow Council members with photographic evidence of Soviet missile installations in Cuba. Unveiling the evidence collected by US intelligence services over the previous weeks and months, Stevenson’s performance produced a supreme and memorable moment of Cold War drama. Some 40 years later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, making the case Review Essay

Scholars of political violence often face problems concerning data availability. Research on the perpetrators of that violence is no exception. Over the past 40 years we have made great strides in understanding who joins in violent action and why, yet have rarely probed the representative nature of the subjects queried or contemplated the implications of this sampling for our conclusions. It is generally assumed that those left to ‘tell the tale’ about what transpired are representative of those who participated in the violence. In this article, we use the context of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to probe questions about which perpetrators of violence we include in our research and subsequently, who we miss. We theorize an often overlooked group of perpetrators, the ‘murderers in the middle’, who take orders from above, mobilize others to kill, and zealously participate themselves. We contend that this group of perpetrators is potentially unique from those generally captured, identified, and studied in that they are likely to have actively and willingly engaged in violence for personal gain as well as for ideological reasons. Systematically missing groups of perpetrators has potential implications for research on participation in mass violence as well as our understanding of why this behavior occurs.

In 1994, leaders within the Rwandan state and military organized a systematic campaign of violence against the minority Tutsi population of that country. Given the scale and character of violence in Rwanda in 1994- especially the case's unequivocal status as genocide- the Holocaust has been a frequent comparative point of reference. Even though some scholars of genocide may wish otherwise, the Holocaust remains the paradigmatic case of genocide in the popular and to some extent scholarly imagination. The place of the Holocaust in the analysis and interpretation of the Rwandan genocide is partly a function of the intellectual history of the Rwandan case. Prior to the genocide, Rwanda had a minimal international presence, in particular in the English-speaking world. Genocides may have distinct normative dimensions, but genocides are also social phenomena that may be examined comparatively as other social phenomena, such as revolution, the welfare state, and civil war, are.

Two genocides in the mid-1990s - against the Tutsi in Rwanda and agsint Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica (and, arguably, elsewhere in Bosnia) shattered the notion that the end of the cold war would usher in an era of global peace and stability. Thisd chapter examines those genocides as a means of drawing attention to how these episodes changed the way policy makers and scholars came to think about genocide. After presenting an overview of each case, I address the failure to grasp the genocidal dimensions of violence in Rwanda and Bosnia. I argue that those failures revealed blind spots in what people understood about genocide or the prospect of suppressing it. They also prompted changes in both the policy-making and academic realms that have altered the trajectory of genocide studies since then.

Rwanda is largely known to the outside world for the 1994 genocide, during which Hutu Power extremists murdered between 500,000 and one million civilians, most of whom were members of the nation’s Tutsi minority population. The military victory of the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ended the genocide, after which the RPF invested in an ambitious transitional justice programme, including trials, memorials and annual national commemorations, to tackle the unenviable tasks of pursuing “universal accountability” and reconciling its citizens. In doing so, it has gradually established an official history of what it terms the “1994 genocide against the Tutsi”. This official history has provoked controversy within and beyond Rwanda. Its supporters laud the government’s efforts to educate the public, promote genocide resistance, and provide survivors with safe spaces to remember missing and murdered loved ones. Its critics argue that it creates a dangerous hierarchy of suffering that obscures Rwandans’ diverse experiences of political violence in the 1990s. This chapter maps the evolution of official commemorations in Rwanda alongside official efforts to silence discussions of broader experiences of political violence in Rwanda in the 1990s, highlighting the potential challenges that can surround genocide commemorations in post-genocide contexts internationally.