Ethnic Conflict: Rwanda

Tracing the origins of ethnic-based political violence is an enigmatic dilemma for many political scientists, especially with respect to the multifaceted complexities within the 1994 Rwandan genocide. A common hypothesis proposed by primordial theorists attribute the origins of the genocide to ‘ancient tribal animosities’ which harden racial and cultural confines and thus galvanize violence. Although the Rwandan genocide involved the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis by the hands of Hutus, a coalescence of additional diplomatic, demographic, and historical cleavages endure as compelling origins of ethnic-based violence. Within this essay, I will argue that the Rwandan genocide was activated along racial and cultural lines, however, the primordial hypothesis is limited by the systematic leveraging of political, socioeconomic, and historical fractionalization. We can instead trace the genocide’s origin through instrumental elite-led manipulation of identity and salient crises, which thus hardened previously weak boundaries between the Hutu and Tutsi. I will begin this discussion by first outlining the political leverages through the lens of elite activation and political power manipulation. Next, I will describe the manipulation of colonial conditions which served to prime the salience of political and socio-economic cleavages. Then, I will detail the socioeconomic leverages and various economic divisions and crises within pre-genocide Rwandan society, which combined with the previous leverages, provides an alternative source for the genocide. Finally, I will conclude that due to the proposed rationality, the reader may consider a hybrid instrumentalist and constructivist theory as a superior hypothesis for tracing the origins of the Rwandan genocide.