Behavioral Variation in Genocide

What is it about?

This article is about behavioral variation in genocide. Research frequently suggests that violent behaviors can be explained by or treated as synonymous with ethnic categories. This literature also tends to pre-group actors as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders for research purposes. However, evidence that individuals cross boundaries from killing to desistance and saving throughout genocide indicates that the relationship between behaviors and categories is often in flux. I thus introduce the concept of behavioral boundary crossing to examine when and how Hutu in 1994 Rwanda aligned with the killing behaviors expected of them and when and how they did not. I analyze interviews with 31 Hutu, revealing that transactional, relational, social-psychological, and cognitive mechanisms informed individuals’ behaviors during the genocide. The result is a dynamic theory of action that explains participation without homogenizing individual experience due to presumptions about behavioral and categorical alignment. (Abstract, p. 148)

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Why is it important?

"The dynamic theory of action is ... consequential not only for theory but also for political and policy reasons. Knowing what prompts a person to kill or not kill as a genocide unfolds has powerful implications for intervention. Crucially, if we wish to understand how intervention in genocide is possible, we need more work on how, when, and why people choose not to kill when killing is expected (and even sometimes demanded) of them. If one goal of scholarship on genocide is to understand the mechanisms leading to mass violence such that it can be prevented or halted in the future, we must untangle not only why people join in genocidal violence but also how and when they might stop." (Conclusion, p. 166)