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  • 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.

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