Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (review)

For academics who have investigated the complicated history of ethnicity and the rise and fall of elites, broad macro-level concepts such as "masses," "elites," or ethnic groups are not too difficult to question. The notion of an "elite," for example, can easily assume the existence of a permanent status group, whereas in reality the members of such status groups move into and out of the group as the social fabric changes. Determined to discard lumped categories, and cautious about received knowledge, Lee Ann Fujii applies the same insights to terms commonly associated with the Rwandan genocide of 1994, problematizing the general categories of "perpetrator," "victim," "bystander," or "rescuer." Arguing that the genocide should be seen as a social process, in which people shifted from one category to another according to circumstances, she shows that permanent labels do not always fit individual actions. Context matters. Relying on numerous interviews recorded with great sensitivity and skill in two contrasting localities and in prisons, the author asks two main questions: What differences did changing specific circumstances make over the course of the genocide? And, which social interactions were most instrumental in inducing collective killings?

Fujii, of course, does not discard the usual terminology attached to the study of genocide without a careful, comparative analysis—quite the contrary. Instead of adopting an approach assessing actions based on ethnic hatred and ethnic fear, she proposes what she calls a "social interaction" argument, according to which "state-sponsored ethnicity" is "an endogenously generated 'script' for violence" that is left open to interpretation. Her analysis concentrates less on the script, its historical background, and its long-term resonance, than on its interpretations in short-term, shifting contexts. She does not analyze political strategies according to the perspective of local or national political history. Instead, she shows how violence inscribed in the genocidal script provided leaders with the means to express and consolidate their power, and to induce conduct that would respond to their strategies.

Fujii concentrates on the group she qualifies as "Joiners" as she analyses the genocidal process at a micro-level, trying to account for the participation of particular localities within the nationwide nightmare. Her last chapter, "The Logic of Groups," consists of a very skilled analysis of in-depth interviews, with the goal of understanding the processes and motivations at play. Murders were perpetrated in groups, or, as she argues, "killings produced groups and groups produced killings" (154). Joiners—who were the bulk of the perpetrators—made choices, even if their attitudes differed. Some were forced to join, some joined willingly; indeed, some made explicit choices in one direction or the other according to their moral values. Of particular interest to an anthropologist are her findings that the attacks were often quite structured, performed in groups and committed publicly, featuring theatrical elements around physically intimate killings. The accomplishment of collective killings created a cohesion that kept groups together over long periods, with "'watching' or 'observing' an integral part of violence" (175). To an anthropologist, this process is reminiscent of the way in which conviviality builds cohesion in better times, a phenomenon that should not be confused with obedience: group participation and the display of consensus matters more than the content of the shared action. This insight leads Fujii to another interesting point: that Interahamwe identity applies only to groups, not to individuals—an observation that makes sense of the fact that many killers, when unobserved, also rescued or protected victims.

Perhaps paradoxically, by heightening readers' awareness of the manifold individual actions, the author's methodological discarding of another received category—that of the "mass"—leads to a deeper understanding of the complex interactions that led to "mass" killings. The book offers a thoughtful—if, for some, provocative—analysis. It also reminds us that other links remain to be investigated if we are to make sense of the imbricated webs of nationwide violence.