Polarization and Civil Disorder with Omar McDoom

Ceejay Hayes:

This is CounterPol. Today I am speaking with Omar McDoom, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, about Rwanda. My sometimes co-host, Alan Jagolinzer, has sent me more than a few articles about the US and its proximity to civil war, given the long-standing political tensions and the rise of the far-right. I personally think that it is unlikely that social order in the US will break down that severely. And yet, I don't think anybody knows they'll be a bystander to hostilities until hostilities break out. Eventually, I started to think about the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s. I have a cursory understanding of that history. Germans and later Belgians ethnicized the colonized Rwandan population into Hutus and Tutsis, appropriated power and wealth to the more Eurocentric Tutsis, those inequitable socioeconomic dynamics continued post-colonization, and then there was a Hutu uprising resulting after decades of subjugation. My theory here is that ethnicization, or, put differently, ethnic polarization, of the Rwandan people by European colonialists laid the groundwork for the outbreak of violence that emerged over 30 years after Rwanda gained independence. The wealth and power inequities imposed by Belgian imperialists succumbed Rwanda to its tragic fate. Plot twist, my assumptions of the Rwanda genocide were largely wrong. At best, they lacked critical information. Still, intergroup polarity between Hutus and Tutsis is still a relevant factor, and its interrogation provides some interesting observations, a cautionary tale of how violent things can get when social polarization grips the public. Omar takes us through a brief though insightful history of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Rwanda, guiding our attention to how ethnic polarization manifested and remained relevant throughout each period leading up to 1994 and beyond. Let's get into it.

Omar McDoom:

Hi, I'm Omar McDoom. I'm an associate professor in comparative politics, which I teach at the London School of Economics. My way of background, my family originally from the Caribbean, from Guyana. which is itself an ethnically contentious part of the world. But most of my research career has been focused on a different part of the world, in sub-Saharan Africa, and I began my own research career looking at the genocide in Rwanda. And that, I think, is what brings me here today to this podcast.

Ceejay Hayes:

Thank you. Thank you. Give us like a two to five minute history on the Rwanda genocide. What was happening before? How did these groups become in tension with each other? What was the catalyst that kicked off the genocide in Rwanda?

Omar McDoom:

Right. So this is a podcast about polarization and the origins of polarization and then what the destructive consequences of polarization are for societies and their political systems. So Rightly so, people are interested in questions of moral responsibility. Who is responsible for polarizing the society? That question is important, but I also want to contextualize it by recognizing that sometimes there are factors at work that lead to polarization, that there is no specific individual that you can point to or specific decision that is responsible for it. And sometimes it's simply the consequence of certain structural or historical factors that make countries or societies particularly vulnerable to polarization. And Rwanda is one such country. It is an extremely unusual country, not just in the region, but on the continent in Sub-Saharan Africa. And maybe I'd like to begin by just putting Rwanda's exceptionalism into perspective. So the first thing to note about Rwanda is that it has an unusual ethnic or social structure. Many people will know that there is this, there are these three so-called ethnic groups in Rwanda. There is a Hutu majority, estimated before the genocide to represent something between about 84 to 85 percent of the population, so they were the natural majority. Then there was also a Tutsi minority, representing somewhere between 10 and 14 percent of the population. And then lastly, a very small and politically marginalized Twa minority, super minority as well. The first thing to recognize is that our country in Sub-Saharan Africa has a relatively small number of ethnic groups, only three. and the relationship between them. So if we would take the two largest groups, so the Hutu and the Tutsi, that relationship, the dominance, that there is such a large numerical gap between the Hutu and the Tutsi, that's also quite unusual. So the relative sizes of the groups, the number of these groups, there's such a small number of them, and also that it is essentially a bi-ethnic structured society where the two are largely on the margins of society, but there is this competition that goes on between the two larger groups, between the Hutu and the Tutsi. So that bi-ethnic structure is very distinctive. Only Burundi, Zanzibar, Lesotho, and Swaziland have similar structures. And bi-ethnic structures, you told me at the beginning, your family are from Trinidad and my family originally from Guyana. These are also countries which have large groups whose politics are structured around this bi-ethnic structure. So that's one thing, the social structure is unusual. And the other thing I would point out about Rwanda is that these groups, these Hutu and Tutsi and the Twa, unlike most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, they don't live in separate areas. There's no Hutu land, there's no Tutsi land, there's no Twa land. They actually live side by side. And that's very distinctive, that this spatial integration is the way that it is. And the other thing I would point out about these ethnic groups is they're not ethnic groups in the sense that you and I might conventionally think of ethnic groups. It's not that they have different languages. It's not that they have different cultures. It's not even that they have different political systems or that they have different leaderships. They actually were governed collectively as one people, the Banyarawanda. That's important and I say all of that just because it's easy to want to focus on what individuals did that led ultimately to the genocide in Rwanda, but you need to understand that those decisions happened against a rather unusual, quite extraordinary baseline, which is Rwanda's socio-demography, which is a very distinctive country in sub-Saharan Africa. Okay, so that's my way of introduction to the country. You asked about the history that led up to the genocide, so maybe we begin just with the pre-colonial era and trying to understand what the relationship was like between Hutu and Tutsi, especially in that time period. So what does it mean to be Hutu and Tutsi? This is a subject of intense academic disagreement. There is a belief and a narrative that is propagated that both of these groups originated outside of Rwanda, but that the Hutu came first and the Tutsi came later. And the Hutu, the claim is that they originated from somewhere in Chad or Cameroon and then migrated to Rwanda many hundreds of years ago, and that the Tutsi originated somewhere in the upper Nile region, perhaps what is now modern-day Ethiopia, migrated southwards, but after the Hutu. And that's important because it was very much a part of the narrative in the genocide is that the Tutsi were alien, or at least they came later and they didn't have the same claim to the land that the Hutu did. So this indigeneity was stronger among the Hutu. As a specialist of the country, I will say that we have no conclusive evidence that any of that is true. But what I can tell you is that many, many evil ones and believe that to be true. And perhaps that's more important than the actual reality or the actual historical truth of the matter. And what do these identities then signify? I think all we can really say is the meaning of Hutu, Tutsi and T'wa was never constant. It changed continuously across the history of the country. And there have been many, as a result, significations attached to them. They've been called signifiers of occupation, signifiers of class, signifiers of ethnicity as well, and political identities. The point I think to take away is that this meaning has changed over time, that these identities are largely constructed And one thing we can say about them is that eventually, at the end of their pre-colonial time, it became clear that these identities signified status, and that Tutsi was associated with high status, and Hutu was associated with a lower status. did they live happily all together before the Germans and then eventually the Belgians arrived? This is a narrative that is often propagated by the current government, that there was this golden age of inter-ethnic harmony where Hutu and Tutsi lived and cohabited quite peacefully together. That is not altogether correct. If we were to trace the origins of the Rwandan state, it goes back a long way, back to, we believe, the mid to late 1600s. And at that time, the relationship between Hutu and Tutsi was still contentious. And if you were to look at this kingdom, it was called Nyinginya. This was the precursor to the modern Rwandan state. If you look at Nyinginya, that entity, that polity, through conquest, expanded and also contracted at times. So there was war that was going on. And it wasn't until actually quite late in its history, late 1800s, so the early 19th century, when we had a Tutsi king, his name was Wabugiri. And he came to the throne in 1860. And He stayed on there 35 years till 1895, and he, I would say, was the one leader of Rwanda who did the most to construct a centralized political state. And as part of that process of centralization, there was war. There was war that was fought along ethnic boundaries as well. And in fact, there were nine Hutu-headed, I would call them, principalities in the north of modern-day Rwanda that held out against Mubigiri and resisted annexation into Rwanda, into Nyinginya. And it wasn't until, in fact, Europeans arrived that they were formally annexed into what would become then Rwanda-Urundi. the colonies. So there clearly was inter-ethnic struggle before the arrival of the Europeans. That segues then to, I suppose, the colonial period and what then happened to these identities during the colonial era. It began with Germany, but I would say that the greater responsibility for the nature of inter-ethnic relations around it lies with the Belgians. So one thing that they did do was they practiced ethnic favoritism. However, that's not unique. They clearly favored, at the beginning of their time, the Tutsi. And they did so for reasons, I think, which are perhaps unusual and perhaps distinctive, which is that the Belgians genuinely believed in racial science. They believed that the Tutsi were racially superior to the Hutu, and they thought that they were more fit to rule. So they bought racial science. They would measure the length of their noses, the size of their crania, to be able to mark whether somebody was Tutsi or Hutu. The other thing that they did is they also brought biblical scripture to this, because they also believed it wasn't just racial science, it was also religious. And there was this biblical belief that the Tutsi were descended from Ham. And so they were part of the biblical moral universe, whereas the Hutu were not. They were outside of the realm of the Bible. They were not a people recognized as descended from one of the recognized figures in the Bible. So in terms of their sort of moral inclusion, the Tutsi were also favored in that sense. So the Belgians did practice ethnic favoritism and they did favor the Tutsi, they did favor allocation of educational opportunities, the colonial administrators favored them in the allocation of jobs, administrative political posts, and it did lead to a situation where there was almost a quasi-monopoly of political power in the hands of a Tutsi elite in the colonial era. And I would say that perhaps the most damaging decision that the Belgians made was to institute identity cards in which the ethnicity of every Rwandan was recorded. And that is a colonially distinctive policy. They did it in all three colonies. They did it in Burundi. They also did it in Congo. And I think they were the only colonial power to do this. It happened in post-colonial contexts. South Africa did this, of course, and so did Kenya. But as a colonial era policy, I think it was only the Belgians who did this. This had two immediate consequences. First of all, it made social mobility impossible. So you could no longer become Tutsi, because historically it used to be that if you acquired a certain number of cows, which were a status marker, that you could become Tutsified. You had that opportunity to become Tutsi through being gifted cows and being conferred that status. So it limited social mobility, so it froze these identities, and it also institutionalized them, so it made them tied to the structures of the state. So in that sense, I'd say that the Belgians bear responsibility for the reification of ethnic identities in Rwanda. At the same time, if we were just to fast forward now to the post-colonial period, of those three colonies that Belgium owned, Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda, The other two, Congo and Burundi, their post-independence leaders made the very conscious decision to abolish the identification of ethnicity on these ID cards. It was only in Rwanda that the decision was made to keep them. And that, of course, would prove highly consequential because these ID cards institutionalized and kept ethnicity a salient identity because it was recorded by the state. And of course, it was used as a way to identify those to be targeted during the genocide itself. But I say that because it's important to recognize that not all responsibility can be tied to what the Belgians did during the time that they were colonizing Rwanda. There were also post-colonial decisions that very much contributed to it.

Ceejay Hayes:

I want to name two things that I think are quite relevant to the experience that other countries and other contexts are having. One is the belief of something regardless of whether or not it's true. And so this idea of indigeneity in Rwanda that the Hutus were there first or the Tutsis And I think that sort of understanding of reality and what is to be true is something that can be replicated throughout multiple contexts. Another thing that is interesting, however, is the constructed nature and malleability of these identities. When you're talking about the malleability of the Tutsi identity, I was thinking about whiteness in the United States, how malleable whiteness had been in the service of wealth distribution and wealth exploitation and capital exploitation. It became convenient to associate Irishness with whiteness. in a way that wasn't always true in the United States. Same with Italian identity and other Eastern European identities, holding that all under whiteness wasn't originally how whiteness was constructed in the U.S., but it was made malleable to do so to whatever end. So it's interesting to hear you talk about identity as a construction in the context of Rwanda, because it feels very relevant to other contexts as well. Let's get into the post-coloniality of it all. Let's talk about what was happening after that.

Omar McDoom:

So Rwanda becomes independent in 1962 and the circumstances of that decolonization moment are actually worth explaining because Rwanda, unlike many other or most other sub-Saharan countries, achieved its independence in a very unusual way. It did so through a revolution, a revolution that was dubbed a Hutu revolution. So this was a movement from below that sought to reverse the Tutsi dominance. So it was an uprising from below, from Hutu, the majority, to abolish the Tutsi king, known as the Muami, as an institution, and then instate a republic, a Hutu-dominated republic. But the point I want to make here is that that revolution had a lasting effect on the strength of ethnic identification in Rwanda. And it is a very distinctive way through which independence was achieved. It was not that colonial power simply departed. It wasn't that there was a war fought against. There wasn't a liberation struggle against the Belgians. This was actually a struggle within the country, among the Rwandans themselves, that led to the independence. The effect of that was to ensure that ethnicity would be very deeply embedded into Rwandan society and politics. So understanding the revolution is really important for understanding why ethnicity has remained so salient in Rwandan society and politics since independence. And again, it's quite distinctive. So what happens, the first republic of Rwanda was headed by a Hutu, his name was Gregoire Kayibanda, and he came from the center of Rwanda. And he had a particular view on what Hutu and Tutsi signify. For him, they were very clearly racially distinct identities, racially distinct. And he saw the Tutsi as having monopolized politically power for too long, and that this was undemocratic because the Hutu were the natural numerical majority in Rwanda. So under Kayibanda's rule, the Tutsi were entirely excluded from political life, They faced severe discrimination, and many of them, in fact, as a result of the revolution, had left and had fled Rwanda and had settled in the country's neighbor, Rwanda, Uganda, especially, Congo, and Burundi, and some went further afield to Europe and also to North America as well. So the descendants of those Tutsi refugees of the revolution would ultimately become the ones who would then start the civil war that would come and culminate in the genocide. I'm saying a little bit about Kayamanda's view on ethnicity because it was such an exclusionary view. He did not think of Tutsi as Rwandan. He did subscribe to the view as Tutsi as alien and as having originated outside of Rwanda. But in 1973, Kayabanda's rule comes to an end. And it does so because of events outside of Rwanda. Something happens in Burundi, its false cousin next door. Also very similar ethnic structure with the Hutu and Tutsi. majority and minority, but in Burundi, it had been a Tutsi regime that had governed since independence rather than a Hutu regime. And what happened in 1972, just a year before Kayabanda's rule comes to an end, is that there had been a mass killing, some describe it as a selective genocide, of possibly tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand Hutu, mainly those who are more educated in Burundi. And what this does is it has implications for Rwanda, and it creates very strong sentiment among the Hutu in Rwanda, and it leads to an opportunity for another Hutu, this time from the north of the country, Jumana Habirimana, who was a military man, to seize power and depose Kayibanda. And this then ushers in Rwanda's second republic from 1973 all the way up until 1994 when the genocide begins. Now, Khabir Amarna has a very different view of what Uthu and Tutsi mean to Kayibanda. So if you were to look at Khabir Amarna's speeches and what he says about Uthu and Tutsi, he thinks of them not as racially distinct, but actually it's just as ethnic groups, as ethnicities. And his language is much more inclusive than Kayabandis, which was much more exclusionary. So he does talk about Tutsi as also being Rwandan. And he speaks of the importance of needing to come together and work to develop the country. His rhetoric, his narrative is that he sees them both as belonging to the country and both as necessary for the country's development. Now, one thing that's often cited about Habib Urbana's time is that there was no violence against Tutsi. And there's no state reprisal violence against Tutsi, whereas under Kayibanda, many of those Tutsi refugees from the revolution had tried to come back to Rwanda by force of arms. And I think there were 10 incursions, 10 attempts to attack Rwanda. And each time there was such an attack, the states took it out on the Tutsi civilian population that remained in the country. So there was revenge killings inside Rwanda, reprisal killings inside Rwanda. There were no such attacks during the Happy Ramana era until 1990 when the civil war begins. So that is one of the reasons why we did not see reprisal violence against Tutsi and why Happy Ramana's time, at least up until 1990, is seen as largely one of peaceful coexistence between Hutu and Tutsi. Things change in October 1990. There is an attack, and it is an attack led largely by the descendants of the second generation of those Tutsi refugees from the revolution. And this starts Rwanda's civil war. And that civil war ultimately would culminate in the genocide in 1994. But it's important to understand what happened in those four years, which were highly consequential for the genocide.

Ceejay Hayes:

So you have these two leaders, and I'm not going to say their names because I'm going to butcher them, but one has a very sort of racialized understanding of these ethnicities and does not integrate these two identities at all, Hutu and Tutsi, but the other does in a way that promotes more peace. And so I want to name that because it's interesting that there was this longstanding peace prior to the start of the Civil War that would devolve into the genocide, because I think for me, understanding that the tension had existed through 1990 when the Civil War happened. I'm really interested in what damaged that sense of peace, because that can point to a threat that we need to look out for in other communities as well.

Omar McDoom:

This coexistence, this peaceful coexistence that existed under Habir Amano was shattered with that fateful attack in October 1990. And the group that led that attack, as I said, largely composed of Tutsi descendants of the refugees. Not exclusively, there were also some disaffected Hutu who were also part of the leadership of what was then the Repandent Patriotic Front, or the RPF, the rebel that attacked Rwanda. That attack transformed Rwandan politics initially and eventually Rwandan society too. But I should say that in October 1990 and for most of that time period from 1990 up until April 1994, Rwandan society was not yet colonized. Yes, the identities had become salient again. I would say that the boundary between Hutu and Tutsi had been reactivated and became politically salient. But still, on balance, if you were to look at the ideologies that were in circulation, the beliefs that were being, the narratives that were being promoted in Rwanda after the civil war began, Moderate beliefs, moderate ideologies, moderate narratives were still the dominant ones, and radical, ethnically extremist ones were still on the margins and still on the fringes, which begs the question of what brought them from the margins to the center, and that's a very interesting story. So I would point to three indicators of moderation as being dominant. So if you were to look, for example, at civil society, and then also the media, and then also political parties. So each of those three spaces, what was happening there? So if you were to look, for example, at civil society, let's take the Catholic Church, the largest, and probably the strongest counterweight to the state was the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was in a difficult position. Its leadership was mainly Hutu. The archbishops, the nine archbishops, seven of the nine were Hutu, and the Archbishop of Kigali, the capital, was a member of the ruling party's central committee. Its lower clerical classes were mainly Tutsi, 70% of them were Tutsi. The Catholic Church, at best, issued ambivalent statements about what was happening in the Civil War. There was no unequivocal condemnation of ethnically targeted violence, and I think that was partly problematic. But it wasn't fully aligned with the state, and it wasn't also fully opposed to the state. So there was ambivalence from the Catholic Church. Then look at the media. So what's going on in the radio? What's going on in print media? The first thing to point out is that a very small percentage of Rwandans are actually literate enough to be able to read print media. I looked at this in my research, and just under 7% actually had completed, of Rwandans between the ages of 15 and 24, had had more than a primary school education. So they would not be getting their news from reading newspapers. Nonetheless, there were 80 different magazines and newspapers that published between 1990 and 1994. But again, only a minority of those, and I sat down and worked out 20 of them, I would describe as either pro-Hutu or extremist. And I would say the other 60 were still propagating what I would consider to be inclusionary moderate messaging. There was not polarization yet in the print media, at least not dominance of ethnic extremism. The radio, there were three radios that Rwandans could hear. There was Radio Rwanda, which was the government radio. There's Radio Télévision des Mille Collines, which was known as Radio Machete, the hate radio. That was a private radio station that only began operating in 1993, in July, so actually just the last nine months before the genocide, so there was nothing before that. and I looked and analyzed the broadcasts of RTLM, and it is very interesting to see that there is not much in the way of what I would consider to be ethnically extremist language in RTLM before the genocide begins proper. So I wouldn't call that either a polarized radio station at that point. And then the third radio station was the radio station of the rebels themselves, Mujiburra, which also had a national orientation and inclusionary as well. So that's civil society, that's the media, and the last is the political parties. So Rwanda had been a one-party state up until 1991. In 1991, multiparty was introduced. This is part of the post-Cold War democratization movement in Sub-Saharan Africa more generally. And the three main opposition parties, the PSD, PL, and the MDR, if you read their communiques and press releases, if you read their statutes, their founding statutes, the language is of Rwandan nationalism and inclusion. And that goes on, all of this goes on, all this moderation is still going on up until, I would say, the last few months before the genocide. And this is where things really turn very quickly, very bad. And the event that triggers it, at least among the political parties, was again what's happening next door in Burundi. Burundi, in 1993, elected its first ever Putin president. Melchior Ndedaye. This was a hugely significant event for Burundians and a hugely significant event for Rwandans to see that the Tutsi-dominated regime had been given way to a Butu government. Ndedaye was assassinated in October 1993 by low-ranking members of the Tutsi military. What this effectively did was send a message to Rwanda's Hutu moderate political leadership that you cannot trust the Tutsi to share power with them, that they would not allow a Hutu-dominated government or even could be trusted in power sharing. And it was that event that really began to split the political parties into moderate and less moderate, Hutu power wings, more radical wings that were no longer talking about the possibility of power sharing with the rebels, with the RPF. So it splits Rwanda's political parties. That's one factor. The other factor that splits Rwandan political parties and Rwandan society is, ironically, the power-sharing agreement that the external international community brokered, the Arusha Peace Accords. And the reason why this radicalized Rwandan society and politics is because the deal that was brokered was grossly unfavorable to the Hutu majority. It did give a disproportionate amount of political and military power to the rebel, largely Tutsi-dominated group. And for many Hutu, this was unacceptable. It was unfair that they would get as many seats in the cabinet as the ruling party, that they would get 50% of the officer corps in the military and 40% of the rank and file. giving them effectively a military veto in Rwanda, that this was seen as grossly unfair. And the reason why such an unfavorable peace settlement had been achieved was partly because the RPF had come to dominate on the battlefield, so it was in a very strong position militarily, and also because there was the unusual situation where it was a two-way peace negotiation between the Rwandan government and the RTS. But in reality, there was three factions. There was the rebels, there was the ruling party, and then there were the opposition parties who had come into a coalition government with the ruling party, the MIND. but their interests were in fact more closely aligned with the rebels because they also wanted the ruling party to give up power. So the representative from the government side at the peace negotiations was accused of essentially a self-coup, of giving up too much power to the rebel group. So that radicalized Rwandan politics and it led to disaffection of many Rwandan leaders who felt that too much power had been given up. to come back to this question of what triggered the polarization, Rwanda. So I tried to show you that the polarization happened in a very short space of time. It didn't start just in 1990. I would say that it accelerated from 1993 onwards. And it was triggered by events in Burundi, and it was triggered also ironically by the peace process itself.

Ceejay Hayes:

Just for clarity for the listener, what were the sort of ethnic affiliations of each of these political parties? And can you also name them because you were giving acronyms?

Omar McDoom:

There were actually altogether 15 political parties that came into existence from 1991 onwards. But the three largest ones, the ones that have the strongest support bases, would be, first of all, the MDR. That's the, translated into English, the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain. So it's the Democratic Republican Movement. And its base is largely Hutu, and mostly those from the center of the country. Then you have the PSD, the Parti Social-Démocratique, the Democratic Social Party. I would say the support base is predominantly Hutu, but also had Tutsi among its supporters. And last of all, you have the PL, the Liberal Party, Parti Libérale. and this was seen as largely a party for Tutsi, educated, professional, middle class, but it was very much a party that claimed itself to be a party open to all Rwandans. And all three parties preached a rhetoric of inclusion, at least preached it in their statements and in their communiques up until 1993, this rhetoric of inclusion and being Rwandan as the super overarching national identity.

Ceejay Hayes:

It's interesting because you're describing that there was still moderate sentimentalities at the beginning of the Civil War and up to the genocide. I wouldn't have expected that. Let's get into the genocide. What happens? Because I think I'm aware of a very specific pain point, but I'm interested in hearing your telling of the story.

Omar McDoom:

Maybe I'll start with this question of, was the genocide premeditated? Because that's important. Just how far back in time can we trace the idea that a genocide was going to be committed against the Tutsi? Because that's an important indicator of just how polarized society was in Rwanda in the lead up to genocide. So it is contested. And my view on this is that the level of premeditation has been overstated. Usually three pieces of evidence are put forward to argue that there was a plan to eliminate the Tutsi civilian population. very early on, sometime in the early 1990s. And they point to, first of all, there were these massacres of Tutsi that were taking place, as it was seen as a dress rehearsal for the genocide. Second, there were lists, lists of Tutsis that were drawn up. And third, there was the training of the militia, particularly the Inter-Ahamwe militia, who would play this huge role in killing Tutsi during the genocide. Now, each of those three facts could be explained in different ways, and I don't think that they provide the smoking gun or conclusive evidence that a genocide was planned from very, very early on. So, first, the idea that these massacres were dress rehearsals. These massacres were always in response to some incursion or attack from the rebel group. It was the same pattern of violence that we saw in the 1960s when the first generation of Tutsi refugees attacked Rwanda trying to come back. There would be reprisal violence from the society, sanctioned by the state to punish the civilian population. We saw exactly the same thing in the early 1990s. RPF victories on the battlefield were punished with reprisal violence against Tutsi civilians. We didn't have a genocide in the 1960s, so I don't think we can conclusively say that this was practicing for a genocide. The lists. Yes, there were lists that were drawn up. Importantly, these lists contained the names of Tutsi men. not Tutsi women, not Tutsi children, always Tutsi men. And one reason for that was because there was a concern, and it was a legitimate concern, that some Tutsi men were defecting to support the rebel group, were leaving Rwanda to go and fight on behalf of the RPF. not only that, but if they didn't leave to fight, then perhaps they also provided some other form of support for the RPS. So they were seen as potentially a fifth column, as it were. So rather than drawing up lists of everybody who could be killed when women and children, it was specifically focused on combat capable men. And then third was the training of the Inter-Dahabwe. So I think this I find most difficult to say that this is conclusive evidence of the preparation for a genocide, because I would say it's highly possible that a military would want to train a militia group to support the conventional military in a battle where there is total warfare, where you need to mobilize as many people as possible, including conscripting as well as mobilizing civilians to form militia to help defend the country. So I don't believe that the Mogenocide was premeditated to the extent that it began in the 1990s. And that's important because it's consistent with my belief that moderate forces were still the dominant ones inside Rwanda up until very, very close to 1994. The puzzle is what explains why it is that the moderates who were in the ascendant, dominant, numerically superior position up until April 1994, why did they lose to an extremist minority? That is the real puzzle of the Rwandan genocide. And you need to study what happens in the very short window after Javier Amada, Rwanda's Hutu president, is assassinated. Now, nobody knows for certain who killed him and there are plausible arguments for both the RPF having assassinated him and also extremists within his government to have assassinated him for having given away too much power to the rebel group and the power sharing deal. Whatever your belief on that is, what I can tell you is that it was widely believed inside Rwanda, both among ordinary Rwandans and among Rwandan elites, that the RPF were the culprits, that they had killed Havira Mana. And immediately what happens is the question of who is going to succeed him And there was a UN peacekeeping mission on the ground, led by General Dallaire at the time, who argued that you need to stick to the terms of the peace agreement. And the peace agreement says it would pass to the Prime Minister. However, an extremist minority, led by Dennis Bagasora, who was the director de cabinet, the cabinet director for the Ministry of Defense, argued that there should be, in fact, military rule now that the president is dead. And he wanted not only to establish military rule, he also wanted to appoint a new chief of staff of the military, because the old chief of staff had been killed in the same plane crash with Happy Ramada on April 6, 1994. This extremist minority did not get their way. They lost in the first step. They didn't get military rule. The moderates on the crisis committee that was established said, no, no, we must stick to the peace process, and we are not going to let you put in your man, who they recognized as being a hardliner, as the new army chief of staff. They wanted their own man, and they appointed Marcel Gatsinzi, who was a moderate from the south of the country, Hutu, who was well respected in Rwanda. So if there was a plan to start a genocide, it certainly wasn't going to plan at the beginning. But things begin to change. And they change because extremists, as they exist anywhere in the world, are willing to take risks and do things that moderates are not. And in this case, what this extremist minority did, led by Bagasora and also some several senior figures from the ruling party, is that they said, we will eliminate all the moderate leadership. And it began with the assassination of the Prime Minister, Uwe Lehmann, and her Belgian peacekeeper bodyguard, which famously led to the withdrawal of the UN mission. And then they targeted a number of other senior individuals, moderates, who they believed supported power sharing with the RPF. So they physically eliminated the opposition. And they did this using the presidential guard, who was personally loyal to Habib Amani, and who really believed the RPF had killed Habib Amani. And at the same time as they eliminate the moderate leadership, basically what that does is it sends the rest of the moderates into hiding because they fear that they will be killed. So the moderates go into hiding, and what the extremists do is not quite clever. They then form a new cabinet, replicating the coalition involving all these different political parties, but they've chosen the extremist members, the hardline factions from each of these political parties, to now become members of the cabinet. So it looks to the outside that they've installed a civilian government made up of multiple political parties just as it was before, and in fact this whole thing takes place inside the French embassy, the inauguration of the new cabinet, and they've done it to make it look as if continuing civilian rule. But what they have in fact done is put into place a civilian government that is headed by individuals who are opposed to any power sharing with the RPF. And once they've done that, the next thing they do is they then change the Army Chief of Staff. They recall Getzinzi and they replace him as well. So now they have control of the civilian government. They now have control of the military apparatus as well. And the next thing that they do is they then start changing the civilian apparatus at the local level. So now they control the central government, they control the cabinet, but they then start telling the burgomasters, there are 145 communes in Rwanda, and the burgomasters were the leaders of those communes, and they tell them that either you start following our instructions or we will replace you, and that's what they do, they do replace simply force them to resign, and they put into place a leadership at the local level that is also aligned with the extremist government. And they achieve all this in less than 11, 12 days. And in those 11, 12 days, the balance of power has shifted away from the moderates and fully in favor of the extremists. And partly they've been able to do that because of the international community's decision to withdraw and also the UN's failure to actually want to take a side in the moderate extremist power struggle that was taking place inside the government. Kofi Annan was the head of DPKO at the time. Roméo Dallaire did ask and instructions were given to him that he should not take sides in what was seen as an internal power struggle. But the inaction favored the extremists. So ultimately, they did win. And once they have control of both the civilian and military apparatus of the state, they use the remarkable machinery of the state to implement the genocide. And it happens, as you know, incredibly quickly, with incredibly destructive consequences. By my calculation, maybe two-thirds of the Tutsi civilian population were killed, and most of those were killed actually in the first two weeks after the assassination of the president.

Ceejay Hayes:

We've been talking a lot about people in positions of power and their movements that are taking us through the post-colonial period, into the civil war period, and now into the genocide period. What was happening in the social dynamics just within the public? Because there's a lot of animosity within people of power, but I wonder if that's actually being replicated within the general population.

Omar McDoom:

Great question. It's commonly believed that ordinary Rwandans were deeply radicalized on the eve of the genocide so that it was like lighting tinder because they had been incensed by what they were hearing on the radio and they had been radicalized by the war. And so it was so easy for them to then mobilize and start participating in the elimination of the Tutsi. The reality is more complex. Rwandan society was, for the most part, not radicalized before the genocide itself. I would say the Rwandans who were, were those who were on the front lines of the civil war, who experienced on a daily basis insecurity, had to flee and feared for their lives, existentially feared for their lives. Those Rwandans very clearly were radicalized and they had been clear distancing between Hutu and Tutsi in those communities on the front lines. But if you were to look elsewhere in the country where Hutu and Tutsi lived side by side, a very nice indicator of the fact that they were not radicalized is what they do immediately after they learn that Habib Abad, the president, has been killed. So in the south of the country, one of the sites where I did research, the Hutu and Tutsi in these communities actually came together and started to do joint patrols of their communities to try to keep out any elements who might try to penetrate their community and cause problems in it. So there was actually inter-ethnic cooperation on the very first day that the Habir Amani was killed. And it's not only that they do these patrols together, they also man the roadblocks together. These roadblocks are infamous in the genocide because this is the site where people are held and then thwarted and then killed. But at the beginning, in these communities, Hutu and Tutsi together manned these roadblocks. Because in their minds, it wasn't clear that the Tutsi were the targets. It wasn't clear to Hutu in the south of the country that their Tutsi neighbors were the enemy. They were not radicalized. What happens, however, Rwanda is a very small country, and very quickly they begin to see events happening in neighboring areas. And they're beginning to see that Tutsi are fleeing these neighboring areas, and they're asking themselves, what's going on? And what's going on is that the inter-Ahmadi militia, the presidential guard, and members of the new civilian cabinet, the extremist members, are traveling into the provinces, into the periphery, and are mobilizing the Hutu to rise up against the Tutsi in their communities. Slowly and surely, the violence against the Tutsi begins to get closer and closer to these communities where these Hutu and Tutsi had in fact been in solidarity with each other. The turning point in the South, when I was doing my research, was actually a visit from the newly-installed presidents in Nicaragua, who makes a speech in front of a church where there were many Tutsi who had gathered and sought refuge there. And, in short, as a result of that speech, it became a target of what they were expected to do. So, with facilitators from the Interahamwe, and the Rwandan military, and the civilian leadership, You see Tutsi beginning to flee and take refuge, and you also see Hutu beginning to form hunting groups to come after them. That happens in the South almost two weeks after the president is killed, because for those first two weeks, it wasn't clear to them who they should be targeting. It also took time for that power struggle in the center of the country, between the moderates and the extremists, to play out in favor of the extremists. So that's why there was a delay in the South, because the population was not previously radicalized, and it took time for the violence elsewhere to reach those communities.

Ceejay Hayes:

I want to sort of understand why the Hutus would respond to this call of action. You talked about a bit earlier how Rwanda, differently from Burundi and Congo, they reify their ethnic identifications. which I thought is interesting because I would imagine that as part of the decolonial process, they would try to pull back from these identities that were not not present in the pre-colonial era, as you had mentioned, but were sort of made institutionalized by a Belgian government. And so I could see where Burundi and Congo made the decision to pull back from using those ethnic markers. Rwanda stood by them. What implications did that have for equity? Did that change how people had access to things? Did that distribute power in a certain way? Did that provide or remove opportunities? What was happening in terms of inequities between the two entities?

Omar McDoom:

So, bear in mind that the vast majority of Rwanda, up until the genocide, was agriculturally based. They were overwhelmingly farmers, mostly. In fact, Rwanda stands out as having been the least urbanized country in sub-Saharan Africa on the eve of the genocide. Less than 5% of Rwandans lived in cities. And most of these ordinary Rwandans, Hutu and Tutsi, who lived in the countryside, were poor, extremely poor, almost at subsistence level. There may have been differences. Historically, Tutsi owned cows, so that may give them a slight socioeconomic advantage. On average, I would say for ordinary Rwandans, there's no clear disparity between poor Hutu and poor Tutsi. When it comes to political power, the situation is different. Even under Habib Amani, who was the more inclusive of the post-independence republic leaders, it was still clear that the Hutu controlled most of the important political offices. There were some Tutsi in positions of political power as prefects or burgomasters, but it was still a minority. So I would say that at the grassroots level that there was not much differentiation on socioeconomic grounds. So the puzzle becomes why these Hutu, who were not widely radicalized against their Tutsi neighbors, why then they would respond to the call to arms, as you say, and turn against them. And that's a very interesting, it's what I call the micro-mechanics of mobilization. So it doesn't begin with every single Hutu in a community suddenly listens and wakes up and says, I have to kill the Tutsi or the enemy. I have to defend my country and defend my community against these Tutsi. It isn't. It is a small minority, what I would call a hardcore nucleus of individuals and communities who do respond to that call. And it could be just a matter of just a few individuals. It could be the local party representative. It could be somebody who once upon a time had served in the military as a reservist. But there was always somebody or some group who were willing to be the first movers to start the mobilization process. And what they do is they draw on their family and their friends, so their social networks, to establish groups And these groups would go house to house looking for Tutsi. They would also on the way stop at other Hutu households and bring them along. And people would come along because to not do so might also single them out. So you would find in these groups a mix of people with motivations. Some people who are committed extremists, who are determined to kill, Some people who are there opportunistically because perhaps there's the promise that after the person who's being killed that they then may get their cows or their material assets. Some people who are simply conformists who feared that if they did not go along that they would be seen or accused of being sympathizers with the Tutsi. And then you do have some people who also resist, who refuse this as well, but they were largely a minority and they were often punished in their communities. So I would say that there was a process for mobilization. When you dissect it and you try to explain how it happens, it begins with the identification of a small group of people who then use their networks to draw upon and make the groups bigger and bigger until it becomes, there's a tipping point where it becomes more dangerous to say no to participation than it does to say yes. And that tipping point happened very quickly in Rwanda. And partly why it happened so quickly is because, again, of some unusual characteristics of Rwanda. It is an extremely small, very, very densely populated country where it is extremely difficult to hide. Not just for the Tutsi to hide, but even if you're Hutu, to simply say, I don't want to participate, it's very difficult for you to do that because people will know what you do or do not choose in Rwanda because of the topography and the very high population density, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa on the eve of the genocide.

Ceejay Hayes:

How salient were the Hutu, Tutu-Tutsi-Twa identities in these four rural agricultural regions before the genocide? Like, were people not interacting with Hutu? Or if they were Tutsi, were there, like, intergroup marriages between these groups in these regions? Did these identities really matter prior to the genocide?

Omar McDoom:

I think there was variation across the country and along the lines that I mentioned previously. To those Hutu, particularly in the north of the country, which was the front line of the war, it also coincidentally is the home to those nine Hutu principalities that resisted annexation during Robert Goody's era as well, so there are some deep historical factors to that region of Rwanda being distinctive, the ethnic relations being different up there. It's hard to separate out the effect of the war from the effect of the history, but to be clear that for northern Hutu, that 1990 marked a sea change in the relationship between Putu and Tutsi. Tutsi actually began to flee long before the genocide in the north of the country because they were already being targeted in the north. The situation is very different in the south. which again historically has a very different feel to it. Intermarriage was high in the South and that's one of the factors I believe that contributed to the delayed onset of the violence in the South is because the social capital, the inter-ethnic capital was strong, it took time to break those inter-ethnic bonds in the South, which is why it took a couple of weeks for it to happen. So you do see some inter-ethnic solidarity in the South. And in fact, you know, one of the stories that I heard in one of my southern research communities was the baptism of a Hutu child, and the godfather was a Tutsi man. And that was happening just 10 days before Hattie Obama's assassination. So it's a nice little insight into just how close Hutu and Tutsi still interacted in the South together. So all that to say is that there was variation inside Rwanda. The identities were certainly salient and became much more salient as a result of the civil war. They could not help not to be. But their radicalization levels were quite different between the North and the South of the country.

Ceejay Hayes:

Let's talk about the radio in terms of deepening the salience of these identities, because you mentioned that there was very little literacy rates in Rwanda at the onset of this genocide, which I think is quite different now, I think.

Omar McDoom:

Yes, it's got much better. Education has improved significantly. So, as I said, there were these three radio stations, the two inside the country and then the rebel major station outside of the country. Radio Rwanda was an official government radio station and, you know, if you were to look at the broadcast there, there's nothing in its broadcasts that would suggest to you that a genocide was about to happen or that even that inter-ethnic relations were in difficulty. RTLM, their private radio station, is a different story. So this was a radio station that was set up in July 1993. It's set up as a company and 39 of its shareholders, or the majority of its shareholders, are actually members of the ruling party and from the north of the country. It's set up because it is a response to the peace process itself and the fear that the Arusha Accords will give too much power to the RPF. When you analyze the broadcasts before the genocide, it doesn't call for elimination. It doesn't use language that is dehumanizing of Tutsi. So there's no clear kind of genocidal intent in the language of the radio, the different broadcasters, the different journalists there. But what you do see is a couple of things. One is that it makes a link. between the invasion in 1990 and then the revolution in 1959 to 1962. And what it's doing is planting a seed of suspicion in Rwanda's minds that the RPF will come back to Rwanda and reverse the revolution, that it will reinstate the Tutsi monarchy in which the Hutu were subjugated. So they do that. It does make historical references and makes connections between the past and the present. The other thing that it does is that it makes people wonder about what would happen in this power sharing arrangement and whether the power sharing arrangement would in fact last or whether it would simply be a pathway to Tutsi rule again. So, if you were to define the function or the effect of the radio, I would say the RTLM's role was to create suspicion, but not incite the violence. I don't think we're there yet. And in fact, when you look at the radio's broadcast after Javier Romano was killed, its language doesn't become radical extremist invective until almost 10 or 11 days, at which point most Tutsi have already been killed. And that's a very interesting point because we often think that radicalization precedes violence. But one of the findings that I had in my research was that radicalization also followed violence. So not just a cause but also a consequence of killing. Some Rwandans, not all, killed because they were radicalized and they did believe they were extremists and they were racist and they were ideologically committed and it did lead them to perpetrate murder. Many Rwandans, though, I think were not yet radicalized, but joined these groups because of peer pressures and conformity, and then were forced to participate and committed atrocities or were complicit in atrocities. And as part of their psychological self-defense, they needed to provide a rationale or a justification for what they did. And they radicalized, meaning they developed extremist negative views of the Tutsi as a result of the act of killing. It is a form of dissonance reduction, to use a technical phrase, but essentially the idea you're trying to provide a justification for yourself. And I think it was the same with the radio. The radio also responded to the violence itself. It wasn't leading the violence. I think it also, in part, followed the violence that was happening in Rwanda. It's a more nuanced view of the role of the radio and and recognizing that it isn't always top-down, it isn't always elite manipulation, but the elites themselves respond to forces from below, and to structural facts from below as well. They're not all clever instrumentalizers of ordinary Rwandans, but in fact, they themselves respond to pressures, politics, and facts from below as well. That's, I think, an important understanding of how the relationship between elites and non-elites in the context of violence should be understood.

Ceejay Hayes:

I want to take note of what you just said, is that radicalization followed the violence, you know, and this process that you're naming, that people perhaps are more moderate than the conditions seem, but they are succumbing to peer pressure, or perhaps, and I think this is maybe a bit more challenging for people to accept, just being complicit in the violence due to their identity. They are Hutu, they're seeing this call to action, and so regardless of whether or not they believe or are fully radicalized towards this belief, they are acting on it, then creating that dissonance to sort of justify that. Sort of going over the genocide period, because we know the violence of that, Let's talk about the post genocide period, or like the end of the genocide, the conclusion of killings. What is happening in that immediate era in the social dynamics? Are people accountable? Are they assuming culpability? What's going on in the dynamics when the killing ends?

Omar McDoom:

The genocide comes to an end just more than 100 days after the killing of the president. And it comes to an end not because the international community has intervened to stop it, but because the rebel RPF defeats the ruling party, essentially, the government, and pushes them over the border into then Zaire. And it then faces this war-torn, genocide-devastated economy and society and has to rebuild. But there are also some obviously important questions around justice and reconciliation and how you go about achieving peace in the context of a post-genocide society. These are no small challenges, these are massive challenges. And Rwanda has been largely held as a sort of the phoenix rising out of the ashes because it has now attained a status today. We're now nearly 30 years after the genocide, and it's actually leading in a number of sectors in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of economic sectors and social sectors and so forth. So the transformation is quite remarkable. But to focus just on the immediate aftermath of the genocide, the priority would have been simply stability. So bear in mind that not only was the government exiled into Zaire, but about 2 million Hutu refugees who feared that there would be reprisal killings by the RPF also fled with them into the Congo, into Zaire. The RPF does commit exactions. There is violence committed against some Hutu who remained. The scale of that is contested. The RPF, which is the lead party in the current government, deny that justice needs to be done. They argue that everybody who committed war crimes or other atrocities has been held to account. But that is not the view held by the Hutu, or by many Hutu, especially the Hutu political leadership that's currently in exile. So they not only argue that there were atrocities committed against Hutu in reprisal for the genocide inside Rwanda in the aftermath, but also the RPF followed many of these Hutu refugees into Zaire and hunted them down and killed them. And the evidence is that indeed, several tens of thousands, possibly over 100,000, some say even 200,000, we do not have systematic evidence of this to be able to say conclusively, but many tens of thousands of Hutu civilians were indeed killed in the Congo, for which there has been no accountability since then. So all that to say is that when you look at post-genocide Rwanda from the perspective of justice, that there is a grievance within the Hutu community, both the Hutu inside the country and the growing community outside of the country in exile, that it has been victor's justice, one-sided justice. So they have had Gacaca, which was the attempt of how you deal with mass atrocity using mass justice. And Gacaca was its attempt to bring about justice and reconciliation in Rwanda, but that it was focused only on crimes committed in one direction and not by the other side. So that is a longstanding grievance that is still a fault line in modern day Rwanda today. And when we talk about Rwanda being peaceful, I think we should be careful because I would say that Rwanda today certainly has not experienced violence, has not suffered from insecurity, but I would characterize it more as coexistence than reconciliation at this point. And one of the reasons, one of the obstacles for that is indeed this long-standing grievance over accountability for the violence. And on top of that, there are also question marks, I'm beginning to get now into post-genocide politics, but there are also question marks over political inclusion and also perceived ethnic bias in post-genocide Rwanda. They make the long-term stability of the country, they place a question mark over them, I believe.

Ceejay Hayes:

I would like to name that as well, the fact that you named coexistence, not reconciliation, as the condition which is defining Rwanda in this moment. I'm wondering, and we don't really need to answer this question, but if coexistence can be a satisfactory end goal, if we don't really have the tools, if we don't have the conditions, if we don't have the interpersonal relationship to pursue reconciliation if coexistence is enough? That could perhaps be a question we can tackle on later. Thinking about the government of Rwanda today as it has to manage this coexistence in a way that sustains, if not peace, nonviolence. Speak on the democracy that Rwanda has now, how that is promoting this longstanding peace slash nonviolence.

Omar McDoom:

post-genocide Rwanda, what does the future hold? The RPF, the government immediately after the genocide, understand they needed to secure the country and order and stability were more important than freedom and equality. There was a transition period, nine years before they had their first elections. Then elections were held. President Kagame was elected. He's been in office since 2000. The question is, we are now nearly 30 years since the genocide. In which direction is the country moving long term? Is it moving towards now that they've established 29 years of order and stability? Do we feel that the country is opening up and that the political space is becoming wider to allow more liberty? And is also the society becoming more ethnically equal? And I would say that in answer to both of those questions is, unfortunately, the country's moving in the opposite direction. And you ask, well, does that matter? If we have coexistence, even if it's not peace and reconciliation, does it matter? Well, I think so. And maybe I'll conclude on this because The real litmus test for Rwanda's future is regime succession. Who will succeed President Kagame and who will succeed the RPF? There has been no turnover since 1994. Can it continue indefinitely in perpetuity? I think that if you were to look a little further north to Ethiopia, I would say that the TPLF held that belief but have come unstuck, as we have seen in the last couple of years. I think that the risk is the same with Rwanda. And if you were to look at Rwanda's history, regime succession, every change of regime in Rwanda since 1896, So going back over 130 years, every single regime change has been extra constitutional outside of the established channels for changing governments. Some of those have been accompanied by violence, political and ethnic violence. So the risk for me is that if you have continuing political exclusion and perceived ethnic bias in the allocation of opportunities in Rwanda, then eventually people will feel there is no means through which they can express disagreement or effect change other than through extra constitutional channels. And that to me is the risk. I do not think we will see genocide again on that scale in Rwanda, but I do worry for the fact that the succession beyond the RPF is not clear to people. Either we may see a coup from within or perhaps possibly an uprising from without. Both of those I think would be devastating for the remarkable achievements that Rwanda has made in the last 29 years.

Ceejay Hayes:

How are the Hutus and Tutsis today? You know, we talked about co-existence over reconciliation, but that history still lives and still exists. So how are those two groups in Rwanda today?

Omar McDoom:

That is the $64 million question. What do Hutu and Tutsi really think of each other inside Rwanda today? It is difficult to know. not only because it is hard for researchers to go to Rwanda and ask about ethnic relations, ethnic identification in the public sphere is prohibited, so it's an extremely sensitive topic, but even if you could, even if you had a way to do it, I would say that it is very risky for Rwandans inside the country to share their true views on ethnic relations, especially with someone like myself, a foreign researcher. Perhaps the greater indication may be talking to Rwandans outside the country who are in exile, who have the freedom needing to self-censor and worry about. So when you speak to Rwandans outside of the country, some of them are people who have left since 1994. So understandably, they have very dim views about inter-ethnic relations. But increasingly we're seeing people, including Tutsi and Tutsi leaders, political leaders, who are leaving the country. Admittedly, they are disenchanted with Kagame, but worry about the state of inter-ethnic relations and believe and tell me that they think it is simply an enforced non-violent coexistence than a genuine coming together of people. I would qualify that a little to say that we are now more than a generation since the genocide and we have had a generation of young Rwandans who have born and who have never known the genocide and instead they've owned what the RPF has put in the school curriculum as to the origins of the genocide and the pre-genocide history. And that curriculum, that messaging has been one of the importance of being Rwandan rather than being Hutu or Tutsi. When I was last in Rwanda, I did indeed come across young people who dated each other across ethnic lines, which surprised me. And their parents disapproved because their parents would have been the generation that knew and lived through the genocide. But they did it despite the social disapproval of their parents. So there's a glimmer of hope there, I think, that with the next generation, the possibility of more than just non-planet coexistence exists. What worries me is the growing community of Rwandans outside of Rwanda that get more and more who do not think that the status quo is sustainable and may take matters into their own hands. Dr. Omar McDoon, thank you so much. It was my pleasure, Ceejay.

Ceejay Hayes:

There is a lot of history that Omar goes through in this episode, so it may be worth giving this episode a second listen. But I find that there are so many parallels between the Rwandan and American experiences of polarization, the influence of media on the public, the relevance of moderate voices in tension with the appeal of more radical talking heads, the bottom-up strategy of polarization or indeed radicalization, But there is one point Omar made that shifted how I think I need to approach understanding polarization. It's this quote. We often think that radicalization precedes violence, but one of the findings that I had in my research was that radicalization also followed violence. Many Rwandans were not yet radicalized, but joined these groups because of peer pressures and conformity, and then were forced to participate and committed atrocities or were complicit in atrocities. Is polarization a retroactive process? Do we find ourselves internalizing a radical worldview only after we act on it? I don't want to draw any false equivalencies between the Rwandan genocide and entrenched polarization in democracies. But if I reconfigure this process for the political arena, is it possible to presume that people are aligning themselves with polarizing figures before they themselves are fully radicalized? If radicalization itself isn't a mobilizing factor, but in fact only happens after one is mobilized, then what motivates a person to action in a polarized democracy? Perhaps we can't ascribe the actions of a person living in a conflict zone to that of a person living in a polarized democracy, but perhaps we can learn something from that. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the fluidity of influence between elites and the public. That seems to be a running theme in my interviews for this pod. Perhaps it's worth interrogating whether polarization is a linear process or an iterative one. Still more questions than answers, but a puzzle is starting to take shape. Thank you again to Omar McDoom for sharing his brilliance with us. His expertise is in genocide and civil wars, and he is currently writing on the conflicts happening throughout the world. You can find some of his pieces in the link I included in the show notes. Thanks to Jac Boothe of Neon Siren Studios for editing this pod. If you liked this episode of CounterPol, please leave us a review and share with your network. Thanks for listening.