<i>The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda</i>, Scott Straus

Reviewed by: The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda Jennie E. Burnet Straus, Scott . 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 288 pp. $27.95 (cloth). Much has been made about the "mass participation" of average citizens in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Oft-cited theories blame the genocide on: (1) the spontaneous eruption of deep-seated ethnic hatred or tribalism; (2) the blind obedience of the Rwandan people, who simply did what their leaders told them; and (3) the rise of Hutu extremism and anti-Tutsi propaganda, which dehumanized Tutsi to the point where their Hutu neighbors no longer perceived it as an aberration to dispatch them with clubs, machetes, and hoes. Many other theories appear in a seemingly endless stream of publications in French and English about the genocide. A key problem is that many of these theories are based on conjecture or anecdotal evidence, rather than on painstaking empirical analysis. (Notable exceptions stand out, such as the rigorous historical analysis of Alison Des Forges in Leave None to Tell the Story.) Scott Straus's recent book, The Order of Genocide, distinguishes itself thanks to Straus's breadth and depth of knowledge of the secondary literature in French and English, his painstaking fieldwork, and his rigorous analytical framework. It is a major contribution to the literature on Rwanda, genocide, and political theory, and offers some groundbreaking insight into research methodology when conducting research in difficult settings with hard-to-access informants. In the book, Straus focuses on the genocide's local dynamics and bases the bulk of his analysis on interviews with 210 convicted and sentenced genocide perpetrators imprisoned in fifteen prisons around the country in [End Page 116] 2002. To help insure validity, he triangulates his survey results with data from additional interviews, conducted with Tutsi genocide survivors, Hutu nonparticipants, and current and former government officials, as well as a vast array of secondary literature on Rwanda, including scholarly works, memoirs by UN officials, UN peacekeepers and Rwandans, human-rights reports, and court documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and national courts (such as Canada and Belgium) that have heard cases related to the 1994 genocide. Based on these data, Straus posits that the Rwandan genocide was not necessarily meticulously planned in advance; rather, in the aftermath of President Juvénal Habyarimana's assassination, on 6 April 1994, Hutu hardliners took control of the national government by force and declared all Tutsis to be "the enemy." This declaration . . . functioned as a de facto policy—in effect, an authoritative order and a basis for authority—around which coalitions of actors could mobilize to take control of their communities. (p. 7) Local actors, who could be local authorities, businessmen, party leaders, soldiers, or even common thugs, who subscribed to the hardliners' position then mobilized to secure power in the community and made "killing Tutsis the new order of the day and demanded compliance from the Hutu civilian population" (p. 7). Straus argues that three main factors drove this process: (1) the civil war between the MRND government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had destabilized the political situation in the country and made average citizens fear for their security; (2) Rwandan state institutions, which penetrated to the local level, making it possible for hardliners to enforce their decision countrywide; and (3) the existence of ethnic categories, which made it possible for Hutu, "with no apparent history of antipathy toward Tutsis" to accept the hardliners' message that equated "Tutsi" with "the enemy," who had to be killed in self-defense (p. 9). Hutus killed not for ideological beliefs or ethnic hatred: they killed because they wanted to protect themselves during a war and during a period of intense uncertainty, because they felt that complying with those who told them to kill would be less costly than not complying. (p. 9) Among the book's many important contributions, I have space to highlight only a few here. The succinct historical background presented in chapter one outlines the historical background sufficiently for those unfamiliar with Rwanda to understand the local context. Among the brief histories of pregenocide Rwanda...

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