Mass Killing and the Oases of Humanity: Understanding Rwandan Genocide and Resistance

这项建议涉及两个主要问题。首先，在群体层面上，我们试图理解那些在周围的暴力中选择保持体面的人的行为。 虽然实际上有数十万人积极或消极地参与了杀戮和暴力，但其他人却故意选择不这样做;在种族灭绝中，存在着人道和抵抗的绿洲。选择退出的决定在不同的空间和时间，但我们不太明白为什么在一些省份很少发生杀戮，为什么在其他省份经常注意遵守实施暴力行为的命令。第二，在上述分析之后，我们将努力更好地理解卢旺达目前正在使用的和解进程，方法是挖掘倾向于原谅邻居的个人与不愿意原谅邻居的个人的态度，同时控制他们在1994年事件之前、期间和之后的经历差异。在大规模屠杀之后，和解和国家愈合方案的有效性在很大程度上取决于对谁是肇事者、具体罪行是什么以及受害者在现场扮演的角色的详细了解。将所有种族灭绝行为作为二元事件/非事件（如现有定量文献中所采用的）来对待，阻碍了我们定制具体和解和司法程序的能力，例如目前正在卢旺达进行的加卡卡进程，这是一项面向社区的地方努力，正在全国范围内使用。为了设计和执行政治和司法程序，使受害者能够作为个人继续生活，并作为国家发展，我们需要更好地了解种族灭绝活动发生的过程，并能够了解这一过程在空间和时间上的变化。国家科学基金会的支持将用于收集和格式化额外的数据，以补充已经在个人层面收集的数据（对个人暴力行为受害者和肇事者的描述），这些数据将在种族灭绝期间的行为变化分析中用作自变量：权力集中度、危机以及影响个人参与或选择退出意愿的众多背景因素的衡量标准。我们依靠许多来源来做到这一点：非政府组织在卢旺达国内外的报告、1991年卢旺达人口普查、冲突管理中心和布塔雷卢旺达国立大学地理信息系统中心编制的国家绘图数据，以及几个卢旺达人的调查数据，法国和比利时当局各自代表了对种族灭绝的特定政治利益观点。对学者、政策制定者、非政府组织和普通公民的影响。首先，它提供了对人类历史上最重要和最暴力的事件之一的洞察。 其次，它增进了我们对世界上一个在很大程度上被严格的经验调查所忽视的地区的理解，这个地区一再经历大规模杀戮--尽管严重程度不同。这是现有社会科学文献中的一个主要局限性，这些文献应试图在世界各地推广。第三，也是最后一个，该项目提供了一个一般的洞察力，应该如何去调查有争议的政治/冲突过程中的未来-探索案件内的变化。这种方法不仅影响了我们对冲突行为的研究和理解，也影响了我们对何时何地应该干预这些行为以试图阻止它们的概念，以及在这种行为结束后，我们应该在哪里以及如何去尝试调和人群的概念。

This proposal addresses two main issues. First, at the group level, we seek to understand what accounts for the behavior of those that chose to retain their decency amid the violence around them. While literally hundreds of thousands of people actively or passively participated in the killings and violence, others made the deliberate choice not to; amidst genocide there were oases of humanity and resistance. The decision to opt out varied across both space and time, but we have little understanding of why in some prefectures little killing took place, and why in others the compliance with orders to commit violent acts were heeded regularly. Second, following the analysis above, we will engage in an effort to better understand the reconciliation process that is now being used in Rwanda, by tapping the attitudes of individuals inclined to forgive their neighbors versus those who are not while controlling for the differences in their experiences before, during and after the events of 1994. The effectiveness of reconciliation and national healing programs after large-scale mass-killings depends in no small part on detailed understandings of who the perpetrators were, what the specific crimes were and the victims' role in placing themselves at the scene. Treating all genocides alike, as a binary event/non-event (like that employed within the existing quantitative literature), hinders our ability to tailor specific reconciliation and judicial processes such as the current Gacaca process now underway in Rwanda, which is a local, community-oriented effort, being used throughout the country. In order to design and implement political and judicial processes to allow the victims to move forward with their lives as individuals and to develop as nations, we need to better understand the process by which genocidal activities take place and to be able to understand the variance of the process over both space and time. NSF support will be used for the collection and formatting of additional data to supplement data already collected at the individual level (descriptions of victims and perpetrators of individual violent acts) to be used as independent variables within an analysis of behavioral variation during the of genocide: e.g., measures of power concentration, crisis, and numerous contextual factors that influence the willingness of individuals to participate or to opt out. We rely upon numerous sources for this: NGO reports within as well as outside of Rwanda, the Rwandan census of 1991, country mapping data complied by the Centre for Conflict Management and the GIS Centre at the National University of Rwanda, in Butare, and survey data from several Rwandan, Frenchand Belgium authorities each representing a particular politically interested viewpoint on the genocide.The project proposed here has numerous implications for scholars, policymakers, NGOs and everyday citizens. First, it provides insight into one of the most significant and violent events in human history. Second, it improves our understanding of a part of the world that has largely been neglected by rigorous empirical investigation and one that has repeatedly experienced mass killing - albeit at various levels of severity. This is something of a major limitation within existing social science literature, which should attempt to be generalizable across all parts of the world. Third, and last, the project provides general insight into how one should go about investigating contentious politics/conflict processes in the future - exploring within-case variation. Such an approach influences not simply our study and understanding of conflict behavior, but also our conceptions of when and where we should intervene into such activities in an attempt to stop them as well as where and how we should go about trying to reconcile populations after this behavior has ended.