THE ORDER OF GENOCIDE

The Order of Genocide



The Order of Genocide

Critical Analysis:

Straus is a political scientist, and the methodology that he uses to explore the causes of the genocide and the motivations of individual perpetrators centers upon conducting roughly 230 interviews and analyzing the statements that perpetrators make to explain and sometimes to justify their actions. Straus uses regression analysis to highlight dominant reasons given by perpetrators for their engaging in genocide, as well as qualitative analysis of their purported rationales for killing (Marquez, 2002). He also pursues a micro-comparative study of genocide dynamics in five Rwandan locations, providing valuable insights into the various tipping points that allowed for full scale genocide, and the contingent factors that influenced the timing and extent of it. His explanations of how violence spread into the Rwandan countryside through various political and military chains of command are particularly astute and analytically rigorous (Marquez, 2002).

But Straus' aggregation of data is not always illuminating. The main arguments of Straus' book are based upon the quantitative analysis of how frequently particular justifications for genocide appeared in the testimony of perpetrators that Straus interviewed. Many psychological, social, and cultural phenomena that are extremely significant in informing and motivating human behavior cannot be reduced to statements that can be easily quantified. Many are also unconscious and not necessarily apparent, and thus are unlikely to be verbalized. This does not lesson their significance. It does, however, ensure that a scholar as wedded to the notion that 'empirical data' consists primarily of information that can be quantified, and that such information is only useful when it is quantified, will produce academic research that while insightful and provocative only captures a portion of the truth (Agha, 2006).

Although Straus is always extremely cautious in his interpretations of this data, making note of and taking into account the gap, for example, between a person's actual motivations for murder and the image of himself which he may wish to present to a researcher, he still relies too exclusively on the testimony of perpetrators to illustrate why the genocide in Rwanda took place (Agha, 2006).

Straus does not conduct extensive interviews with Tutsi survivors about their experiences, what they saw and heard during the genocide, and the histories of discrimination and bigotry which they faced prior to the genocide. It is understandable that Straus chose to focus his work on the perpetrators, as there has been little research done on that subject. But neglecting the perspectives of Tutsi survivors to comment upon and critically examine the claims of the perpetrators undermines the utility of Straus' research and calls into question its reliability and accuracy. The answers to his questions that perpetrators provide need to be contextualized and interpreted not only by Straus, but by Rwandan survivors who have insight into Rwandan culture and social values that are not necessarily apparent to an outsider, particularly a political scientist who has not studied Rwandan culture extensively.

Straus finds convincing the claims by many if not most of his respondents that they ...