Omar Shahabudin McDoom has written a remarkable book that weaves together quantitative and qualitative methods and a rich theoretical framework that nuances scholarly understanding of civilian participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The Path to Genocide in Rwanda finds that the genocide was a product of elite power politics and a small but willing minority of civilian killers. This book could be assigned in graduate seminars in history, political science, and sociology because it offers nuanced conceptual value for scholars of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass violence. Although McDoom’s findings are particular to the Rwandan case, careful readers will appreciate his theoretical framework as beneficial to the field of comparative genocide studies. His analysis weaves together the Rwandan case through constructivist theories on the role of ideas and the power of emotion in explaining why civilians take up state-led calls to kill the “other.” Such nuance is a strength of McDoom’s The Path to Genocide in Rwanda as he works through multiple, often competing, theories to explain—in clear language—the how and why of civilian killers in Rwanda. He does so while challenging scholarly assumptions about why men (and they are mostly men) kill.
In making his case, McDoom explicitly addresses several characteristics of the violence in Rwanda that remain underexplained in the copious volume of scholarship produced on this tiny central African country. He notes four gaps in published works that The Path to Genocide in Rwanda seeks to address. The first is the astounding speed of civilian mobilization; then the pace of genocidal killing; third, the extent to which the targeted killing of ethnic Tutsis consumed both urban and rural Rwanda, leaving few options for survival; and, lastly, the high percentage of Tutsi deaths at the hands of Hutu neighbors. McDoom overstates the dearth of available literature on each of these four items, perhaps because debates about them are now discussed by academics and journalists on scholarly websites written mostly since 2018. For example, debates on Tutsi lives lost during the genocide and conversations about the number of civilian killers can be found on blogs such as African Arguments and the Review of African Political Economy. Because The Path to Genocide in Rwanda is based on McDoom’s 2009 doctoral dissertation, there is a lesson here for authors to revise their book manuscripts either to incorporate the most recent debates in their area of study or to present their findings to readers as reflective of their doctoral work.
Of particular merit are McDoom’s extensive methods. He surveyed nearly 300 perpetrators and nonperpetrators inside and outside the prison system and consulted some 160 local organizers and leaders of violence. McDoom developed four ethnographic case studies contrasting local communities that experienced high and low levels of violence at the cell level (Rwanda’s smallest formal administrative unit, above the family and below the commune). He also conducted what he calls a micro-comparative analysis of variation in the onset of genocidal violence across Rwanda’s 145 administrative communes, employing GIS data that mapped the spatial patterns in the household locations of more than 3,000 killers, nonkillers, and victims from different communities. In addition, McDoom developed a dataset on the social networks of 130 killers and nonkillers. These methods were used to answer this question: How and why did the 1994 genocide occur? McDoom’s most revealing finding is his claim that one in five ethnic Hutu men participated in the killing, a far cry from the current government’s policy to prosecute, for genocide crimes, all adult Hutu men residing in Rwanda in 1994. His research design does not include female perpetrators, which is unfortunate but understandable given that only 3% of perpetrators were women.
The strength of McDoom’s analysis is its linking of microlevel effects to macrolevel causes. The Path to Genocide in Rwanda is ground-breaking as the first book-length study on the Rwandan genocide to generate theoretical claims about the how and why of genocidal violence at the local, regional, and national levels. It is also a product of McDoom’s courageous and careful fieldwork conducted over a decade, an impressive feat in a location where the government actively determines who may study questions about the Rwandan genocide, with whom, and how. It is difficult to undertake such sustained study on a world-historical event as contentious in its causes and consequences as the Rwandan genocide. McDoom approaches his analysis in a matter-of-fact way, without moralizing about the lives of those he consulted. Such dispassion is a rarity in books on Rwanda, where political agendas are sometimes not so subtly woven into the text. This dispassion, however, sometimes comes at a cost to the reader. Readers unfamiliar with the Rwandan case may find it difficult to understand how the shifting political environment informed the timing of an interview or a survey. It is also unclear whom precisely McDoom surveyed or interviewed, which raises questions about how he interpreted answers to each of his 11 research hypotheses. A more robust engagement with methodology (as distinct from methods) would have added considerable heft to McDoom’s carefully designed research project (a strength of the book).
The lack of discussion on how McDoom gained the consent of those individuals he consulted, on the process of administering surveys, and on how he worked with research assistants and translators is mystifying. He may have withheld this information to protect their physical safety, because Rwanda is a country where talking to foreign researchers has personal risks such as social shunning, imprisonment, and even death. Still, McDoom’s lack of attention to his human informants is surprising, because he puts his findings in conversation with the two most influential scholars of the how and why of the Rwandan genocide: Lee Ann Fujii and Scott Straus. Their texts, published by Cornell University Press in 2009 and 2006, respectively, are master classes on studying perpetrators of genocide in their sociopolitical context. As such, graduate instructors teaching McDoom’s findings could pair his book with methodology chapters from both Fujii and Straus. The political science discipline in the United States has begun to reckon with the ethics of human subject research and its costs for researched and research alike, as evidenced in the 2020 Principles and Guidance on Human Subjects Research issued by the American Political Science Association.
Well written, thoughtfully researched, and empirically rich, Omar McDoom’s The Path to Genocide will reward readers interested in Rwanda, mass violence, and genocide studies, as well as those keen on discussions of elite framing, the power of ideas, and the role of negative emotions (fear, hostility, resentment) in creating out-groups that they depict as worthy of extermination.
