 Good morning everybody, can you hear me okay through this mic? Yes, great. So Moraika took us to the Great Lakes and I'm going to take us back to the Great Lakes but to a different time period. Moraika focused on life after violence and I'm going to talk about life before violence. I should say I'm probably going to also disappoint Lars not just because I'm not very good at typekeeping but also that my paper, what I'm going to talk about is primarily about ethnicity rather than inequality so with that preface I was going to the way I thought I would do this was to share three thoughts that I had about the relationship between ethnicity and violent conflict and the insights that I'm going to share this is my opportunity to plug a book that I recently published come from this book which is called The Path Genocide in Mawanda and it's an intensive case study produced over 10 years based on multiple trips to Mawanda, talking to Mawandans about what happened before and during the violence in the early 1990s. So since I know that I'm a bad timekeeper and that Lars is a very strict enforcer I thought that I should probably start with simply telling you what my three thoughts are in the case I don't get to the third or second one. So the first is simply this that the distinction made in theories of violent conflict between those theories which emphasize ethnicity and identity and those theories which emphasize rationality and materiality that that dichotomy is a false dichotomy and that we should look to soften that distinction so that's the first somewhat abstract theoretical point. I'll try to make it more concrete in the presentation. The second is this that ethnic extremism isn't simply the product of differences between ethnic groups but also the product of differences within ethnic groups and that there is a strategic dynamic interaction that takes place both between so inter and also within intra ethnic groups that produces ethnic extremism. And the third and final point which I may not get to is that ethnic radicalization by which I mean simply the development of extreme negative attitudes and beliefs towards an ethnic other. That this isn't only something that precedes ethnic violence but it's also something that is produced by ethnic violence. Okay so those are the three thoughts. Now here's the evidence that comes from the book to kind of substantiate those three claims. Okay so the first claim the distinction between ethnicity and rationality. So theories which emphasize ethnicity tend to use language that's emotionalist. Emphasizing concepts such as ethnic pride, ethnic loyalty, ethnic grievance, ethnic anger, ethnic fear. And these are very closely associated with theories that emphasize ethnicity and identity. In contrast with theories that emphasize, theories which are based on reason or rationality where the language tends to be that of interests rather than identity and strategy and elite calculation. And what I'm going to try to demonstrate is that these perspectives on theories of conflict are in fact reconcilable. Okay I should say that there is of course as many of you will know a normative bias within political science and perhaps more generally social science towards theories that emphasize reason, cognitive processes. I in my personal view think this is a product of the Enlightenment which largely sees emotions as kind of a subversion of reason. So privileging cognitive and rational processes to explain social and political phenomena. But I think that that's a mistaken bias in the literature. Okay so I wanted to illustrate this. I wanted to illustrate this by a decision, perhaps one of the most fateful decisions in the Rwandan genocide and a decision that would have repercussions for the world, a world historical decision. And this is the decision that was made on the April 6, 1994, the fateful day when President Habyuramana of Rwanda was assassinated. But the decision that I'm interested in is not the decision to assassinate Habyuramana, it was the decision made after his assassination. And this was the decision made by these two individuals, the man on the left, Theonist Bagasota, the man on the right, Paul Kagame. These two individuals made the same choice. They each chose to resume a civil war and to fight until one side was the victor. They abandoned the idea of negotiation. They abandoned the idea of striking some kind of peace deal. And just as a by way of background, Bagasota is the extremist leader of the government of Rwanda following Habyuramana, at least in the very early days. Paul Kagame was the head, the military head of the RPF, the rebel organization that was challenging the government of Rwanda. And I'm sure you may know some of these histories, too. The government of Rwanda at the time that that decision made was actually the militarily weaker force, objectively speaking, compared with the RPF. And I'm sure as you know, the ultimate outcome of this battle of these decisions was the government of Rwanda lost and the RPF won. Okay. So was this, let's focus, I want to focus on the decision of the loser. So the government of Rwanda, why did Theonist Bagasota and his extremist allies make this decision to fight a war that they would ultimately use? Was this the product of reasoned or rational thinking? So they preferred to fight rather than to negotiate. Well, as I mentioned previously, it doesn't seem rational because it was very clear to any outsider that, I say I'm not going to make it to the end of the third point, that never mind, you still got to get this one, that they were objectively militarily weaker. Okay. So I think this decision was not the product of rational calculation. Was it then a purely emotional decision that Bagasota and the other extremists, well, they just would rather die than actually have to share power with the RPF, a Tutsi focused organization. Okay. But when we actually observe what they did in the end, when they were finally cornered on the border with the then Zaire, they didn't fight to the death. They actually ran across the border and hid, where many of them still are there today. So it wasn't that they preferred death to sharing power with the Tutsis. You couldn't be explained as a purely emotional decision either. The way that I attempt to ration, to reconcile these perspectives is this, that the reason that Bagasota and the others made this decision is they simply, they calculated, it was a rational calculation, but it was simply a miscalculation. And that miscalculation was made, the mistake was made because their judgment was clouded by emotion. And the emotions in this case were anger because they believed that the RPF were responsible for killing their president, Habir Amana, and also hostility, the anti-ethnic bigotry that characterized much of the Civil War period in Rwanda. So this should not be a surprise to students of social psychology. So students of social psychology would know this, that cognitive processes, attention, evaluative judgments, probably estimates, perceptions of risks, et cetera, et cetera, all of these rational decisions are actually shaped and affected by our emotions too. So that's my first point, that reason and emotions are not irreconcilable, but in fact work together to produce decisions and outcomes. Okay, let's see if I can get to at least the second claim. Okay. So this is the claim that extremism is the product of both intra and inter-ethnic dynamics. So here is it, very crudely illustrated, an intergroup interaction produces an intragroup interaction, which in turn induces another intergroup interaction, et cetera, et cetera, and essentially it moves along this way towards escalation and polarization. So how did this work concretely in the context of Rwanda? Another individual. This man, Justin Mugenzi, was a party leader. He was the leader of an important member of the government coalition. It was the liberal party. And that's important because this was the party at the time that was most closely associated with the Tutsi elite inside Rwanda. And he was a confirmed moderate. But this, and here's the evidence that he's a confirmed moderate. I won't read it because I don't have enough time. But essentially, if you were to read this, it's simply saying that he thinks that we should share power. We shouldn't fight. But then he changes. And he changes because this man is assassinated. This man is Melchior Indadiye, who is the Burundian Hutu president, the first Hutu president in Burundi in October 1993. And when he is killed, assassinated by Tutsi soldiers in Burundi, this has massive implications for politics in Rwanda. And one of those, so this is a between group interaction, between Hutu and Tutsi. It's an interethnic interaction, admittedly in another country, but they would have implications inside Rwanda. And the implication it has is that it actually divides the political parties inside Rwanda into moderate and extremist factions. So Justin Mugenzi, perhaps the most confirmed moderate, one of the most confirmed moderates, radicalizes. And he makes this speech a few months after Indadiye's assassination. And essentially, again, without having to read it, he's simply saying, now I'm siding with the Hutu, we need to protect the Hutu majority in this country. So he radicalizes. And that was the product of the intergroup interaction. The third and final claim, which I will only be able to simply tell you in very broad terms, is that radicalization, by which I mean developing these extreme negative beliefs and attitudes of ethnic others, that this isn't simply the outcome of isn't something that precedes violence, but also something that is produced by violence. And it actually, what I'm doing here is another theoretical reconciliation, because there are these two contrasting perspectives on perpetrator behavior. On the one hand, people think that perpetrators are just very ordinary individuals, that there's nothing that distinguishes them in terms of their disposition. They don't have radical or extreme attitudes or beliefs. But on the other hand, there's a second group of theories that says exactly the opposite, that these perpetrators, in fact, dehumanize and denigrate and hold these radical views that they're very bigoted, and that's what drives them to participate in violence. What I'm simply showing or trying to suggest is that not only does the causal direction move in this direction, but also it moves in that direction. And that's important because it helps us to address another puzzle in theories of ethnic violence, which is why is it that we see so much gratuitous pain and suffering inflicted on victims when you could quite simply kill them mechanically. And the reason that we see cruelty when perpetrators claim that they are coerced is because individuals who are indeed initially coerced, radicalized through the act of violence itself. The act of violence is a transformative act. So not only do attitudes drive behaviors, but behaviors also drive attitudes. And that is how individuals who feel coerced actually come to commit atrocities and cruelty. So I'll end it there. And thank you for your patience.