MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Scott Straus, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teaches classes on genocide, violence, human rights, and African politics. His book, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, won a prestigious award in 2006 for Excellence in Political Science and Government from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. Scott speaks with Jerry Fowler, using Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) as a case study, to discuss the causes and the dynamics that must be in place to propel a situation towards genocide and mass violence.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Scott Straus. He is the assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Scott welcome back to the program.
SCOTT STRAUS: Thanks so much for having me.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, the first thing I want to do Scott is congratulate you. The last time we talked, we were talking about Rwanda and since then your book was published, “The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda.” It won a very prestigious award, best Political Science book for 2006 from the American Association Publishers. Congratulations!
SCOTT STRAUS: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
JERRY FOWLER: It’s very good. Today we are not going to actually talk so much about Rwanda, you have started in a bit of a different direction in your research -- starting look at situations which had potential for genocide and extreme violence, but didn’t quite get to that point. I guess the first question is why would you even look for those kinds of things?
SCOTT STRAUS: Absolutely, thanks for having me again. The basic premise of the research I am doing now is that we have made a lot of progress in the past decade, in terms of thinking about what causes genocide. You have really seen in books both on case studies of particular cases but also a real surge of comparative research -- that is people who look at Rwanda Bosnia and the Holocaust and Cambodia who look at other cases and try to isolate what are these countries? What do these cases have in common? Therefore, what can they tell us about what are the dynamics driving genocide? There has been a tremendous amount of progress in terms of where we are. But I say there are a couple of different concerns about where the literature has left us. I say first is that theories we have tend to over predict when and where genocide will happen.
JERRY FOWLER: And when you say they over predict it’s that they are suggesting there is going to be more often than what actually occurs?
SCOTT STRAUS: Absolutely, so let us say you look at the deep division in populations. If you look at certain kinds of ideologies -- you look at war, you look at strategic interest of leaders and so forth -- those are some of the prominent theories. There are many more cases where those things exist that is where you would have a civil war between two deeply opposed groups, or you have groups that have extremist ideologies or that have ethnic exclusivists’ claims on the state. I am simplifying a little bit, but in short, genocide is more rare. It doesn’t happen in all of the places where those factors exist. Genocide should never happen, but as a political event it is a relatively rare phenomenon. It is more often than many people think it happens, but from the universe of possible outcomes of cases it’s relatively rare. And so, the first premise is to say -- well let’s choose some of the cases that have many of the factors -- that people think cause genocide but do not or have not yet resulted in genocide, to try to understand what factors are actually constraining or acting as deescalating factors on those cases. That might help us, both from a prevention standpoint, where to put pressure and how to approach these situations that are very tense and could escalate. Also from a theory building exercise, it will allow us to develop more precise or more refined explanations of what we think is going on in these cases. That’s the first premise for why I approached this.
The second issue for me is that I found that the literature tended to compare cases that were actually fairly different in so many different ways that the comparisons became unweilding. So, Rwanda and the Holocaust; they are both genocides. Rwanda, Bosnia, and Holocaust, Cambodia -- I think you can justifiably call these cases genocide, but they are all quite different countries and factors. Not only the factors, but the profiles of these countries are fairly different. Germany was industrialized, involved in a fairly sophisticated institution of governance and was involved in an international war. Cambodia was more of an agrarian society and it had a very different ethnic composition and different in some ways, ideology than what happened in Rwanda. Rwanda was a much smaller country with a particular colonial history. I am schematically pointing to differences, but what I found is that the comparisons that were being drawn, tended to have so many moving parts in them that is was hard to get clear about precisely what might be going on in these cases that they have in common that will lead to these mass violence outcomes.
JERRY FOWLER: This may be a slightly naïve question, but couldn’t you make the argument that because each of these cases have so many things that are different, that the things appear to be common would be that much more significant?
SCOTT STRAUS: You could. I think that’s right. I think that is a very good point. In some ways, yes. First, I would come back to the point. I think to do that, you have to create such a high level of generality that the thing that you would have in common, you’re going to find common to many other cases. So I think again, it’s not that it’s wrong and it has taken us to a good place. It’s more that to get to the next level of understanding, I think you want to look at cases with more similar profiles to understand a little more where the variance is between them that might be driving them along different paths to mass violence. So, I guess I am trying to think what would be a good example of how these different cases produce high levels of generality, one that are not coming to mind, but at the end of our interview I will probably think of something.
JERRY FOWLER: Feel free to just insert them once they burst into your mind. Well, let me ask you this, we are going to turn in just a second to one of the places you have gone to, to look at this. What are some of the key questions you are asking yourself -- we are going to talk about Ivory Coast in just a minute -- but what are some of the key questions that you have in mind that you want to answer?
SCOTT STRAUS: The key question is -- well I think there are a couple of key questions. The strongest link in literature on genocide is the link between armed conflict and mass violence against civilians and genocide. And the key question in my mind, or one of the key questions is why do some wars lead to relatively low violence against civilians and other wars lead to very high levels of violence against civilians? I say that is probably my number one question. I say the second question that I have is, around questions of ideology, questions around identity, and questions of ethnic politics. Again, why is some nationalism, why are some ethnic exclusivists’ parties and ideologies leading to more compromise with their opponents? Whereas some are leading to large scale violence outcomes? I’m interested in the way the international community or the way international actors -- in Rwanda we know and in other cases we know that sometimes international action either serves to lead to more radicalization of parties, or they can just ignore them, and so forth it doesn’t have an effect. However, sometimes international action can have a positive effect, and as we’ll talk about in Ivory Coast, I think it probably has had a good effect. So I think there again there are going to be lessons about peace keeping and intervention.
I guess the other question that is hard to get at is to try to get into leaders’ minds and to try to say, if you think about people who are driving the show in these conflict and crisis...
JERRY FOWLER: “Driving the show,” by that you also mean the ones who are making decisions, whether it be to use violence and how much violence to use?
SCOTT STRAUS: Yes, the ones who are in positions of power and thinking about the menu of options that they might have. So, one option could be they are going to escalate violence among civilians. Another option is that they are going to prosecute the war. The third option is going to be they are going to really choose peace. The fourth option is that they are going to try to mollify the extremists and their coalition or embold in the moderates. And to think about it from their point of view, when they choose to deescalate or to try to put pressure on the hardliners in their own coalitions, when they make those choices and why they make those choices. And that’s very difficult to get at, at some level. So it’s just some of the questions I am asking in some ways.
JERRY FOWLER: So, one of the cases you started to look at was the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Just briefly, why would that be a place you would take up?
SCOTT STRAUS: Ivory Coast is a case that basically has many of the factors or attributes that when people look back at Rwanda and they say, here are the things that really matter in Rwanda and then you look at Ivory Coast and many of those same things are present.
First you have a civil war. You have had now, five years of civil war in Ivory Coast. You have got a pretty strong divide between the northern areas which are controlled by rebel organizations and southern areas which are controlled by the Government. The second issue is that on the part of the government side you have the rise of an exclusivists’, nationalists’ ideology, in particular around the concept of “Ivories.” That basically translates as the “true Violinists.” And the idea being that northerners and Muslims are not true Ivorian and that true Ivorian are Christian and southerners. That has been used in some ways to exclude certain people from voting, often times people that really matter are the children of immigrants who came to work in Ivory Coast from other places in west Africa over the past couple decades. And so those two issues you’ve got war, you’ve got a kind of ethnic nationalism. You also have militia groups that have been fomenting violence in Ivory Coast and different parts of Ivory Coast, both in the capitol and parts of the west.
JERRY FOWLER: Are the militia groups associated with specific ideologies or do they tend to be more opportunistic, or as often happens a combination?
SCOTT STRAUS: I say a combination, but they have been for a couple of years. They were attacking foreigners and they were arguing these people are not true Ivorian and trying to take back Corte D’Ivoire from foreigners. That was some of the discourse of the militias. Now, what is really motivating them, that is part of it. Part of it is they are opportunistically using violence as a way to gain leverage in their societies. Also the other story in the Ivory Coast is there have been a significant amount of economic decline and the economic space has shrunk. As a result, you find people who are relatively well trained and people who had, in some levels, in theory, were brought up with the promise of the future and they are finding themselves without the certain levels of opportunities and are frustrated by that. So a lot of the talk in the Ivory Coast is about there is not as much land that is available, there’s not as much job opportunities. Youth who want to be gainfully employed are not being able to and they are looking and are scapegoat foreigners, so a lot of people are talking about it in that way. You do have militia groups that are tied to the ruling party, the one that has been promoting this kind of nationalism and they have been willing to use violence when necessary.
You also have in the Ivory Coast, both economic declines. I talked about political instability; it has gone through a transition from a single party rule to a multi-party rule and a lot of uncertainty that comes with that. That in turn, I think did play a role in Rwanda and I think in other cases as well.
And those are some of the factors that not only I, but other people looked at and said, “wow, Ivory Coast is ripe or has got the conditions for some really serious mass violence and maybe genocide.” You have seen some, both from the UN, Juan Mendez’s office, the special advisor to the secretary general on genocide has done a report on Ivory Coast. It is the only one, as far as I know beyond Darfur. You have some genocide awareness groups that have pointed to raise the alarms about Ivory Coast and so forth. So, that is why I chose it. You could choose that over the world. You could probably use fifty cases that are nowhere near genocide, but here is a case where I thought, its got a lot of factors and lot of people are worried about mass violence there. I want to try to understand, up until this point, what has kept that from happening. It may still happen and that is a flaw of my research design, it would be terrible, but I want to understand, if I could, what is not letting Ivory Coast go to that level at this stage.
JERRY FOWLER: And I know this is obviously something that will take more research than you’ve done this far, more thinking, but after having gone to Ivory Coast and doing the research, what are some of your initial impressions for what accounts for this so far not as extreme outcomes as it could have been?
SCOTT STRAUS: Well, I just want to say as a caveat that I haven’t done the systematic research that I wanted to do and over time I hope to be doing that research. In a couple years, I hope to come back, not only Ivory Coast, but in some other cases and be able to say, “Here I’ve done the field research and that I have done it systematically and here are all the answers that I have.” I was in Ivory Coast this past summer as well as Chad and will talk about that, but I will give you a sense of what my impressions are. I think the first thing that I sensed was that the war was not very intense, at least it is not now, or the way some people talked about it. It did not seem very intense. And so, I had the feeling that the perception of threat, the perception of the risk, the perception of the sense of major loss, that I do think escalates conflicts and I do think can lead people to extreme solutions. I just did not get the sense from being in Ivory Coast and talking to people that there was that same level of threat perception, sense of fear, panic and sense of intensity around the war that I think in other places has really led to an escalation of the violence. That was the first issue. The question is why that is and in some way I can have some speculation, but I am not exactly sure, but maybe I will come back to that if you’re interested.
The second thing is that the notion of Ivoirete, when I ask people from parts of the country as well as the capital, just didn’t have as much resonance. People would recognize it, whether it was someone in a political party, even some of the youth I spoke to, general conversation -- I would ask people, as many people as I could -- “what do you think about Ivorians,” -- and again, I was not doing any systematic sampling, this is just impressionistic research. They gave me the impression that they recognize that Ivories was either something political elites were using to leverage their own power or something that did not make sense to them. They recognize at some level that Cote D’Ivoire is a multi ethnic, is a multi religious society and it will probably, always will be and there were some legitimate grievances, in their minds, against foreigners and the sense that there had been a real open door immigration policy, under Cote D’Ivoire’s first president. That it led into a large influx of people from around West Africa. But that, that was a fairly specific set of issues, rather than a deep sense of there is one group that really belongs to Cote D’Ivoire and they are Christian, they are southerner, and everyone who is Muslim and northerners doesn’t belong here and should get out and not vote. Those are a different kind of sense of I guess the resonance of identity and nationalism. I just did not have the sense that Ivoirete meant in peoples’ mind that northerners and Muslims were potential enemies. There were much more specifics to the dynamics of immigration in that country.
JERRY FOWLER: When you talk about the concept of Ivoirete, you are suggesting that it’s a sense of identity that elites are trying to propagate, as part of an ideology, how long have they been doing that?
SCOTT STRAUS: It’s a good question. I think it stems from the mid to late nineties when the concept was first coined. So it could be something that is relatively recent and that over time will catch on, but that could be and it would be really dangerous for Cote D’Ivoire. The sense that I had though was that it was not meaningful to people, at least not now, even in the context of the crisis. What you find in Rwanda and Darfur and other places were that there were long histories of cooperation between Hutus and Tutsis between so called Arabs and Africans in Darfur and it is not as if these identities were always very salient in sites of conflict. Most of the time, people lived in cooperation and there was lots of intermarriage and so forth. Certainly from Rwanda and my sense from Darfur is that these identities were more etched. They had a resonance, even if they were not sites of conflict, they were meaningful to people in different ways. And so when they became the identities around which violence was mobilized, in the crisis, people hanged onto them and they governed the conflict to a certain degree. Not saying that people attacked others because they hated other people on the basis of identity, but the identities and the way that they shaped conflict and shaped violence were resonant, significant and etched. I guess is a word to use. Whereas in Cote D’Ivoire, I did not have the sense that this was something that could actually shape the conflict. That was my impression, and obviously it is something that I could do a survey and try to in a way show that more specifically or do more systematic interviews with people, that is something that I would like to do.
In the western part of Cote D’Ivoire, for example where a lot of the violence is concentrated at the moment, the conflicts there are much more local and have to do with the dynamic between the indigenous -- people who had been in the area for long periods of time, who had given out parts of their land to immigrants who had come and farmed primarily cocoa in that region, now wanted that land back to a certain degree. And some of them use the language of Ivoirete, but I just didn’t for genocide and mass violence to happen. There has to be some way that there is an alliance, ideology, ideation, or political alliance between people at the center, people at the national level, and people at the local level. There is the potential of the in Cote D’Ivoire, but I also had the sense that it wasn’t happening. That these ideologies and identities were not salient or resonant enough in the societies to organize mass violence type of outcome. That was my impression.
JERRY FOWLER: We are near the end of the time, let me just ask about one more factor. There was a fairly vigorous international intervention led by the French in Cote D’Ivoire. What role did that play?
SCOTT STRAUS: There was the French intervention as well as the UN intervention. I think frankly if you look at the record, Rwanda did hover over people’s minds, international actors minds, when the war broke out in Cote D’Ivoire. People were using this ideology, and there was a sense of crisis and people said, “oh my god, we’ve got another Rwanda on our hands,” that did lead to a fairly robust international peace keeping efforts that included -- I think the number is about 4,000 French troops and I think about another, I cannot remember the numbers off hand, but I think 7,000 or 8,000 more UN troops. The UN now has a fairly large operation now in Cote D’Ivoire and a separated the two sides. I think my sense is that the international intervention there did have the effect of separating the two sides and also, deescalating the sense of crisis and the sense of potential that again the sense of threat and perceptions of threat had the effect of reducing that. That was my impression. Now part of that has to do with the fact that French troops are very credible. They are well trained, well-equipped, they are well organized, and they have good communication systems. They have a long time presence in Cote D’Ivoire. The French have a military base there. So I think the notion, this was not kind of add hawk, the last minute UN peace keeping operation where people are ill equipped, knew nothing about the country. The troops there were well-equipped and presented a credible deterrent, I think to groups that would want to fight. And I do think it had a pretty good effect, in the sense of making Cote D’Ivoire appear that it will be very difficult to win and that it would be very difficult to overcome that obstacle if you were an armed combatant on either side. I do think that has played an important role there. So, I do think there are lessons there for the international community about what kinds of peace keeping operations actually can work and can deescalate conflict. Again, I think more research needs to be done there to see whether or not that did have an effect.
The final thing that I just want to mention would be that, I also got the impression in Cote D’Ivoire that from African standards it has been a relatively well developed country; a lot of commerce, a lot of trade. You know just going up and down the country you see truck loads, full of produce that are being taken from very lush parts of the country and from other countries around the region, to the port in Abidjan and then shipped on. I think that translates into a number of economic incentives for peace and ultimately de-escalation of violence. I think those -- in ways I haven’t figure out yet -- my hypothesis would be that there is a lot to loose in Ivory Coast and there are a lot of people who have relative power who don’t want Cote D’Ivoire to go to hell, if you will. I think that is also serving as a deescalating pressure. Those are a lot of factors and I am only looking at one case, but those are the types of things I came away thinking. These are some of the hypothesis that I want to test further and ultimately try to work through them to figure out what are the general propositions from which I can develop that say here is when we are likely to see, when you got war, when you got nationalism, you got identity, you got economic decline, and you got other factors, militias, hate speech and so forth. When are those going to likely head towards genocide, mass violence, Rwanda, Darfur, Burundi? When are they likely to head to not a good outcome, but a stalemate type outcome? That is the research question that I want to explore in the future.
JERRY FOWLER: I have been talking to Scott Strauss who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin. I hope you check back with us as his research progresses, but in the meantime, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
SCOTT STRAUS: Thanks so much for having me Jerry.
