Metodos De Investigacion

Faculty of Political Sciences

Introduction to Research Methods for Political Sciences

Exercise #1
Causes for the Outbreak of Violence in Rwanda



May 9th, 2012
Introduction
The case study that aims to be analyzed in this research is the Genocide in Rwanda.
During the genocide of 1994 the Rwandan Government was able to mobilize more than half of the population against a smallethnic group called Tutsi.
This mobilization culminated with the death of approximately 80% of the Tutsis in Rwanda (between 500.000 and 1.000.000 people).
The idea of this research is to understand how a government can organize a massive amount of people to kill and torture others without them rebelling. It also intents to analyze the tools that can be used in order to meet these objectives.
Sometools that found to be very important to the mobilization of masses were the exacerbation of racial hatred and the influence of the media over the population, therefore the question that pretends to be answered during the length of this research is: “How do exacerbation of racial hatred and media’s influence can cause outbreak of violence?”
The case of Rwanda is relevant to the PoliticalSciences in a very basic way. Political Sciences aim to study the relation of power between two or more actors, and if a conflict is looked upon as “a process of confrontation between two or more parts, caused by a clash of interests, values, actions or directions”, then it can be inferred that conflicts become part of the areas of study of the Political Sciences.
Political Science analyzes theconflicts, among other things, to understand its causes, and thus being able to recognize an emerging conflict somewhere else.

Theoretical Background
The central purpose of this section of the research is to analyze the similarities among the variables presented in the examination between the Rwanda and Darfur Genocides. The survey inspects the dynamics in the three variables used in this study inorder to generate practical inferences between the two cases from a comparative analytical perspective. In this fashion, common casual factors in both conflicts are to be presented in this section of the work.
The outbreak of violence: The analysis finds that both cases present a similar character in the use of force. One nexus of comparison between the two cases concerns intensity of violence isthe rate of killing, that is the number of deaths over a certain period of time. These estimates come from a 2005 US Department report, and from a 2005 report issued by the Coalition for International Justice. The modes of force follow the same logic in both cases. In addition, the perpetrators in both conflicts are mainly government soldiers and militias, who also claimed they were actingaccording to government orders. As in Rwanda, they labeled their victims with despicable names. In both scenarios the outbreak of violence was generated and led by the State, targeted at a particular ethnic population, and intended to destroy that ethnic population. Thus, it can be inferred that these are the main common causal factors in both cases that ignited the outbreak of violence. These areexamples of state-directed large-scale violence against civilian populations defined in ethnic terms, which can be measured through text analysis.
Exacerbation of racial hatred. As for this variable, in both, Rwanda and Sudan, one of the main sources for the augmentation of local tension and racial hatred incitation, were national policies and politics. The instigators of genocide are analyzed on twodifferent levels, the individual and the political elite. This comparison yields theoretical inferences and evidence to support existing explanations of genocide theories. Not only about the causal dynamics of the crime, but also on the creation of prevention-strategies to cope in a better way with future likewise scenarios. According to Stanton model of the 8 stages of genocide, Classification is...