Resisting Genocidal Violence 

Nicole Fox, California State University, Sacramento

Hollie Nyseth Brehm, California State University, Sacramento

Research Grant, 2018

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According to our sample, those who saved others during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi were a diverse group of individuals in terms of socioeconomic status (ranging from wealthy to very poor), age (25–62 years old at the time they rescued), religious identity (Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal), and gender (men and women). Although this was part of our research design, it is worth noting that the communities in which they lived also varied significantly in terms of the level and onset of violence, as well as whether they were urban or rural. While we are still in the midst of data analysis, we have six important findings thus far.

The majority of the people with whom we spoke did not rescue alone. Rather, they rescued with the help of their partners, children, neighbors, or extended family, often in a concerted, sustained, and planned series of actions. Rescue involved hiding people in homes or helping people cross borders and checkpoints. It also included more transient encounters in which brief assistance—like food—was provided. Notably, these efforts were often undertaken by several people or even through large social networks.

Our findings indicate that rescue is not often undertaken by a single individual but rather by a network of individuals engaging in a form of collective action with the shared goal to save others.

This finding is important because existing research frames rescue as an individual act. However, our findings indicate that rescue is not often undertaken by a single individual but rather by a network of individuals engaging in a form of collective action with the shared goal to save others. In turn, viewing rescue as collective action rather than as a series of individualistic acts will surely result in important theoretical and practical insights, as a robust body of research has identified the factors associated with successful collective action in other contexts.

Many people rescued several times, and the majority of people with whom we spoke began their rescue efforts by saving someone they knew: a distant family member, someone from their religious network, a neighbor or employee. Indeed, it is difficult to dehumanize an individual someone knows personally, and identity-based ties (e.g., familial) often supersede conflict-based identities that may pit people against one another. As such, we find that social ties matter tremendously and that, for many, rescuing people they knew was a gateway for rescuing strangers. However, a third of the individuals in our sample only rescued people they did not know. In our future analyses, we will assess the factors associated with rescue of strangers, which will yield important implications for understanding rescue when social ties are not a prominent factor.

While the majority of people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda did not choose to rescue, those who did made a significant difference that cannot be overemphasized. Our sample of 160 people represented almost two thousand cases where individuals were saved from death. Those who were rescued grew up to be mothers, fathers, doctors, teachers, community organizers, soccer players, friends, and leaders in their community and abroad. The true impact of saving these lives will never be known and cannot be quantified.

We found that religious beliefs were often a precursor to individuals’ decisions to rescue when their lives were at risk. Specifically, the belief that they were doing right by God assured rescuers that if they died while saving others, they would be rewarded in the afterlife, thus lowering their death anxiety in a way that allowed them to take high risks to save others. This finding aligns with and extends previous research, and we similarly found that religious social networks shaped rescue efforts, including where these efforts took place (e.g., religious spaces or homes of religious individuals), how they unfolded, and who they impacted. However, it was rescuers’ religious practices—such as abstaining from drinking or refusing to lie—that served as social buffers from intense recruitment to genocidal violence and from being discovered once they were hiding people. The documentation of these religious buffers is new, and we look forward to further analyzing these buffers going forward.

Women’s role in rescue is often underemphasized. However, many women were involved in rescue efforts, and we seek to amplify their stories. We also find that women in our sample often used the constraints of their gender to save others, meaning that they were rescued in gendered ways. For example, mothers saved children, pretending they were their own, or breast-fed other babies who were not their own. They also found their role as mothers/daughters as motivating to save others. This sheds light on how women used their roles as caregivers, mothers, and daughters to rescue even when their choices were constrained by patriarchal societal norms and mass violence.