Rwanda, Remembrance and Research: Or, How Rwandan Violence Taught Me to Embrace Subnational/Disaggregated Conflict Studies and Integral Conflict Research

Fourteen years ago I began a journey to understand the political violence that took place in Rwanda during the year of 1994. Toward this end, I brought with me the skills that I had at that time: 1) an interest in media as well as government-generated data and content analysis, 2) an approach that was pooled at the nation-year, cross-sectional and time series in nature, and 3) an interest in state repression/human rights violation. All of this would change when confronted with Rwanda. Indeed, after full immersion into the case (from about 2000-2004, as well as reflection over the next ten years), I moved from being mostly interested in media and government sources to being mostly interested in human rights NGOs; I became more interested in the variation within countries than between them; and,I was no longer just interested in state repression/human rights violation but essentially every form of political violence.

Rwanda has this type of effect on you.

Read more in the blog post published at Political Violence @ a Glance on April 10, 2014