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Huxley (1932), Orwell (1949), Wallace (1996) and others have all sculpted dystopic worlds for us – worlds where the modus operandi of the ‘Government’ is the operationalization of social cohesion/coercion. Through acts of (both abject and soft) coercion, the dystopic governing apparatuses in these works of art, (re)create realities within which the norms of the everyday are twisted to normalize what would otherwise be considered violent behaviour. This dystopic principle of reality (re)creation/alteration that renders violence the norm through state- supported (and/or sanctioned) practices, performances and policies is not limited to the realm of fiction. In this article, I am hoping to see how this translates in relation to the Rwandan Genocide (April 7, 1994 – July 1994) by focusing on the following question: How did (certain) mechanisms of social-engineering contribute towards the specific form and extent of violence observed during the Rwandan genocide – the kind of political violence where neighbours were killing neighbours (Fujii, 2011)?

By tracing mechanics of social-engineering like the use of Radio Rwanda (through a practice theoretical approach to understand permissibility of practicing violence) and the form in which the Interahamwe organized the killings (or rather “hunts”- through an organizational ergonomics approach to understand the possibility of performing violence) I am hoping to show that a ‘surreal’  reality was (re)created by the ‘Government’ where violence became the norm, reducing the physical and psychological costs (Randall, 2008) of performing violence, contributing to the conditions of possibility for the form and extent of violence seen in Rwanda during that period.

First, let’s return to Orwell. A lot has been written about how Orwell’s 1984 (Gleason 1984, Giroux 2014) or Huxley’s Brave New World (Hale 2006, Diken 2011) act (almost) as fables cautioning us about the horrors of totalitarian realities. In fact, we have glimpsed shadows of these realities so many times in our own – we have traced instances of draconian control by propaganda and/or surveillance and/or misinformation so many times – that we even crafted a word for it: Orwellian. But Orwellian is typically an adjective (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2020)- it describes a noun: a ‘state’ (Barnett 2006), a state of being (Botting & Botting 1984), a system (Cohen 2006), an order (Fowler, Hodge, Kress & Trew 2018) and/or so on that exists in/through the intersection of absolute control, coercion, cohesion and compliance. I, on the other hand, am more interested in the adverbial connotations of the word- in tracing Orwellian processes of reality- (re)creation that participate in forming the conditions of possibility for the noun itself, especially in the case of the Rwandan Genocide (April 7, 1994 – July 1994) or rather, the Genocide against the Tutsis (Kagire 2014, suggesting a strong politics of naming here. Think of the work of Richer & Hopkins 2001 where they suggest that social categorization is intimately related to political activity.)

Those four months of the summer of 1994 are seared into global public memory as one of the most gruesome injustices (Olesen, 2012) the world has witnessed. Countless lives were lost at the altar of colonial baggage – ethnic tensions (the Siamese twins spoken of in the works of Prunier 1999) and social cohesions/ networks (Fujii, 2011/ building on Staniland 2014), and the horror of it all was perhaps only marginally surpassed by the shock of how this all occurred. Most people were killed in their own villages or towns, by their neighbours – quite literally – in rather physically intimate ways: through machetes (Verwimp 2006). The idea of intimacy echoes literature in Criminology that focuses on the concept of “weapon choice” (for a robust review the work of Dawson & Goodwill 2012 is highly recommended.) While there are many different theories about what the choice of weapon reveals ranging from demographic and lifestyle characteristics of both victims and offenders (Pelletier & Pizarro 2018) to psychopathologies of/in perpetrators (Catanesi et al. 2011), the primary impetus behind all these studies remains the same: the manner in which the killings occur, the weapons that are used tell the story of increasing/decreasing levels of intimacy between the perpetrator and the victim, and this distance is a useful unit of analysis. Here, when I speak of intimate violence, I speak of a violence that is relatively more intimate than gunfire where the physical distance between the victim and the perpetrator is larger and the killings are more ‘clean’ as compared to killing with machetes which requires greater physical interaction and strength on the part of the perpetrator and connotes a very strong affective element.

This affective element is also displayed through other actions- spaces typically considered sacred/safe like churches and schools (think here of the Gikondo massacre) were violated. Radio stations were mediums of instruction from those in uniforms (of many different kinds) to those without (to ‘ordinary people’ like you or me) that the latter were equally/primarily responsible for the performance of this violence.

"Either you took part in the massacres or you were massacred yourself" (Prunier 1995, 247). How was this made feasible? What processes led to the (re)creation of a reality where such a form of violence was even possible, especially to the extent that it was? Which mechanisms of social-engineering participated in the (re)creation of this ‘surreal’ reality where violence became the norm? These are the questions I am hoping to address within the scope of this article.

There are at least two ways in which these questions can be interpreted based on how we choose to understand ‘mechanisms.’ Here, mechanisms could be socio-political dynamics like the legacy of Belgian coloniality, the ethnic tensions that were birthed in the wake of that and then perpetuated, the institutional mechanics of governance that facilitated this perpetuation, the disparities of class and urban-rural divides and so on. But they could also refer to practices of violence performance, rituals through which the killings were carried out in the most corporeal sense, the way in which groups were organized and/or the radio was operationalized. The former understandings of mechanisms, I think, are best suited to answer why questions: why did the genocide happen? Why was there so much violence involved? On the other hand, the latter understanding of mechanisms lends itself to more easily to the answering of ‘how’ questions.

Tracing Onto-Methodological Assumptions

Let’s begin by addressing some of the onto-methodological assumptions that shape the manner in which I will be approaching these questions. The first assumption is that genocide is not an event, rather it is a culmination of a number of historical socio-political trends, and therefore processual in nature. This conceptualization of the genocide, also seen in Prunier’s “The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide” (Prunier 1997), explores the complexity of the genocide temporally (by tracing the “cause/s” of the genocide to be grounded in the........

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