The Psychology of Threat in Intergroup Conflict: Emotions, Rationality, and Opportunity in the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

What explains the well-known ability of security threats to mobilize social groups against each other? This article argues that the power of such threats lies in the power of group emotions, notably the primary emotion of fear. Fear works by activating psychological processes at the group level that leads to the polarization of attitudes between groups. To illustrate the effect of fear on intergroup relations, the article analyzes survey data, radio broadcasts, and interviews from Rwanda's civil war and genocide of 1990-94 to provide evidence of four psychosocial mechanisms at work in group polarization: boundary activation, outgroup derogation, outgroup homogenization, and ingroup cohesion. The article further argues that the debates between emotions and material opportunities, and emotions and rationality in explanations of ethnic conflicts represent false theoretical choices. Emotions and material opportunities both matter, and rationality and emotion are not incompatible. It proposes two simple refinements to extant theoretical and empirical approaches. First, it calls for a distinction between attitudes and violence in ethnic conflicts and argues that emotions matter for the polarization of attitudes, but it is material and structural opportunities that mediate their expression as violence. Second, it asks that scholars recognize extensive research in social psychology that shows that both emotion and reason interact in individual judgment and decisionmaking. † Lecturer in Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science. He may be contacted at o.s.mcdoom@lse.ac.uk. 2The power of security threats to mobilize social groups against each other is well-known. †. Distrust and fear characterize relations between large segments of identity groups that have engaged in ethnic conflicts in diverse regions of the world: Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka; Serbs and Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia; Arabs and Jews in Palestine; Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda. But why are security threats so powerful? How exactly do they work to polarize societies? And when do they lead to intergroup violence? This article argues that the power of security threats lies in the power of group emotions, notably the core emotion of fear. Emotions work by activating psychological processes at the group level that lead to the polarization of intergroup attitudes. They produce violence when presented with material or structural opportunities within societies that enable or constrain their expression. To illustrate how group emotions work, the article draws on the case of Rwanda's civil war of 1990-94, culminating in a genocide that represented one of the deadliest cases of ethnic violence in world history. In little over one hundred days between 507,000 and 850,0000 Rwandans lost their lives. 1The perpetrators were drawn overwhelmingly from Rwanda's ethnic Hutu majority, and the victims primarily from its ethnic Tutsi minority. The case identifies and illustrates the operation of four psychosocial mechanisms that mea...

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