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Violence and the State: Evidence from Rwanda's 'Decade of Atrocities'

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Violence and the State: Evidence from Rwanda's 'Decade of Atrocities' Violence and the State: Evidence from Rwanda’s ‘Decade of Atrocities’∗ Leander Heldring December 2016 JOB MARKET PAPER For the latest version, click here Abstract This paper shows that contemporary patterns of violence can be traced back to the establishment of the precolonial state. Rwandan villages that were brought under centralized rule one century earlier experience a doubling of violence during the state-organized 1994 genocide. Instrumental variable esti- mates exploiting differences in proximity to Nyanza – an early capital – suggest these effects are causal. In other periods, when the state pursued peace and rebuilding, with longer state presence, violence is lower. Using data from several sources, including a lab-in-the-field experiment, I show that exposure to state institutions impacted civil society, and in particular culturally transmitted norms of obedience to political authority. In a lab setting today, individuals close to an abandoned border of the historical state are more likely to follow an unenforced rule than individuals just across the border. The state’s im- pact on rule following led to more violence when the Rwandan government mobilized for mass killing and to less violence when the government pursued peace and rebuilding. These results suggest that the interaction of government policy with deep-rooted aspects of civil society has the potential to reconcile long-run persistence with rapid economic change. Keywords: Violence, States, Rwanda. JEL classification: D73, D74, H70, N4. ∗Harvard University, Department of Economics, Littauer Center, 1805 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138, United States of America; e-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.leanderheldring.com. This paper was previously titled “State Capacity and Violence: Evidence from the Rwandan genocide”. I would like to thank Melissa Dell, James Fenske, Nathan Nunn and James A. Robinson for helpful suggestions and conversations throughout this project. I would like to thank Daron Acemoglu, Martin Abel, Faisal Ahmed, Robert Allen, Robert Bates, Paul Collier, Simon Franklin, Ed Glaeser, Maximilian Kasy, Akos Lada, Horacio Larreguy, Karlijn Morsink, Suresh Naidu, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Kirsten Pontalti, Simon Quinn, Gautam Rao, Dan Rogger, Valeria Rueda, Philip Verwimp, Jonathan Weigel and David Yanagizawa-Drott for helpful conversations as well as seminar participants at Harvard, Oxford, Utrecht, Groningen, the 2013 CSAE conference, the 2013, 2015 NEUDC conference and the 2013 HiCN Annual Workshop for helpful comments. I would like to thank Sophie Mukatizoni, Theogene Nkurunziza, Ömer Özak, Philip Verwimp and David Yanagizawa-Drott for kindly sharing their data. I would also like to thank Christian Iradukunda, Fidele Munezero, Christophe Ndahimana, Manasse Twagiramungu, Tim van der Maarel as well as several Rwandan enumerators for excellent research assistance. Funding is gratefully acknowledged from the International Growth Centre, the Economic History Society and the International Peace Research Association Foundation. Several recent studies examine the long-run impact of precolonial states in Africa (Gennaioli and Rainer, 2007; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013). The authors find that achieving greater bureau- cratic complexity before colonization has a significant positive effect on contemporary economic devel- opment. This effect has persisted to the present despite most precolonial states being absorbed into larger countries during the Scramble for Africa (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2016), despite Euro- pean colonial powers radically changing political institutions (Acemoglu et al., 2001) and despite post- independence governments frequently failing to represent the interests of inhabitants of these former states (Easterly and Levine, 1997). Although the effect of precolonial states on development is arguably causal, these studies do not focus on identifying exact causal mechanisms. In this paper, I study civil society as one of the channels through which precolonial states impact con- temporary economic development. Combining a village level data set and a lab-in-the-field experiment with local variation in the establishment of Rwanda’s precolonial state, I test the hypothesis that exposure to state institutions causes stronger norms of obedience to political authority to develop (Putnam et al., 1994; Guiso et al., 2014). As the Rwandan state developed, it initially enforced demands, such as taxation or conscription, by force. As the threat of violence became credible, individuals optimally responded by obeying political authorities (Vansina, 2004; Des Forges, 2011). If over time obedience to authorities be- comes a norm about the course of action which is most beneficial when faced with a demand from the government – in other words, obedience becomes internalized –, it may persist even when the state weak- ens or when governments change.1 Furthermore, historical differences in the strength of these norms may be measurable today. The setting of this paper is Rwanda, which is an attractive setting for two main reasons. First, I can exploit the fact that the precolonial Rwandan state, called the Nyiginya kingdom, expanded slowly be- tween its inception before 1700 and colonization in 1897, introducing local variation in exposure to state institutions across precolonial districts.2 Second, Rwanda’s recent history of violence provides an attrac- 1I understand a ‘norm’ in this paper as a belief about the ‘right’ course of action. Norms may optimally arise as a heuristic for decision making when information processing is costly (see the evidence summarized in Nunn (2012)). 2The focus in this paper is therefore on the intensive margin of the presence of the state, comparing villages in districts that were incorporated earlier to those incorporated later. Because initial state formation was often resisted and bureaucratic hierarchies took to time to form, I expect the effect of state on rule following behavior to be stronger with longer exposure to state institutions. This idea is consistent with notions of the accumulation of social, civic, and democratic capital discussed in Putnam et al. (1994); Guiso et al. (2014); Persson and Tabellini (2009) and Guiso et al. (2010). In a recent model of the incentives to cooperate by Tabellini (2008) the establishment of a government has a slowly diffusing effect on civil society due to parent-child transmission of cooperative values. Because the incentives for parents to inculcate cooperative values depend on the number of cooperators in society, it may take several generations for stronger norms of cooperation to develop (Tabellini, 2008). Similar mechanisms predict that when obedience is enforced by a community, enforcement norms are built up slowly (Acemoglu and Jackson, 2016). One reason for community enforcement of obedience is the possibility of collective punishment for disobedience. Consistent with this logic, initial establishment of the Rwandan state often involved the ransom of a chief (Des Forges, 2011). 1 tive, albeit tragic, setting to study the hypothesis of this paper because the motives of the government changed dramatically within a short period of time. Specifically, between 1990 and 1993, the Rwandan Hutu government pursued territorial control in the face of a rebellion. In 1994, it instead organized the Rwandan genocide, in which it pursued mass mobilization of the Hutu majority population to extermi- nate the Tutsi minority. After the genocide, a new – Tutsi – government sought to re-establish territorial control while fighting former genocide perpetrators.3 In each of these episodes, observers have noted the impact of Rwanda’s long tradition of centralized government. Studying the genocide, Gérard Prunier writes: “Rwandese political tradition, going back to the Banyiginya Kingdom ... is one of systematic, centralised and unconditional obedience to authority” (Prunier, 1995, p. 141). Studying post-genocide rebuilding, Philip Reyntjens writes: “An ancient state tradition played an undeniable role here: a mere two years after the extreme human and material destruction of 1994, the state was rebuilt. Rwanda was again administered from top to bottom” (Reyntjens, 2013, p. 25). Combining village level data on violence with my reconstruction of the expansion of the state, I find that villages where the state was established earlier experience more violence during the genocide.4 This result is consistent with individuals being more likely to comply with the state’s call to mobilize for vio- lence in areas with longer state presence.5 In contrast, in the years just prior to and just after the genocide, and again consistent with the hypothesis of this paper, I find that violence is lower.6 Figure 1 provides a timeline of the main events studied in this paper and a summary of these results. An alternative explanation for these results may be that ethnic polarization was stronger in places where the state formed earlier, resulting in more violence against the minority Tutsi. I address this possi- bility by controlling for the fraction of Tutsi in several regressions. I also control for differences in house- hold income in 1990, as a summary measure of differences in development before the genocide.7 I then 3The Hutu and Tutsi are the main social groups in Rwanda, with the Hutu being the large majority. Although Nyiginya kings were exclusively Tutsi, following a 1959 coup Rwanda had a Hutu-led government until the end of the genocide (Verwimp, 2013). 4I proxy for violence during
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