Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction Book

In her book "Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda," Lee Ann Fujii gives readers a historical background leading up to the genocide in Rwanda and attempts to explain how ordinary human beings can turn on their neighbors and become genocidaires. While many scholars have explained that the actions of these genocidaires stem from ethnic hatred and ethnic fear, Fujii argues that social interaction played a much larger role in explaining their participation in genocidal actions. I found Fujii's book very interesting and find her arguments compelling. Fujii believes that the local ties and the dynamics of the group bound the perpetrators together and served as a way to recruit others and initiate others into killing those they considered their enemies. Once initiated, they continued to kill because their participation conferred on them a powerful identity as a member of the group. Fujii also believes that situation factors and personal motives (greed and jealousy) played a key role in explaining their participation in mass murder. This was a very interesting read. I recommend her book.