The importance of hate radio pervades commentary on the Rwandan genocide, and Rwanda has become a paradigmatic case of media sparking extreme violence. However, there exists little social scientific analysis of radio's impact on the onset of genocide and the mobilization of genocide participants. Through an analysis of exposure, timing, and content as well as interviews with perpetrators, the article refutes the conventional wisdom that broadcasts from the notorious radio station RTLM were a primary determinant of genocide. Instead, the article finds evidence of conditional media e fects, which take on significance only when situated in a broader context of violence.

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Why do some multiparty elections lead to political violence while others do not? Despite extensive literatures on democratization, civil war, and violence against civilians in civil war, the topic of electoral violence has received less attention. We develop a set of theoretical propositions to explain this variation, testing them on an original dataset on African elections from 1990 to 2008. We find that elections in which an incumbent presidential candidate is running for re-election are significantly more likely to experience electoral violence, both prior to the election and after voting has taken place. We argue that clientelism is behind this pattern, and that clients often resort to electoral violence to protect a reliable incumbent patron. On the other hand, when an incumbent candidate is not running for office, we argue that clients are less willing to assume the risks of participating in electoral violence because candidates in the election have not established a record of delivering patronage at the executive level. We further find some evidence that pre-existing social conflicts increase the risk of pre-election violence. We suggest that this finding is due to the tendency of political elites to mobilize voters around pre-existing political and economic grievances to promote their candidacies, in turn heightening tensions and divisions. We also examine, but find little support for, a number of other possible determinants of electoral violence, such as regime type, income level, international observers, ongoing civil war, pathway to power, and first elections after civil war. The article contributes not only to a small but growing literature on electoral violence but also to a burgeoning literature on political behavior in African elections.

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The research problem driving this paper is the absence of a strong theory that accounts for variation among cases that have similar probabilities of escalating to genocide and similar forms of organized (usually state-led) mass violence against civilians. Much of the existing theory on genocide focuses on explaining under what conditions and by what processes regimes commit large-scale violence against civilians. I argue that a critical missing dimension to studies of genocide, but also more generally to the study of political violence, is a methodological recognition of negative cases and a theoretical recognition of the dynamics of restraint that helps to explain such negative cases. That is, in addition to asking what causes leaders to choose to escalate violence, I argue that scholars should emphasize conditions that prompt moderation, de-escalation, or non-escalation. I propose an alternative framework for how to conceptualize the process of political violence and review the literature to identify key restraint mechanisms at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. I further articulate a provisional theory of genocide using this new analytical framework. I illustrate my argument with an empirical analysis of mass violence cases in Sub-Saharan Africa since independence, and with a more in-depth analysis of comparable crises in Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire, where the trajectories of violence differed significantly. While this paper draws on extensive empirical research, my primary purpose is not to advance a developed new theory or to test particular hypotheses, but rather to outline a research agenda that promises to draw from and contribute to recent work on the comparative politics of violence.

Comparative research on the determinants of genocide has surged in recent years, as reflected in the six books under review. The new research makes genocide studies more systematic and theoretical; integrates the topic into mainstream social science disciplines; points to three emerging explanatory paradigms; and yields some surprising cumulative findings. However, the works also reveal significant conceptual, empirical, and methodological problems that limit the comparative enterprise and the search for a general theory. The article argues for an alternative, disaggregated approach that situates genocide within a spectrum of organized violence against civilians and links genocide studies to studies of violence in war.