Paper short abstract:

This paper endeavors to shade light on the current perceptions of Rwandans as regards the issue of obedience to authority and its space in the 1994 genocide.

Paper long abstract:

Obedience to authority is said to have been the cause and the means of massive human rights abuses in the world history. In this regard, Stanley Milgram writes: "… ordinary citizens are ordered to destroy other people, and they do so because they consider it their duty to obey orders".

When trying to account for mass participation in the 1994 genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda, various explanations have come out including among others, the issue of obedience to authority, which has been very controversial among researchers. In fact, while some of them contend that ordinary citizens have massively responded to the order of killing because they are used to obey to orders from authorities, others argue that the obedience thesis in explaining the massive participation in genocide hardly holds given that in their history, Rwandans in some occasions, have proved to be disobedient or resistant to orders from an authority in spite of the dangers they faced in doing so.

However, the conclusions that obedience is/not one of the major factors explaining mass participation in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have ostensibly left aside Rwandans own point of view as much as obedience to orders is concerned in their society.

Our belief is that the views of Rwandans and their own perceptions of obedience to authority shade more light on its real position in the Rwandan society, thus contributing to the 1994 genocide explanation.