Rwanda Primordialism Essay

Primordialism argues that there is a concept of kinship, where members of an ethnic group feel that they share characteristics, origins or blood. From what I have gathered, it assumes that ethnic identity is fixed and unchangeable. In this chapter, Donald Horowitz suggests that we tend to view primordialsim negatively, mainly because historically it has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Instead he suggests that we should see exclusive kinship bonds as an evolutionary survival tactic that gives people who share an ethnic group the ability to distinguish otherwise hostile strangers from people had share their ethnicity. I agree with his claim in relation to what we have learned about the Rwandan genocide because despite the criticism of this theory and the idea that the conflict was not based on ethnicity, I feel as though primordialism was

I think a lot of the time ethnicity is used as an automatic explanation of political events, but it does not reflect the truth. From the video we learned that the notion that the Rwandan genocide was an explosion of natural ancient hatreds between the Hutu and Tutsi are not true. Firstly, the ethnic differences between the two groups were not clear as they lived in the same places, spoke the same language, practiced the same religion and had many similar physical characteristics. I don’t think a primordialist view was feasible here, and I don’t think that it is in most cases. In the Rwandan case, before the colonial powers intervened, the boundaries of the Hutu and Tutsi were changeable in relation to class, and success but the elites turned this around and made it about ethnicity by changing employment opportunities etc. for certain groups. Fearon and Laitin would say that the colonialists created social and racial constructions that did not exist in the