ABSTRACT
This chapter examines women’s perpetration in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda from a situated action perspective, emphasizing how societal inequality influenced women’s participation in the violence. Drawing on new data from Rwanda’s post-genocide, Gacaca trials and 25 in-depth interviews, we demonstrate that many women committed acts of perpetration during the genocide, though these acts often took the form of property crimes rather than the violent crimes more commonly committed by men. In this historically patriarchal society in which women were often confined to the home, fewer opportunities to perpetrate violence emerged for women than for men. Yet, despite structural constraints, women exercised varying degrees of agency in their decisions to participate in various forms of violence, and interview data sheds light on such decisions. The perspective put forth in the chapter hence highlights the importance of understanding the social context of a genocidal act to demonstrate that women’s participation in genocide cannot be theorized outside the constraints of structural inequality.
