ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses everyday forms of violence as a root cause of mass violence, such as genocide. It utilizes the idea of Tutsi as a monolithic class of foreigners to frame the 1994 genocide as an example of settler genocide. In pre-1994 Rwanda, the message of ethnic Hutu hardliners was that genocidal killing was normal insofar as it was an acceptable and legitimate course of action during Rwanda’s civil war and genocide. The chapter focuses on everyday forms of violence to understand how killing Tutsi became normalised in a context of fear, insecurity and confusion that made the call to genocide a legitimate social act. Everyday forms of violence operate on a continuum of normalised harms, rooted in a system of domination that links the rulers to the ruled through a sociality of intimacy that normalises class, gender and racial inequalities. In Rwanda, a genocidal message made the difference in prompting civilians to kill, often repeatedly.
