Identity Alone
From a Primordialist perspective, differences in identities can be enough to cause violent conflict (Hammond & Axelrod, 2006), but if this was true then we would expect that most, if not all, multi-ethnic/cultural/identity societies will experience high levels of violent identity-based conflicts – which is not the case. Indeed, there are many examples of highly diverse societies with many ethnicities, religions, cultures and identities that are relatively stable and are not experiencing the high levels of identity-based conflicts that we would expect to see. For example, developed countries such as Belgium and the UK and developing countries such as Malaysia and Botswana are ethnically diverse countries that are relatively peaceful …show more content…
According to Social Identity Theory, individuals place themselves in groups, based on markets such as an ethnicity, religion, political party, football club, class, or education levels etc, and this ‘in-group’ will try to enhance its own image and interests by discriminating against the ‘out-group’, or those that are not part of the ‘in-group’ (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). This categorisation of “us” versus “them” also generally results in the in-group exaggerating the differences between their group and the out-group and exaggerating the similarities between the members within the in-group (Abrams & Hogg, 1990). From this perspective, the Rwandan Genocide was not caused because of ancient ethnic animosities, as Primordialists claim, or merely because the Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities were socially constructed, but it was caused by the fact that an in-group was created that 200,000 Hutus considered themselves a member of and which allowed them to coordinate and mobilise, by exaggerating and stereotyping differences with the Tutsi out-group and justifying violence against them. The vast majority of Hutus did not place themselves in the ‘in-group’ that justified killing Tutsis, which is why the majority of Hutus were not committing violence against the Tutsi