VoE - Hollie Nzitatira
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[00:00:00] 

Hollie Nzitatira: We can look at these different cases and try to identify what were the major causes of violence, what are the risk factors present in countries that experienced genocide?

And then use that to try to use statistics to forecast into the future. What countries have those risk factors? Where should we be worried about? 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: Joining me this afternoon is Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at the Ohio State University [00:01:00] College of the Arts and Sciences. She teaches classes on genocide, global crime, violence, qualitative methods. She also leads Ohio State's education abroad course in Rwanda every summer.

Dr. Nyseth Nzitatira, welcome to Voices. 

Hollie Nzitatira: Thank you so much for having me. 

David Staley: Well, and I say you study genocide and I think it would be useful to start with a, a definition of genocide, especially on this day, which I think is, I think this is Genocide Day. Am I remembering this correctly? 

Hollie Nzitatira: It absolutely is.

There is a very formal name. It is officially the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide, and of the prevention of this crime. So absolutely Genocide Day and this day itself was at a really important day in history.

So on December 9th, 1948, the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention, and this was one of their very first pieces of international law. And what they set out to do was actually define the crime of genocide. And make it an international crime. In this piece of law, they define [00:02:00] genocide as the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

And then they list different types of crimes that can be considered genocide. So you could think, for instance, what most people would think of as killing. It can also involve gender-based violence, forced displacement, preventing births, other forms of violence. Broadly tied together by the notion of targeting a group of people simply because they're members of group and trying to eradicate them.

David Staley: Mm-hmm. This was in response to the Holocaust, I'm imagining? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yes, absolutely. So the term itself was coined by a Polish Jewish lawyer named Rafael Lemkin. And he had studied the Armenian genocide and then had actually witnessed what was taking place as the Holocaust was starting and thought that it was different from war.

Not necessarily worse than war, but different because Jews were being targeted simply because they were Jews for no other reason. So he actually fled Poland and was able to make his way to the US and to lobby the United Nations, which was forming [00:03:00] at this point in time, and to essentially lobby them to take up this crime and to say, this is what this is, and this should be illegal internationally.

David Staley: Hmm. So you study genocide actually from a variety of perspectives, and I wanna start first with the notion of upstream, prevention. You actually do work forecasting future genocides. Do I have that right? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Absolutely. I try to at least. So what we do as social scientists who study genocide is we try to look at history and learn from history to try to better predict the future.

And there are a number of different things. If you look across all of the different cases of genocide since the Holocaust. There have been more than 40, and we can look at these different cases and try to identify what were the major causes of violence, what are the risk factors present in countries that experienced genocide?

And then use that to try to use statistics to forecast into the future. What countries have those risk factors? Where should [00:04:00] we be worried about? 

David Staley: And you've done you've done this work both for the US government and the, the UK government I believe.

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah, absolutely. So when I finished my PhD in 2014, the US government contacted me and asked me to be part of a task force called the Political Instability Task Force.

And this task force actually was created way back in 1994, after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda with the idea that the US government and other governments should have seen this genocide coming. There were many risk factors present. Anyone who understood the causes of genocide would have. Been forecasting what happened in Rwanda.

So our government created a task force to try to predict instability globally, and it predicted genocide as well as other forms of violence. Much more recently, this task force no longer exists, and now I work with other governments, including the government of the United Kingdom on some of their genocide forecasting efforts.

David Staley: Do you see any sort of risky areas in the world [00:05:00] right now? 

Hollie Nzitatira: So one of the things we start with as forecasters is every place has risk. So we don't ever consider no place having zero risk. Every place has risk of genocide. And then what we do is we look at the various factors we know, elevate the risk to try to consider which places have the highest degree of.

Just to give you a couple of examples, we know that prior genocide is actually one of the strongest risk factors of future genocide, and this means that places that had genocide in the past that maybe didn't come to terms with their violent past are gonna have elevated risk. We also know that anywhere with ongoing conflict, so civil war, you could think of if there's a government and a rebel group fighting that government, this is going to increase.

The risk of genocide quite substantially. So we pay attention to things like that. We pay attention as well to the type of government we know. For instance, if the leader's very authoritarian and has been in power for a long time, this increases the risk. And of course, we pay attention to things [00:06:00] people might expect us to pay attention to.

So we look, for instance, are certain groups being dehumanized? Are they being excluded in certain ways? So based on all of that, there's often, you know, 20 or 30 countries that fit a pretty high risk profile based on that. And then we'll tear down from that and look at other countries that have some of the risk factors but don't have others.

David Staley: What do governments do with this information? Do they, do they intervene before a genocide occurs? 

Hollie Nzitatira: So my. Security clearance wouldn't be high enough to know all of that. To be honest. I wish I knew, but I've been told that oftentimes the best strategy is to try to reduce risk well before violence breaks out.

So absolutely. You're surmising correctly that the ideal situation would be some type of diplomatic intervention that never reach even reaches the newspapers. And, and I know very little about that because I'm not in those spaces. From a more public facing standpoint, though, many things could be done to reduce risk.

So a [00:07:00] lot of community organizations can reduce risk, and when we make these forecasts, they're given to governments, but they're also provided publicly such that advocacy organizations can identify countries at risk and also work with local partners on the ground. How do we reduce risk locally, because that's just as important as governments responding as well.

David Staley: Hmm. I don't know if you can answer this or not. How reliable or how how effective have your forecast been? 

Hollie Nzitatira: I can answer it, but it's a bit of a depressing answer, in the sense that we actually can forecast genocide really well. So you can do something called out of sample tests and you basically use your statistics and kind of trade it on a base data set and then forecast forward within your data set.

And based on this, oftentimes we're between 90 to 95% accurate, and that's considering both. The forecasted genocides, but also forecasting non genocides. Right? You also have to identify those correctly because if you said 95 countries are at risk, you'd likely get a lot of them [00:08:00] right. So we're quite accurate in terms of our forecasts.

What we know a lot less about is what those next steps should be. So once we have identified countries at risk, what does actually decrease risk? There's very little research on this and it's very difficult to study. 

David Staley: Hmm. You also examine what you call midstream engagement. In other words, interventions.

Once violence is underway, what? What does this research look like? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Absolutely. And sort of on the heels of what we were just discussing, I started examining that in part because there is such little research on that midstream would essentially involve intervening as violence has started in a way to curb violence or ultimately.

And violence and there are a whole host of strategies that individuals and governments can take to intervene. Some of them are, are relatively low cost and easy, like naming and shaming. So actually pointing out this government is perpetrating genocide and calling it genocide. There's really reliable research.

Some [00:09:00] I'm doing with one of my grad. Students, Jack Whipple, others that others have done that shows that naming and shaming actually works and that leaders care about their reputation. So this would be a low cost intervention. We also have studied economic sanctions, so you could think sort of, of a mid cost intervention, economic sanctions trade embargoes, things of this nature.

We find they don't. Often work, but perhaps very targeted ones work. You could think of an arms embargo, for instance. And then you can also think of high cost interventions, and these would be things along the lines of humanitarian intervention, boots on the ground. We do know in the short term that armed intervention's going to work to stop violence.

In many instances. There is a. Broader question, however, of if it works long term. And what I mean by that is oftentimes if an armed group is coming in, stopping the violence while they're there, the violence is going to stop. But once they leave, there's often a power vacuum. And these are the power vacuums where terror organizations and [00:10:00] other types of groups pop up.

So the long-term implications of that are a little bit unknown, which is why it's a strategy that some are a little bit hesitant to pursue. 

David Staley: So all these interventions are at the level of states and governments? Absolutely. Does that mean you're advising states and governments in your research? 

Hollie Nzitatira: We try to, so a lot of what researchers like me who study genocide do is try to use really good empirical evidence to advise those who have the position to actually make these decisions.

So absolutely we do it as a consultant. So of course they never have to take our advice, but we certainly try. And then I'd also say, while we're talking about states and governments, it's equally important to be thinking about. Local individuals in these settings, they also have the capacity and in fact, likely a better capacity to respond to increasing risk.

So I think one of the frontiers of genocide prevention is thinking about how international actors or even researchers who care about genocide can work with. Individuals and groups on the ground in these countries to [00:11:00] think about programs that could reduce risk because of course we have states that can intervene.

We also know this is very political and sometimes governments don't want to intervene, and there's many different factors that shape whether they decide to call another country's actions, genocide, for instance, which is why we also need to be thinking about local communities and how we can collaborate with them.

David Staley: This is why the definition of genocide is so important, I'm guessing.

Hollie Nzitatira: So important, and frankly, it's really criticized as well. So you'll recall that I mentioned there are four groups that can be victims of genocide. There are others that likely can as well. So definitions are created through political processes.

For instance, political groups are not part of the definition. They were in the original one, and then a very political process ended up getting them removed from the final law. And we have many instances of genocides against political groups. So the definition is important, but it also is, frankly, a little bit flawed because it's a piece of law and all laws are also flawed.

David Staley: Hmm. Does [00:12:00] genocide also include violence against a culture? You can't speak your language, for instance. Is that, is that genocide or is that something else? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Such a great question. It depends. So if that violence is tied to an intent to destroy in whole or in part, absolutely. If it's not, it would be something else.

And that's a good question as well, because Raphael Lemkin, this Polish Jewish lawyer who created the term genocide. He actually thought that cultural destruction was critical for this definition of genocide. In practice, it's really hard to measure. Cultural destruction. Sure. So as we think about forecasting genocide, we're often measuring deaths because this is the most reliable thing to measure.

If you think, how do you measure the destruction of a culture? In some genocides there's forced assimilation boarding schools for children. Sometimes it's changing a street name to a different street name, and that is actually impacting culture. But measuring that in a way for. Say instance, A forecasting model can be a little bit [00:13:00] tricky, but absolutely.

Destruction of culture is often a broader part of, of the goal of genocide. It's eliminating a group of people, including their culture. 

David Staley: Hmm. So a third research track, I suppose we might call it, is downstream recovery. And you've got a, a. Book that you're about to publish? Yes. Reintegrating after genocide when formerly incarcerated Rwandans, return Home.

Tell us about, well, tell us about this book and tell us about this research project. 

Hollie Nzitatira: Absolutely. So as I mentioned, one of the strongest risk factors of genocide is. Prior genocide. So as I started my career studying genocide forecasting and trying to understand why genocides happen, I became equally interested in understanding how countries recover in the aftermath.

And I've been fortunate to do a lot of research in Rwanda. Rwanda had a devastating genocide in 1994 that took the lives of up to 1 million people in the country. And this genocide was largely committed by civilians. Ordinary individuals, most [00:14:00] of whom, who had no criminal background, who were convinced by local leaders, by propaganda by years of unrest within their country to join killing groups and to target their neighbors.

And this was a country of seven and a half million and roughly 240. Thousand people, mostly men, but some women joined these killing groups and for about three months targeted their neighbors, specifically Tootsie in Rwanda. And as I already mentioned, about 1 million people were killed. As this violence came to a close, the Rwandan government had to decide, what do you do with a situation like that?

Mm-hmm. So anytime there's a genocide, there's the large question of how do you come to terms with this? Some countries choose to do very little. You could think, for instance, of the genocide in Guatemala, a lot of people don't even realize genocide was there, and it's not taught there even as genocide in the schools There.

But by most definitions, it was a genocide. Rwanda decided to do something about the genocide, and one of the things that they did was they [00:15:00] created a local court system called the Gachacha Courts, and these were state led, but community centered courts that had trials every week and every community, and they had.

Lay judges, they elected judges from their communities and had trials every week for all of these hundreds of thousands of people who were suspected of perpetrating genocide. Okay. These courts had the ability to put people in prison for up to 30 years, or life for a small percentage. And then many of these people have been coming back to their communities often to live side by side with the people that they harmed back in 1994, and I was in Rwanda studying the courts and started to see this process unfold, and I started asking.

Is anyone studying this? This seems like it could be a situation where conflict could pop up again, if you have people who killed their neighbor's, kids went to prison for 20 years, and then are coming back to live in that community. So for that project, my research team in [00:16:00] Rwanda and I interviewed about 190 people.

Who had committed genocide before they left prison and then found them four months and one year after to see what was happening as they were coming back and to see what aided a more positive experience for them, but also for the people in their community broadly thinking about what does peace many years after genocide, when a community is still grappling with its impacts really look like.

David Staley: What does that look like? 

Hollie Nzitatira: It's complicated, as you can probably imagine. 

David Staley: Yeah. I'm struggling to, to picture this. 

Hollie Nzitatira: So one of the most interesting findings for me at least, and I think for, for folks in Rwanda, was that there wasn't nearly as much animosity and violence as you might expect, so when we... 

David Staley: 'Cause 30 years had passed or...? 

Hollie Nzitatira: A a bit more complicated than that,

but I do think that's part of it. So basically when we interviewed folks who were incarcerated for genocide and we asked them, when you go back to your community, what do you think is gonna happen? And a lot of people said, I think kids are gonna see me and they're gonna run because they know that I committed genocide.[00:17:00] 

And then when they actually got home, a lot of them were pleasantly surprised that they were actually sort of tentatively welcomed by their neighbors and neighbors came over, checked on them, brought them money, brought them soda. And my research team and I really focused on this one because it was unexpected, but two, because it was a really pivotal moment and it was one that's.

Symbolized to a lot of the people who were coming back, that their community members were at least open to them being in the community. And I wanna be very clear that it doesn't mean everything is okay. A lot of the survivors, survivors of the genocide are still dealing with immense trauma. And this is something that even though it's been 30 years, it's also only.

Been 30 years and for someone who lost their spouse and their kids, you know, 30 years is in some ways the blink of an eye. So it doesn't mean that everything is fine, but it does mean that a lot of folks are at least open to, to having these folks back in their communities. And we [00:18:00] also started to then think, you know, why might this be the case?

Why would someone be at least open to having them back? Why would someone actually go to their house? And, and welcome them. And one of the things I think is happening is tied to how people understand the genocide. So I also study narratives of violence. How do we actually talk about it? How do you teach about it in schools?

How do you explain this? And when you ask a randan, why did someone commit genocide? They're not often gonna tell you, oh, they were evil, or, oh, they were. Horrible. They're often gonna tell you the history of Rwanda, and they'll say, well, to understand why this individual John committed genocide, you actually have to understand colonialism.

You have to understand the government that sowed the seeds of discrimination, and they'll give you this very structural narrative. That explains the genocide and that helps contextualize someone's actions. 

David Staley: And these are ordinary people, not intellectuals? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Ordinary people. Yeah. And it's tied, the government has done a lot of work to teach the story of the genocide.

And I don't [00:19:00] necessarily think they were doing it to aid the reentry and reintegration of people who were convicted of genocide, but I think an interesting byproduct of that is that there are memorials all across the country that teach the story. There's a big commemoration event every year because of this.

A lot of folks who have no education can tell you a really sophisticated story of why the violence happened, and this in turn, I think helps them at least understand it doesn't excuse why someone would would commit genocide. This is, I think, one of the worst crimes in the world. So of course it doesn't excuse it, but at least helps contextualize it and it helps separate the individual who did an evil thing from.

An individual who is evil and who's always going to be evil. Mm-hmm. Because if you see them that way, having them come back and be your neighbor is pretty difficult. But if you can see them as someone who might be redeemable, who did something completely evil and awful, but at least can understand why they did it.

That can at least shape your interactions with them in a different way. 

David Staley: You said in Rwanda the reaction was trials , [00:20:00] of punishment courts, punishments like that, s o not like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Are there instances of that with genocides? Obviously I'm talking about South Africa and that was not a genocide,

but it was a different type of justice, I suppose. 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah, absolutely. So it's a broader field. What we're talking about is called transitional justice, and it's broadly efforts to come to terms with a violent past. So one of the most prominent types is trials, and these, as you're mentioning are, are punitive.

They're really focused on, on the individuals who committed the violence and they're not as focused on the victims or the survivors. Truth Commissions came about really in the sixties and the seventies as an alternative to that. And they have their own issues, but the idea was that rather than focus on the individuals who perpetrated violence, let's think about what the survivors might want tied to this idea that they might want the truth about what happened.

They might wanna know what happened to their loved ones, and there might be a better way to do this than than a trial. So. [00:21:00] I believe there have been over 70 truth commissions and for some work that I've done with the Auschwitz Institute in New York, we actually looked at whether truth commissions help prevent future violence.

And we found that they do. So I think they are an effective tool. You're absolutely right. It's not what Rwanda chose. But there are other instances where truth commissions have been chosen. I will say for the Rwandan model, for the trials, they did make them. Community trials and there had to be 100 community members present.

And they did that in part, kind of nodding to what was happening in South Africa because this truth commission you mentioned was happening in South Africa around the same time. Mm-hmm. So this was one of the models they considered and they thought, do we want a A truth commission like this? And ultimately went toward trials.

But thought if they were public trials and community members had to be present, you would still have some of that truth telling. Aspect tied into the trials, and people would still be hearing the narratives of what happened, learning what happened to their loved ones in a, in a modified setting. 

David Staley: Hmm. [00:22:00] So you're studying downstream recovery about how you reintegrate you're observing, you're not advising.

In this situation, or maybe you do in other situations, do you provide guidance or advice for how to recover from genocide? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah. I definitely, as a researcher, we observe and do in-depth studies, and I believe research has a duty to also. So provide this type of advice. To be very clear, I am a white Western woman, so I never want to presume that I could advise an entire country that went through something so horrible on, you know, how they could fully come to terms with it.

But I do think that if I spend extended time, it. In a country working and doing this as a researcher, I also have a duty to provide advice. So with that, absolutely. So one of the things that I did for this study was type up recommendations for Rwanda Correctional Services on how people could be better prepared to come back to their communities again.

We followed people who were leaving [00:23:00] prison and coming back and spoke with them three times. A sense of what were they struggling with? What could their reentry preparation have looked like, how different it could have been to make it even better. And at the same time, I went back to Rwanda to share the, the results of this study with some nonprofits that I worked with so that they could then use it kind of however they see fit.

I think one of the most actionable items that we found was that this story I told you about. Men, you know about people being welcomed was broadly tied to men, and that women who committed genocide had a much worse experience. So the men that we spoke with were the ones that largely said, I came back and my neighbor brought me a soda, and I felt like I was kind of integrated into this community again.

And at least in a small, meaningful way. The women were largely ostracized. Broadly because of this idea that, that women couldn't commit genocide and kind of gendered norms about women as the hearts of home in Rwanda and what it means to be a woman, it was a lot more [00:24:00] jarring for people to think about women committing genocide than men.

And this is shaping their reintegration differently. So there's a, a nonprofit that I've gotten to do a little bit of work with there and was able to share with them that, and they're doing some programming tied to women's reentry, given that they're struggling more than men. 

David Staley: Since we're talking about Rwanda, I introduced you as leading a study abroad program in Rwanda.

Tell us, tell us about what students experience on this study abroad. 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah, so this was a program I was fortunate to start back in 2017, and it is a three week program, so I take. Roughly 15 to 17 Ohio State students there every summer, and we go and stay in Kigali, which is the capital city for three weeks.

And the program is structured around understanding the genocide, but also understanding Rwandan culture more broadly. It's three weeks, as I mentioned. The first week is about Rwandan history. The second week is really about the genocide, and then the third week is really about how the country recovered and the students get a chance.

[00:25:00] To learn with me, of course, but also much more importantly to talk with Rwandans. And I, I love teaching this program because we can talk, for instance, about theories for why people commit genocide, and then they can talk with three people who committed genocide, who come in and share their testimony with the students.

Or we can talk about. Why people rescue others during genocide and then they can actually hear from people who rescued. We stay largely in the capital city, but we also travel around the country and they get to see the beauty of Rwanda as well. And they learn, of course, about the genocide, but also about randan culture and about the landscapes of Rwanda.

It's a stunningly gorgeous country, so I get to take them to the rainforest, take them on a safari, so they get to also understand that. We're there to study the genocide, but the country is so much more than the genocide as well. 

David Staley: You and two co-authors have written teaching the human story of genocide, which is aimed at middle and high school students.

First of all, what do you mean by the human story of genocide? [00:26:00] 

Hollie Nzitatira: When we talk about genocide, oftentimes we're talking about these numbers that are really hard to wrap your head around. We were just speaking about Rwanda, up to 1 million people killed. You think of other genocides. It's hard to even conceive of the millions of people and lives that have been lost and the many others who have been harmed by genocide over these last few decades, and really these these last few centuries.

As we think about teaching students about genocide. They can sort of wrap their head around these numbers, but what they really need are stories. Mm-hmm. And to be reminded that if you think of a million people, each one is a person and a person who had people who loved them, a person who maybe had kids, a person who had an identity and a job and a whole life.

And I think as. Students think about it that way. It helps them to comprehend the magnitude in a very different way, and it makes it more personalized. Often when we think about genocide, at least right now we're talking [00:27:00] about things that happened far away from the students, things that happen in the past, even though there are genocides happening now as well.

And they can also struggle to understand why that's relevant. And as you start to underscore that these are humans who are targeted simply because of who they were. Having stories and being able to base it in an understanding of people helps students start to understand it in a different way. 

David Staley: How do you how do you present the harsh truth of genocide to school children? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah. So the youngest age that I've ever worked with or consulted for is middle school. I was on the advisory committee Chicago has a great holocaust museum, and a number of years ago they decided to add a wing on modern genocides, and it was going to be for a sort of upper middle school as well as high school.

And then as you mentioned, I also work with, stu or students, but also with teachers and trained high school teachers. So one of the things I'm very careful with is, you know, we never take shock and awe [00:28:00] tactics, and it's really important that we are balanced in our approach and we do present things as they were, but we still keep in mind what people have capacity for, if that makes sense.

Mm-hmm. You can't tell a seventh grader. All of these details about what happened, but they still have the capacity to understand the basics. They still have the capacity to understand that a government actor, for instance, who wanted power, decided to discriminate against a group of people like they're, they at least have the capacity to do that so often it's.

Trying to think at what level they're at and distilling it, but still also presenting the reality. Because we also don't wanna whitewash what happened either. So it is, as you hear me talking, you know, a delicate balance, but one that I think is important. I think it's, it would be worse if students didn't learn about this and then they came, for instance, to college and absolutely shocked to learn that there have been over 40 genocides since the Holocaust.

David Staley: Hmm. I wonder what. [00:29:00] Motivated you to study genocide? I mean, of all the, of all the sociological phenomenon to study, why genocide? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah. So I saw a talk on genocide back when I was 21, and I grew up in rural Wisconsin in Neville, a great city but one where my history curriculum didn't frankly talk much about genocide.

I learned about the Holocaust as I think many do. And, and that was sort of it. And I saw a talk when I was Tony one that mentioned that more people were killed in genocide during the 20th century than all of the international war of that century combined. And then all of the homicides of that century combined.

And I still remember thinking like, can that possibly be true? And if so, how have I not learned about. Any of these other episodes of genocide. So I still remember going back to my room and starting to do some research and trying to look into what were these genocides I had never heard of. And then I realized there were so many in [00:30:00] Cambodia and Sudan, Guatemala, as I already mentioned, Bosnia, Rwanda, and I hadn't really learned about many of them, so I decided to.

At that point in time, I was going to be a lawyer. That was my plan. And I quickly shifted and said, well, maybe I'll be a social scientist and try to study genocide and try to, to learn some research methods so I could use those to apply them to the study of genocide and try to better understand why it happened and, and how we can prevent it.

David Staley: Hmm. I'm not certain I've ever asked this question in the seven or so years that that I've been doing this program. How do you personally. Cope emotionally with with a field that that must be incredibly emotionally difficult to study. 

Hollie Nzitatira: It certainly can be. It is. It's horrific to study at times and it can be hard to talk with people who are victimized and to hear their stories, and it can be.

Equally difficult to interview people who perpetrated genocide and sit across from someone that, you know killed three children, for instance. [00:31:00] There's a couple of things that I do to cope. One of them is perhaps a nerdy way of coping, but I have a happy study and that is that I also study rescue during genocide.

So in every genocide there are people who risk their lives to save others. If, if you're. If you ever watch Mr. Rogers, I still remember I was gonna say this sounds like Mr. Rogers. Right? Exactly. And he has this great line about how when he would watch the news, he would get scared. His mom would remind him that even in the darkest of times, you can look for helpers.

And the same holds true for genocide. So in every genocide I have found one that hasn't had it. There are people who resist the genocide and say, we're not gonna participate, we are not gonna target our neighbors. But they also go above and beyond that. And they risk their lives to try to save people. And these are ordinary people.

A colleague and I have interviewed about 170 of them. And in our interviews we've tried to identify what makes them make this choice [00:32:00] versus other choices. And one of the, the hallmarks of the field so far is that they're often ordinary people who make extraordinary decisions at a certain moment. And this gives me a lot of hope to sit across from someone who is.

Strong enough to say, absolutely I'm not gonna target my neighbor, and in fact, I'm gonna help someone, even though helping that person endangers them and their whole family because rescuing during genocide puts you and your spouse and your kids at risk, that's a really high risk decision, and yet many people make it.

So as nerdy as that sounds, studying, that gives me a lot of hope. 

David Staley: Hmm. What are you working on now? What's, what's next for your research? 

Hollie Nzitatira: Yeah, so this, this project on rescue, my colleague Nikki Fox and I are actually writing a book on, we're writing a book for Cambridge University Press on Rescue during genocide and, and trying to tell these stories and also trying to tell some of the stories that are underrepresented.

A lot of women who rescue during genocides, their stories go untold compared to some of the others. So we're trying to elevate those [00:33:00] voices and look into why their stories have been untold. So that's a main one. I'm also started a new forecasting project here at Ohio State. So I have a Catalyst grant from Ohio State.

These are grants that are given to researchers with ideas that I. Ideally Ohio State views as promising. That could sort of put Ohio State on the map for having a center or having a large project. And when the forecasting task force that I served on was disbanded this last year by the US government, I thought, you know, we can do this here and have a Catalyst grant and a great team working on getting our own project up and running called the Prevent Project.

So those are two of the, the projects that I'm working on now. 

David Staley: Hmm. Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, thank you. 

Hollie Nzitatira: Thank you so much for having me.

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. [00:34:00] Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.