Burundi
Subtitle: ethnocide as discourse and practice
By: René Lemarchand.
Series: Woodrow Wilson Center series
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Washington; New York, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 206
Subjects: Violence -- Burundi; Genocide -- Burundi; Burundi -- Ethnic relations -- Political aspects; Burundi -- Politics and government
Description: This book offers a wide-ranging discussion of the roots and consequences of ethnic strife in Burundi. It provides the reader with an appropriate background for an understanding of Burundi's 1993 transition to multiparty democracy and the coup and violence that followed. Focusing on the 1972 and 1988 bloodbaths, the author shows how these cataclysmic events shaped the images the Hutu and Tutsi have of each other and created the basis for political myths on both sides of a socially constructed fault line.

In so doing, Lemarchand brings out a dimension of analysis that has seldom been taken into account in discussions of "ethnic cleansing" or "ethnocide." The main emphasis is on how ethnicity can be exploited to transform and mobilize the system of political discourse and ultimately invest it with the horrors and irrationality of genocidal violence.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 188-193) and index.