Trust in the aftermath of genocide: Insights from Rwandan life histories

We study changes in inter- and intra-ethnic trust in Rwanda. We focus on the impact of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi, which is a case of group-selective violence marked by a clear perpetrator-group and victim-group as well as within-group variation with respect to exposure to violence. In our empirical analysis, we rely on more than 400 individual life histories in which intra- and inter-ethnic trust were systematically ranked for all life history years. Overall, we find that, while intra-ethnic trust remains largely unchanged, inter-ethnic trust decreases with the onset of violence and sharply so for those targeted in the genocide. Inter-ethnic trust gradually recovers over time. Only members of a subset of the victim-group, namely those with the highest probability of individual physical exposure to violence, portray signs of continued out-group mistrust, 17 years after the genocide. Our results suggest that taking into account the element of time, establishing a fine-grained differentiation of the relevant in- and out-groups in the conflict, and identifying the level of exposure to violence, are necessary steps to better understand the impact of political violence on trust. Regarding theory, our findings further qualify what is known about the twofold theoretical foundation of trust relationships, namely that changes in interpersonal trust reside in altered personal predispositions due to traumatic experiences and/or evolving experiences of trustworthiness in social interaction.