Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. History Dept.

Advisor(s)

Arnout van der Meer

Second Advisor

Sarah Duff

Abstract

This project aims to compare the ideological and structural colonial legacies that created the tensions for genocide to occur in Timor-Leste and Rwanda. It also aims to understand how these colonial legacies inhibited the international community's response and exacerbated the genocides. The genocide in Timor-Leste occurred from 1975 to 2002 and was perpetrated by the Indonesian government against the native Timorese population. The genocide in Rwanda occurred from April to July of 1994 and was perpetrated by the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority. Throughout this thesis, I argue that colonial legacies like nationalism, racial hierarchies, and the maintenance of colonial structures created the ethnic tensions for both of these genocides. I also argue that legacies of the civilizing mission discourse inhibited the international community's response to both genocides. This thesis focuses on the colonial legacies of these genocides rather than the genocides as they occurred to illuminate a larger pattern of post-colonial genocides as a legacy of colonialism.

Keywords

Genocide, Post-colonial, Rwanda, Timor-Leste, Colonialism

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