Although the violence used was low-tech (perpetrators using weapons such as farm tools, machetes or clubs), this represented a thoughtful campaign led by the state with its own purpose to eliminate the Tutsi minority, which involved genocide (Straus, 2006). .
"In the Rwandan case, genocide included the participation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, of whom the majority had no prior history of committing lethal violence" (Straus, 2006:2).
The question that arouse from this event is what lead these innocent people to commit genocide and how did it spread so fast across the country? During the last twenty years of this unfortunate event, most of the literature review focused on the reasoning behind it, trying to drive away readers from the notion that it took place out of cultural chaos and pre-existing hatred between these two groups. Most argue upon the fact that Rwanda is simply a pure case of modern genocide, which has been planned by the state in order to pursue a nationalist belief (Straus, 2006). Instead of focusing on a mono-causal explanation of these two events, I suggest a more complex explanation which will include the notion of peer pressure, increase of violence and incriminating and dehumanizing the victim. .
Current theories suggest participation in genocide can be split into two categories: theories that can relate to structural factors and theories that relate to the individual (Loyle, 2009). Structural factors refer to institutional, cultural and situational justifications for a society at a specific time. In relation to individual factors these explanations can start from personal life experiences to psychological issues. Structural theories have been portrayed very well in the current literature for genocide and includes characteristics of societies, cultures or certain events that leads people to commit genocide (Loyle, 2009). The most important characteristic of it is that it focuses on the context in order to determine the mobility of state's population to commit genocide.