"When Radio Kills" – NYT blog highlights Stockholm University research

"I think it actually only took a few hours to find out that the NYT had mentioned the article," says David Yanagizawa, who hasn't actually read the piece yet as he is currently doing field work in Uganda. "A friend who is an economics researcher in the US emailed me about it. I haven't had the opportunity to respond to the comments yet as I haven't had the opportunity to read it yet."

Yanagizawa's paper investigates the impact of propaganda on participation in violent conflict and in particular looks at the role that "hate radio" station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) played during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

According to Yanagizawa, who is set to defend his doctoral thesis at Stockholm University's Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) on June 4, RTLM  played a significant role in the genocide, calling for the extermination of the Tutsi ethnic minority population.

Widely listened to by the general population, between July 8, 1993 and July 31, 1994 RTLM broadcast racist propaganda against Tutsis, moderate Hutus, Belgians, and the United Nations mission UNAMIR.

David Yanagizawa says: "I found that the mass media was able to significantly influence the participation in the killings that took place during the Rwanda genocide," says Yanagizawa, "and show that villages that happened to have full radio reception, compared to villages that happened to have no radio reception, increased participation in the killings by 65-77%."

Yanagizawa estimates that the radio station's broadcasts, which created a backdrop of racial hostility in the country, account for somewhere in the region of 45,000 deaths, or 9 percent of the total Tutsi deaths.

"I hope that the academic community thinks that the results shed some new light on what drives people into conflict, and what mass media is capable of," says Yanagizawa.

David Yanagizawa is set to defend his thesis at Stockholm University on June 4, 2010.

Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES)
www.iies.su.se/

The New York Times blog Freakanomics
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/when-radio-kills/

David Yanagizawa's paper “Propaganda and Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide”
http://people.su.se/~daya0852/Rwanda_jmp.pdf

Text and interview: Jon Buscall