The Identity Trap: The Language of Genocide

The purpose of this article is to create a framework for thinking about how language themes propagated in radio broadcasts start to degenerate into the reification of a culture that tolerates and even encourages classification and dehumanization. Understanding these language themes becomes an early warning system that begins to signal the beginning of a genocidal spiral. This framework is termed the Identity Trap, and it demonstrates how various linguistic conventions combine to establish a social context that builds up the speaker’s social identity while denigrating the “enemy’s” social identity, which provides the rationale for escalating conflict against that enemy. Two broadcasts from the 1994 Rwandan genocide are used as examples.