Working to understand the incomprehensible

As a graduate student at Indiana University in 1994, Matt Krain watched in horror as a civil war in Rwanda suddenly exploded into a full-blown genocide in which the Hutu-dominated government killed more than 800,000 of its own citizens, most of them ethnic Tutsis, while the world looked on impotently.

Krain, a political scientist, had always been interested in human rights issues, but the Rwandan genocide pushed him to begin thinking more systematically about state violence.

At that time, he says, “the only studies of states slaughtering their own people were on a case-by-case basis. Only one or two people were doing research systematically.”

Krain decided to increase that number by one. Fresh out of graduate school, he published a quantitative analysis of the factors leading to the onset of genocide or politicide. He also worked as a consultant with the U.S. State Department’s State Failures Task Force, helping evaluate their work.

More recently, Krain has turned his attention to whether international intervention can stop the killing, and if so, what sort of intervention is most effective.

His analysis demonstrated that an impartial intervention, in which a neutral party such as the U.N. interposes itself between the two sides, is ineffective, “because it assumes there are two sides able to negotiate. But there aren’t two sides in a genocide. One side is slaughtering the other. Intervention on the side of the targeted population is the only effective military option.”

According to a reviewer in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Krain’s complex statistical analysis ultimately yields a simple conclusion: The more times a genocidal state is militarily challenged from the outside, the more likely it is that the killing will slow or stopƒ[C]onfronted with such analysis, policy makers cannot so confidently cry ïfutility’ when others sound the alarm.”

And that, ultimately, is Krain’s goal: “I want to take the excuses away from policy makers.”

Krain finds it easy to incorporate insights from his research into his teaching, whether in an introductory international relations class or an upper-level seminar on large-scale political violence. He challenges his students to think about creative means of responding to genocide, ethnic conflict and human rights violations.

“They walk out of my classroom at least understanding what most people around the world think is incomprehensible. That’s important because if you can’t understand it, there’s no possibility of a solution, and I believe there must be a solution.”

His passion for the subject has inspired several students to delve into it in their own Independent Study projects. Next year, he will advise a senior who plans to look at the role of the media in affecting international response to genocide.

Independent Study — Wooster’s signature academic program, in which each senior works one-on-one with a faculty mentor to create an original research project, performance or work of art — was one of the things that attracted Krain to the college in 1998. Each year since then, he has seen its impact on students.

“I’ve had students in a first year seminar class and then four years later been their adviser or the second reader on their I.S. projects, and they were different people,” he says. “They’re transformed from being students to being scholars. They’re empowered, independent. But the biggest transformation is the year they come back to visit.

“Taylor Delhagen, who’s doing Teach for America this year, was back on campus recently and my wife and I had him over for dinner. Listening to him talk about his Wooster experience, I think he honestly believes he can do anything.”

For Krain and his faculty colleagues, the opportunity to work with such engaged, creative students is a big part of Wooster’s appeal. When he found himself, as department chair, running a search for a new political science faculty member this year, Krain made sure each candidate spent time meeting with current students, who could be counted on to speak eloquently about their experience in the department and pepper the candidate with pointed questions.

“We want to hire people for whom that kind of interaction is an exciting prospect,” he says. “I think our students are our biggest selling point.”