After the violence

While on assignment as a freelance journalist in Somalia in 1996, Scott Straus got a call from his editor at the Houston Chronicle, who instructed him to head to Zaire. The country was sheltering more than a million Rwandans who had fled civil war and genocide two years earlier. Now a civil war was brewing there. 

Shortly after crossing into Zaire (today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the border closed and Straus was one of a handful of international journalists left in the east of the country. He soon gained access to a refugee camp and discovered a recent mass grave filled with women and children. 

“I can picture it right now,” he says, closing his eyes in his quiet North Hall office. “It was just shocking. Horrifying.” 

Straus continued to cover the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, filing stories for the Houston Chronicle, where his reporting earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination, as well as for the Toronto Globe and Mail, San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun during his three years in Africa. 

But the experience created a desire to explore what he’d seen with more depth and nuance. 

He turned to academia, earning a PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “I went from interviewing presidents to waiting for professors’ office hours,” he says. 

Straus joined the UW–Madison faculty in 2004. As a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Political Science and International Studies, he studies political violence, human rights and African politics. 

Much of his scholarship focuses on genocide, such as his 2015 book, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa, which earned the prestigious 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. 

In the book, Straus explains how ideas and political messages can become tipping points for genocide. While patterns can be deduced, he says circumstances also exist in which genocide seems almost inevitable and yet never occurs. 

“You rarely see genocide outside of wartime, but not all wars lead to genocide,” he says. 

By focusing on post-Cold War Africa — comparing Rwanda and Sudan, where the Darfur genocide began in 2003, with Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal, three places where unrest has been bubbling since the 1990s and yet genocide has not taken place — he discovered that national founding narratives, or “the stories leaders tell about what their community is and who should be a full member,” can be harbingers of violence. 

Straus, who has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the United States Institute of Peace, has served as a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and consulted for the United Nations Office of the Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention. And in 2016, then-President Barack Obama appointed him to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. 

Since he began teaching at UW, Straus has developed and offered courses on genocide and human rights. 

“I see my academic work as a long-term way of working through what I witnessed and saw,” he says. “To me, understanding and preventing genocide remains a global priority.”