Who Rescues? Who Betrays? The Fate of Cross-Group Friendships in Wartime

• In Event: Ethnicity and Patterns of Violence

Abstract

Do outgroup social ties cease to matter once the bullets start flying? During episodes of group-targeted violence, members of integrated communities are caught in a tug-of-war between appeals to ingroup identity and bonds with outgroup neighbors, in-laws, and friends. Whether the cleavage is religious, ethnic, or economic, individuals whose social ties span these fault lines must decide whether to help, ignore, or betray their outgroup alters. At a macro-level, it appears that outgroup ties are no match for a powerful group-identity narrative. Pre-war Bosnia, like pre-Holocaust Germany and pre-genocide Rwanda, was a highly-integrated society with widespread intermarriage, yet tens of thousands of civilians were murdered and millions uprooted based on their ethnic identity.

After collecting new data, including semi-structured interviews with over 70 Bosnian civilians and ex-combatants, I find compelling evidence that outgroup social ties continue to exert a powerful influence on behavior during episodes’ group-target violence.  On the one hand, the classic “Schindler’s List” or “Hotel Rwanda” image of outgroup rescue appears to have been quite rare. I find only a few reports of altruistic strangers helping persons they had no prior connection to, let alone doing so en masse.  On the other hand, aid and protection from outgroup neighbors, friends, and colleagues appears to have been widespread, pointing to the crucial role intergroup contact and cross-group social networks played in limiting the death toll. Counterintuitively, tie-strength does not appear to be a good predictor of whether one person will help another.  Many individuals were hidden, smuggled, fed, warned, or given life-saving documents by acquaintances with whom they were not close to or friends-of-friends they had no direct relationship with.  Rather, social capital, particularly the norms of reciprocity among neighbors in Yugoslav apartment buildings and residential quarters, appears to have set the stage for life-saving assistance.  At the extreme, these dense local networks even facilitated “ethnic defection,” whereby individuals would volunteer as combatants side-by-side with their outgroup neighbors and against their co-ethnics.

This study breaks new ground by examining outgroup aid and protection outside the context of genocide.  Building on the existing literature on Holocaust and Rwandan rescuers, I attempt to expand our notions of what constitutes assistance by examining a more typical conflict in which many more modes of help were available and the levels of risk far more varied.  In addition, I shift the spotlight from “rescuers” to “acts,” leading to a socially-embedded understanding of how particular network configurations and types of social ties lead to particular acts of assistance.

Author

• Matthew Simonson, Northeastern University