JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 5 identity, (4) instigation of conflict between Rohingya and other residents of the same region, and (5) failure to attribute responsibility to perpetrators of earlier violence. Within this analysis, Facebook’s role was to “enable and spread” hate speech and misin­ formation about the Rohingya, which contributed to the “hate campaign” (1), instigation of conflict (4), and mis-attribution of responsibility (5).20 Important exceptions prove this rule: when the Mission report does point to content that referenced other groups, such as “the international community” or human rights defenders, it only highlights their effects on legal rights such as freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.21 This section will demonstrate that such examples should also be analyzed for their role in mobilizing violence. A broad base of scholarship on other cases of genocide and mass violence confirms the importance of the “background factors” identified by the UN Mission, including narratives about the Rohingya that were promoted through content on Facebook.22 But limiting the scope of analysis to the way Facebook can be used to construct the victim group can also implicitly assume that there is another group ready to act based upon these narratives. Yet while perpetrators may claim to act in the name of a pre-existing ethnic, racial, reli­ gious, or other group, such groups are not ready-made antagonists, like billiard balls waiting to collide when incited. Instead, violence on the scale of genocide requires the creation of coalitions that can work towards this end.23 Such coalitions often include people affiliated with multiple identity categories; they always require bringing together people with a variety of orientations towards violence, willing executioners but also the indifferent and ambivalent, conflicted and reluctant.24 20 21 22 23 24 IIFFMM, 177, 338–43, 166–70. Facebook is discussed in primarily two areas of the report. First, in a section titled “Spreading Hate,” which is divided into one sub-section that documents “Inciting of anti-Rohingya sentiment” (IIFFMM, 166–70) and a second that docu­ ments “Inciting of negative sentiments against the international community” (170–2). The first sub-section analyzes content limited to examples that characterize the Rohingya, except for one paragraph about calls for people to cut off social relations with Rohingya (166–70). The second sub-section documents the situation for international organiz­ ations. It includes one paragraph describing attacks on “national staff” as traitors – but this only serves to illustrate “negative sentiments against the international community.” Second, Facebook is discussed in a section on “Demo­ cratic Space and Fundamental Freedoms.” A sub-section titled “The issue of Hate Speech” details a variety of slurs, tropes, and common narratives about the Rohingya (320–44). This part of the report includes a general reference to “moderate commentators, human rights defenders and ordinary people who have views that differ from the official line” (339). But this is only identified for its negative effects on freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly (315–20, 344–5). Ample scholarship links dehumanization and violence, for example David Livingstone Smith, Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). A consensus also underlines the importance of narratives that construct victims as a security threat, for example Jonathan Leader Maynard, Ideol­ ogy and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Moses, The Problems of Genocide; Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide in Contemporary Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). The Mission also noted the gendering of anti-Rohingya narratives, which aligns with scholarship on the role that claims about and over women play in the mobilization of mass violence, for example Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary (Ber­ keley: University of California Press, 2007); Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg, 1999). Leader Maynard, Ideology and Mass Killing, 70–75; Kjell Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (New York: Routledge, 2017), 99–101; Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, Chap. 2; Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chap. 2; Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 18; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8–9. Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020); Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide; Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).