More than 200 years after its Örst publication, the Malthusian thesis is
still much debated, albeit in a modiÖed form. Rather than predicting a global
catastrophe, most neo-Malthusians stress the local character of the relationship
between population pressure, natural resource scarcity, and conáict as well as its
dependency on the socio-political and economic context. This softened version
of Malthusíthesis has received little empirical support in cross-country studies.
In contrast, a number of sub-national analyses have provided some evidence for
local conditional Malthusian catastrophes, although "catastrophe" is a big word
since these studies have largely focused on low-intensity violence. This article
adds to the small body of sub-national studies, but focuses on a high-intensity
conáict, the Rwandan genocide. In particular, it provides a meso-level analysis of
the relation between population pressure and the intensity of violence measured
by the death toll among the Tutsi across 1,294 small administrative units. The
results indicate that the death toll was signiÖcantly higher in localities with both
high population density and little opportunity for young men to acquire land. On the one hand, this Önding can be interpreted as support for the neo-Malthusian
thesis. On the other hand, it is possible that another mechanism played, i.e. in
densely populated areas it may have been relatively easy for the elite to mobilize
the population, because of dependency relations through the land and labor
market. Alternatively, in densely populated areas, there may have been more
lootable assets, and the violence may have been opportunistic rather than driven
by need or by fear.