This paper shows that contemporary patterns of violence can be traced back to the establishment of
the precolonial state. Rwandan villages that were brought under centralized rule one century earlier
experience a doubling of violence during the state-organized 1994 genocide. In surrounding years however,
with longer state presence, violence is lower. Instrumental variable estimates exploiting differences
in proximity to Nyanza – an early capital – suggest these effects are causal. Using data from several
sources, including a lab-in-the-field experiment, I show that exposure to state institutions impacted civil
society, and in particular obedience to political authority. In a lab setting today, individuals close to an
abandoned border of the historical state are more likely to follow an unenforced rule than individuals
just across the border. The state’s impact on rule following led to more violence when the Rwandan
government mobilized for mass killing and, by contrast, to less violence when the government pursued
peace and rebuilding. These results suggest that the interaction of government policy with deep-rooted
aspects of civil society has the potential to reconcile long-run persistence with rapid economic change