Dispute as critique: Moving beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’

Abstract

From the vantage point of unmaking permanent minorities, ‘post-genocide’ Rwanda seems to have accomplished a transition into a de-ethnicised, de-tribalised and integrated political community. The unmaking of permanent minorities requires, I suggest, an anthropological movement beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’. This is to say, the frame of analysis of the contemporary Rwandan social or political community must not be restricted to people's experiences of genocide. Rather, genocide undergirds, or, even more, continues to remake, the political community in Rwanda, while the social community does not share the experience of genocide. Indeed, the delinking of the ‘post-genocide’ political community from the ‘second generation’ social community requires an anthropological movement towards the everyday of how a political community constitutes itself as integrated. Such a move asks how the ordinary life worlds of common Rwandans are being constituted as de-tribalised, de-ethnicised communities. I examine the rift between the political and the social community in contemporary Rwanda through an anthropological inquiry into disputes. I suggest that peoples’ involvement in disputes and how disputes are tackled in Rwanda provide a window into the social and political aspects of the community. Despite the way in which the Rwandan state tries to curtail inter-community conflict by eliminating a vocabulary of difference, ordinary people use disputes that erupt from their everyday engagements as a way to critique this overarching demand for unity. It is the dispute that puts forth critique as an intervention into the very makings of the unified political community.