The Dual Use of an Historical Event: ‘Rwanda 1994’, the Justification and Critique of Liberal Interventionism

Abstract

This essay places the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in the context of the academic and political rise of liberal interventionism since 1990. It argues that this historical event is important for the debate about ‘humanitarian interventions’ in two different ways: on the one hand, as a signifier, ‘Rwanda 1994’ has been used (or, for that matter, misused) in order to justify an almost unlimited international agenda of liberal interventionism and social engineering; on the other, the genocide that could arguably have been prevented represents the exceptional case where military intervention can indeed be justified—but precisely because it is not in need of a specifically liberal justification. What would have made a military-based prevention of genocide justifiable in this particular case is precisely the aim to prevent something that is universally agreed to be unacceptable (genocide). The liberal twist in the justification narrative, in contrast, tends to emphasize the difference between the (liberal) ‘us’ and the non-liberal ‘them’, consequently claiming the legitimate right for the ‘us’ to decide about the use of force exclusively, that is, without the ‘them’. The continuation of the narrative into answering the post-intervention question ‘what now?’ then leads consequently into the necessity of imposing one's own system of rule as a general norm without due attention to the specifics of the situation ‘on the ground’. The exceptional features of ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the empirical event) thus point in a critical way to all those cases where ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the signifier) has been used to make the case for an ever-expanding agenda of liberal (‘just’) war.