Abstract
Most academic work on the genocide in Rwanda uses either a methodologically social scientific or historical approach to explain the genocide's root causes. These causal stories most often focus on ethnicity and, in doing so, understate how structured economic-material relations made the conditions for genocide possible. Turning to Louis Althusser's concept of structural causality, I form an alternative method for narrating the genocide which treats the genocide as the result of highly complex and over-determined social relations. The paper then re-examines the structural causality of the genocide, focusing on how the coffee economy intersected with the economic, cultural, state, and ideological registers at which the genocide was produced. Representing the genocide in terms of structural causality addresses how over-determined exploitative relationships—between Hutu, Tutsi, coloniser, colonised, rich, poor, farmer, évolué, northerner, southerner, coffee producer, coffee consumer, etc—produced the genocide.
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