Post-genocide Rwanda Research Articles

Contribution of New Media in the Reconciliation of Post-Genocide Rwanda: A Case Study of Selected Non-Governmental Organizations

The 1994 Rwandan Tutsi genocide profoundly impacted social cohesion, highlighting the need for sustained reconciliation. Guided by Social Identity Theory, this study examines how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) leverage new media to promote reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research identifies the primary media platforms NGOs employ for reconciliatory messaging and assesses their influence on community perceptions. Data were gathered through a structured questionnaire of 395 respondents, aged 35 and above, from both urban and rural areas, who rated reconciliatory messages on a five-point Likert scale. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlation analysis, while semi-structured interviews with NGO program managers and youth leaders provided qualitative insights, analyzed thematically. The findings reveal a notable positive correlation (r = 0.596, p < 0.01) between interaction on new media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, and reconciliation outcomes. Approximately 88.6% of respondents reported that these platforms positively contributed to dialogue and mutual understanding. By combining quantitative and qualitative data, the study presents a well-rounded view of how NGOs apply digital tools to connect generations and promote social unity. The study concludes that strategic use of new media by NGOs can significantly support reconciliation in Rwanda. Recommendations include further investment in digital literacy programs to broaden access and specific assistance for NGOs to enhance their digital strategies. This research offers practical insights for NGOs and policymakers aiming to use digital platforms for fostering peace, unity, and social rebuilding in post-conflict settings. Ethical practices, including informed consent and confidentiality, were strictly observed throughout the study.

In the Shadow of a Parent’s Genocidal Crimes in Rwanda: The Impact of Ambiguous Loss on the Everyday Life of Children of (Ex-)Prisoners

In Rwanda, following the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, many people were found guilty of genocide crimes and imprisoned. Their children ended up in a situation of ambiguous loss during and after a parent’s imprisonment. The article presents the multidimensional impact of this loss on the everyday lives of these children and their families according to key themes as they emerged from an ethnographic study in which 21 children and their family members participated. Themes include changed family dynamics and family stress, economic deprivation, incomprehension of a parent’s criminal past, the social stigma of being a child of a génocidaire, and strategies used to make the loss bearable. The uniqueness of the ambiguous loss as experienced by children of perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda compared to those of perpetrators of the Holocaust or other mass crimes relates to an amalgam of factors specific for the context of post-genocide Rwanda; major ones being the severity of genocidal crimes and gacaca courts Rwanda chose as its main form of transitional justice. The case study illustrates how using the prism of intergenerational relations helps to understand some of the transformative and enduring effects of a crisis that deeply affects a society.

Evaluating effects of community-based social healing model on Ubuntu, mental health and psychosocial functioning in post-genocide Rwanda: protocol for cluster randomized control trial

BackgroundThe community-based social healing (CBSH) model, developed by Ubuntu Centre for Peace, aims to support individuals with traumatic experiences and mental health challenges in achieving better mental health. CBSH combines BREATH-BODY-MIND™ (BBM) practices with collective narrative and rituals, facilitated by Community Healing Assistants in therapeutic groups. A previous pilot study involving 1889 Rwandan CBSH participants showed significant mental health improvements, including reductions in depression, anxiety, and PTSD, along with enhanced work productivity, and decreased intimate partner violence. The trial investigates the CBSH model’s impact on Ubuntu and mental health. Ubuntu, a concept that encompasses humanness, compassion, and interconnectedness, is deeply rooted in the African philosophy.Methods/designThis cluster randomized controlled trial will involve 54 villages randomly selected in the Kirehe district, with 1080 participants randomly allocated equally to the CBSH intervention or a wait-list control group. While the trial will be conducted at the village (cluster) level, both primary and secondary outcomes will be measured individually for participants within each cluster. The Primary outcome “Ubuntu” will be measured using a context-adapted Ubuntu measurement scale. Secondary outcomes include psychosocial indicators which will be assessed through standardized tools such as the Patient Health Questionnaire for depression (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing scale (WEMWS), Connor-Davidson Resilience scale (CD-RISK-10), Somatic Symptom Severity Scale (PHQ-15), Revised Conflict Tactics scale (CTS2S), and Adapted Social Capital Assessment Tool (SASCAT).ConclusionThis trial aims to evaluate the CBSH model’s impacts on Ubuntu, mental health, and social functioning among trauma-affected Rwandans, including those impacted by the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, mass killings, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. The findings could be of value to the Ubuntu Centre for Peace, policymakers, healthcare practitioners, and other stakeholders, by highlighting the significance of promoting Ubuntu as a foundation for addressing mental health challenges and the consequences of psychosocial trauma.Trial registrationISRCTN ISRCTN17659369. Registered on February 09, 2024.

Land dispossession as continuum of violence: women’s political agency in post-genocide Rwanda

ABSTRACT The article investigates how gender and class shape women’s political empowerment in post-genocide Rwanda, where access to land creates gendered networks for women to exercise their political agency in the community, market, and state. It argues, based on interviews with Rwandan women, that after the genocide elite women with access to land obtained opportunities to participate in collective political activities that were denied to landless women who were more preoccupied with their daily struggles to survive. It calls for an intersectional examination of class within the continuum of violence against women in the aftermath of conflicts.

Book review: Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Postgenocide Rwanda David Mwambari

Book review: Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Postgenocide Rwanda <i>David Mwambari</i>

The Home Stay Exhibitions: The Home and the Image as Hyperlocal Sites of Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT In the Home Stay Exhibitions young Rwandans are mentored to produce photo stories which they exhibit in their homes, opening the doors to neighbours and friends. Using photography to make new conversations possible, the initiative contributes to social healing in post-genocide Rwanda. This article provides an empirical case study of the Home Stay Exhibitions as a form of localised peace photography. It contributes to arts and peacebuilding and visual peace research by demonstrating how photography is harnessed by local actors to break down entrenched distances and to carve space for inclusive dialogue around hidden areas of peacebuilding including gender, justice and community.

Effectiveness of aid on educational dropout in post-Genocide Rwanda

This study investigates the effects of the Rwandan Genocide on the probability of primary educational dropout between 1995 and 2019 and how development aid moderates those effects. Specifically, this study examines the role of proximity to genocide-target areas and the degree to which development aid may have moderated the altered household economic opportunities. The results indicate that: (i) geographical proximity to genocide-targeted areas does not increase the probability of dropout; (ii) development aid reduces the probability of dropout within genocide proximity by 20 %; and (iii) The effects of development aid are particularly high in low-income households, making dropout 10.6 % less likely. In sum, development aid plays a significant role in overcoming the long-term effects of the genocide.

Transitional Justice and Redress for Racial Injustices against Marginalized Minorities: Lessons from Indigenous Twa People in Post-Genocide Rwanda

ABSTRACT∞ This article addresses the question of how countries respond to racial injustices through transitional justice. It draws on the case of Rwanda and explores the experiences of the marginalized indigenous Twa minorities with transitional justice implemented after the 1994 genocide through the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission and Gacaca courts. The lessons from Rwanda highlight the limitations of transitional justice in providing redress for racial injustices of marginalized minorities when it is practised within an authoritarian political context. The article discusses how the transitional justice approach in Rwanda contributed to the construction of a flawed record of the past and marginalized the racial realities of Rwandans by imposing an official historical narrative. It was also used as a tool of the government to negate racial injustices against the most marginalized communities of Twa people but also to preserve racial injustices and human rights violations against them by denying their ethnic identity and indigenous way of life.

Umwana w'umugore: The gendered realities of girls born of conflict-related sexual violence and their mothers in post-genocide Rwanda.

This article explores the challenges, needs and capacities of girls born of conflict-related sexual violence during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. Twenty-nine interviews and 11 focus groups were conducted with girls born of genocidal rape, alongside 44 interviews with mothers of children born of genocidal rape. In a society where Umwana w'umugore - being 'the child of a woman' - is considered an insult for children born of rape, gendered realities profoundly shape girls' experiences. Data reveal that girls born of genocidal rape face challenges related to identity and belonging, multiple forms of violence and economic challenges. Moreover, girls sustain the indirect consequences of gender-based injustices committed against their mothers, making stigma and social exclusion shared and intergenerational experiences, alongside mutual care and support. Policy development must take into account the unique needs of girls born of rape, the precarious situation of their mothers and broader gender inequalities.

Beauty banned: navigating aesthetic citizenship in Rwandan borderlands

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the discourse on aesthetic citizenship within the context of recent policy shifts in Rwanda. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2019, I examine two recent import bans of beauty products affecting second-hand fashion and skin-whitening cosmetics, which have had significant implications for the everyday aesthetic practices of Rwandan sex workers. While both initiatives were ostensibly progressive, with the rejection of donated clothing from the West and the prohibition of hazardous cosmetics, these policies have had profound consequences for those whose livelihoods rely on aesthetic labour as a means of social currency. Utilizing the concept of ‘aesthetic citizenship’, I examine how post-genocide Rwanda has expanded its pursuit of creating a harmonious state to include regulations with aesthetic ramifications. Against this backdrop, I demonstrate that by challenging the state-upheld notions of appearance, my sex-worker interlocutors expanded their aesthetic belonging and consumption beyond Rwanda, navigating their aesthetic desires in its borderlands.

Perceptions of the Implementation of Women's Rights in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Perceptions of the Implementation of Women's Rights in Post-Genocide Rwanda

The aftermath of gendered violence: Kinship and affect in post-genocide Rwanda

Thousands of women and girls experienced sexual violence during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and many became pregnant as a result of rape. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Rwanda, this article discusses how kinship is (re-)established in the aftermath of sexual violence by focusing on the lived experiences of young people conceived in genocidal rape. The article explores what forms of relationships become possible, impossible, enabled or dismissed, in the aftermath of a period of extreme violence. Through detailing the delicate establishment of affective ties, I hope to show the subtle work that goes into containing genocide memories in the everyday. The article suggests that young people engage in careful and ‘attuned’ kinship practices in an environment that changes throughout their life course. In exploring how young people carefully navigate the mending, protecting, and accepting of ‘family’, the article emphasizes the possibilities and limitations of kinship in the aftermath of collective violence.

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

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.

Bodily Scars as Lived Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Scholarship about politics and the body in conflicts has gained prominence in academic debates. This article advances these conversations by arguing that bodily scars are potent ‘carriers’ of memories of mass atrocities committed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Using both semi-structured interviews and a wide range of secondary sources, this study found that bodily scars – as physical manifestations of wartime torture and pain – evidence past atrocities and survivor resilience. Similarly, they are avenues through which the past is communicated and transformed (in ways that complement and surpass other mediums of memory). Bodily scars play powerful and complex roles in memory conversations; they communicate trauma and keep memories of the mass violence vivid in public and private realms. This article empirically contributes to discussions on the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda, and body studies and memory scholarship more broadly.

Debating the identity and indigeneity of the Batwa in post-genocide Rwanda: a review of the challenges and prospects from a human rights perspective

This study is a systematic review of the United Nations and African Union reports on the controversial identity of the Batwa and their recognition as an Indigenous people in post-genocide Rwanda. Using the criteria of inclusion and exclusion, 25 United Nations and African Union periodic reports dating from 2000 onwards were systematically selected and reviewed. The findings of the study indicate that both the United Nations and African Union agree and disagree on the position of the Government of Rwanda on the identity recognition and the strategies used to empower the Batwa. Therefore, lack of a unified position on the status of the Batwa grossly undermines the United Nations human rights–based approach leading to the violation of their rights. This study proposes a new thinking that rectifies the status of the Batwa as a historically marginalized people. The study also subscribes to the tenets of national unity advanced by the Government of Rwanda.

Ubunyarwanda and the Evolution of Transitional Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda: “To Generalize is not Fresh” – ERRATUM

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Ubunyarwanda and the Evolution of Transitional Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda: “To Generalize is not Fresh”

AbstractConversations around transitional justice often focus on concepts of victimhood and perpetration. Such has been the case in Rwanda in the decades following the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. However, even as Rwandans continue to observe state-led transitional justice reforms which divide them into victims and perpetrators, they simultaneously draw on state discourses of unity to carefully critique and re-work the language and practices which produce such divisions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Berman illustrates how a new generation of Rwandan youth is transforming political ideology by creatively engaging the discourse ofubunyarwanda(Rwandanness) to forge inclusive post-genocide politics.

Sharing and listening to stories for peacebuilding in post-genocide Rwanda

ABSTRACT This article explores how sharing and listening to stories linked children and young people, educators, artists, civil society workers, and policymakers as part of a continuum of transitional justice processes in the aftermath of conflict Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) initiative. We argue that sharing stories within a peace education context can potentially help to address everyday conflicts and personal and social wounds, often due to the residue of past conflicts. MAP facilitates a community of listening and/or a community of listeners through arts-based approaches that engages the individual to listen to oneself, the community to listen to the other, and the society to listen to inform everyday peacebuilding.

Evaluating the impact of Community-Based Sociotherapy on social dignity in post-genocide Rwanda: study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial

BackgroundCommunity-Based Sociotherapy (CBS) is an approach that was introduced in Rwanda in 2005, with the aim of improving psychosocial well-being among its participants and facilitating reconciliation processes. Over the years, CBS has been adapted contextually and the effectiveness of the approach has been measured in different ways, using qualitative and quantitative study designs. This study specifically assesses the effectiveness of CBS in terms of fostering the social dignity of participants as the primary outcome.Methods/designA cluster randomized controlled trial design with person-level outcomes whereas the CBS treatment is delivered at the cluster level. A total of 1200 eligible participants will be randomly assigned to two groups in a 1:1 ratio. Participants in the intervention group will receive the CBS intervention, while the control group will be waitlisted. The primary outcome measure is a self-designed and psychometrically validated Social Dignity Scale. The secondary outcome measures will be the WHO (Five) Well-Being Index (WHO-5), the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), the Self-reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20), and the perceived parental self-efficacy scale. The primary analysis will be performed following an intention to treat analysis, using generalized estimating equation modeling.DiscussionWe expect this cluster randomized controlled trial to provide insight into the effectiveness of CBS on social dignity and secondary psychosocial outcomes among its group participants, who have different socio-historical backgrounds including genocide survivors, perpetrators, bystanders and their descendants, people in conflicts (family/community), and local leaders. This study will inform CBS implementers, policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders on the role of social dignity in interventions that focus on psychosocial healing.Trial registrationISRCTN ISRCTN11199072. It was registered on 2 April 2022.

Foreign language skills and labour market earnings in Rwanda

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent to which proficiency in English and French as a form of human capital individually determine earnings in Rwanda’s labour market and whether it still pays to be bilingual. Using data from the nationally representative Labour Force Survey conducted in 2018, our findings show that after controlling for other human capital and demographic factors, proficiency in both languages is positively rewarded. However, economic returns for proficiency in English language are higher than those for French proficiency and this gap widens from the median to the upper tail of the earnings distribution. Further, in the last two deciles of the earnings distribution, returns to English proficiency surpass returns to bilingual proficiency. A key finding of our study is that proficiency in English is highly rewarded while being bilingual in English and French pays but not in the upper 20% of the earnings distribution. The observed high returns to English language proficiency are likely the outcomes of the language reforms that have been implemented in the country and, most importantly, reflect the history of post-genocide Rwanda. English has become the language of business, government and education, and this trend is likely to continue.