Post-genocide Rwanda Research Articles

Nicola Palmer, Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Nicola Palmer, <i>Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda</i>

Bringing The Daily Mail to Africa: entertainment websites and the creation of a digital youth public in post-genocide Rwanda

ABSTRACTThis article considers Kinyarwanda-language entertainment websites in Rwanda and argues that they create an alternative digital youth public. In a context wherein the ‘traditional’ media is heavily regulated, I argue that these websites provide important spaces of debate, aspiration, and self-making. They allow young Rwandans to participate in transnational networks of cultural production and imagine themselves as well-connected and ‘modern’ global citizens. This does not mean, however, that the digital public convened by these websites is a space of ‘rational’ or democratic debate. Rather, these sites are heavily gendered and seem disproportionately concerned with policing the behaviour and dress of young women. In doing so, they reveal on-going anxieties about women’s sexuality and place in the public sphere. Furthermore, as much as entertainment websites are understood to be relatively ‘apolitical’, they are inevitably shaped by the country’s politics. The digital youth public convened by entertainment websites is ‘alternative’ insofar as it allows for vibrant debate on topics of importance to young people, but it should in no way be seen as existing outside the realm of state power.

What works in citizenship and values education: Attitudes of high school leavers towards the Itorero training in post-genocide Rwanda

This piece of research contributes to the existing literature on citizenship and values education practices in post-conflict contexts. It set out to investigate ways in which high school leavers (HSLs) appreciate Itorero – a non-formal citizenship and values education platform in post-genocide Rwanda . The purpose of the study was also to establish the best predictor of the success of Itorero training according to HSLs’ perceptions. The research to be reported here used a survey questionnaire and focus groups with HSLs. It is revealed that while HSLs are happy with the content, they seem to be immensely displeased with the quality of trainers, organization and training environment. The article also shows that the factor ‘trainers’ consistutes the best predictor of the success of Itorero . This finding raises serious concerns because Itorero trainers are seen as deficient in number of ways. The article raises the question of trainers’ preparation in citizenship and values education. We argue that there is a tendency to neglect this aspect and assume that everyone can contribute to citizenship and values education. We maintain that the quality of trainers is critical for optimal results in citizenship and values education.

Global Discourses and Local Practices: Teaching Citizenship and Human Rights in Postgenocide Rwanda

In postgenocide Rwanda, education is viewed by the national government as crucial for shaping a new, unified civic identity but also as a tool to address the past genocide. Drawing on Rwanda as a case study, this article analyzes national curriculum documents, school textbooks, and interviews with teachers and students in order to understand the following questions: To what extent does the Rwandan state integrate global rights discourses within the civics curricula and textbooks? How do teachers and student engage with these global discourses in the classroom? I find that while the national civics curriculum intends to inculcate a traditional notion of citizenship, emphasizing patriotism and loyalty to the state, the curriculum also includes global norms oriented toward human rights and global citizenship. However, divergent discourses are evident in the classroom among students and teachers where only some aspects of the global models are embraced. This points to an inherent tension in citizenship education that seeks to address a contentious past by drawing on global models around citizenship and human rights while also promoting national civic values.

Leadership Emergence in Post-Genocide Rwanda: The role of Women in Peacebuilding

In the last two decades following the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has been praised internationally for its strong leadership and revamped governance structures. This has resulted in rapid economic development, restorative justice, homegrown peacebuilding approaches, the tackling of corruption, and restoring security in a country that some analysts had prematurely depicted a hopeless case in state failure. In particular, promotion of women’s rights has become a cornerstone of the Rwandan success story, but few scholars have examined the women who participated in this process and their positive contribution in rebuilding their communities. This article focuses on the role a small group of female leaders at different levels of society played in creating and fostering peacebuilding initiatives over the past two decades. It relies on secondary sources and the author’s observations of several processes in the Rwandan society for more than a decade. It focuses on constructive steps taken in Rwandan society to promote women’s leadership, which sets it apart from many other post-conflict countries while being aware of legitimate critiques of post-genocide Rwandan conditions.

The State of Journalism and Press Freedom in Postgenocide Rwanda

News media played a prominent role in perpetuating the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since then, Rwanda has undergone impressive social and economic growth, but the media landscape during this redevelopment remains understudied. Qualitative interviews with Rwandan journalists reveal that reporters censor themselves to promote peace and reunification. Short-term, prioritizing social good over media rights might help unify the country, but ultimately it could limit development and reinforce existing authoritarian power structures. Findings suggest that McQuail’s development media theory and Hachten’s developmental concept maintain relevance but point to the need for a new or revised media development paradigm.

‘I am Rwandan’: Unity and Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Drawing on a corpus of ten oral interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, we examine how the government’s policy of unity and reconciliation has shaped post-genocide identities and intergroup relations in local Rwandan communities. By focusing on the relationships between individuals and the national post-genocide narrative, we show how the socio-political context in Rwanda influences how people locate themselves and how they ascribe rights and duties to and in relation to others. Specifically, we use positioning theory as an interpretive lens to argue that individuals view adherence to the government’s post-genocide narrative of unity and reconciliation as a moral duty, which is vital to continued political stability and economic development in Rwanda. Our discussion focuses on explaining how the social positioning of the national post-genocide narrative may function to reinforce the ethnic tensions the government has pledged to eradicate.

Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide

ABSTRACTSocial scientists have extensively debated the virtues, pitfalls, and practical effects of open dialogue and truth-telling versus silence and concealment in global post-conflict endeavours for justice and reconciliation. This article addresses these debates not by endorsing practices of either talk or silence, but by investigating the practical dilemmas faced by Rwandan youth born of rape committed during the 1994 genocide as they find themselves caught in dual cultural imperatives to reveal and to conceal the circumstances of their origins. On the one hand, the post-genocide moment has seen the rise of truth-telling and self-revelation through testimonial practices in settings like post-genocide trials and reconciliation or peace-building workshops. On the other hand, silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship in Rwandan cultural practice, and youth participants struggled with the stigma of having been born of genocidal rape. We argue that the youths’ ambivalent and sometimes contradictory moral evaluations of talking about versus hiding their origins highlight the challenges and complexities of identity and belonging in post-genocide Rwanda, since their very existence draws them, their mothers, and their perpetrator-fathers into ongoing relationships. These youths’ lives and experiences speak to larger and powerful conundrums at the heart of what it means to live with legacies of violence, including what should be said or remain unsaid, and how the very opposition between revealing and concealing can be confounded by social and cultural variances in the meaning of “truth.”

Whose Justice? Which Democracy? Justice, Reconciliation and Democracy in Post-Genocide Rwanda—Challenges to Public Theology

Abstract How can a public theology advance the task of democracy in order to bring forth justice for all? This article focuses on post-genocide Rwanda as a current example of a country’s quest for justice, reconciliation and democratization after severe violent conflict. The first part traces the historical background of the Rwandan genocide with specific attention on the lack of just and democratic structures in pre-genocide Rwanda and the roles of the Christian churches therein. The second part explores the Christian churches’ involvement in the country’s current reconciliation process. Here, the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda (EPR) serves as a case study. The third part critically assesses the churches’ contribution to reconciliation with regards to how it serves to enhance—or hinder—the implementation of just and democratic structures.

Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda's Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes by Anuradha Chakravarty New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp ix + 367, £64·99 (hbk). - Inside Rwanda's Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide by Bert Ingelaere Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Pp xi + 234, US$64.99 (hbk). - Courts in Conflict: Interpreting

Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda's Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes by Anuradha Chakravarty New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp ix + 367, £64·99 (hbk). - Inside Rwanda's Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide by Bert Ingelaere Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Pp xi + 234, US$64.99 (hbk). - Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda by Nicola Palmer Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp v + 224, £59·00 (hbk). - Volume 56 Issue 1

Memorie vs memoriali: conflitti di attestazione e territori del trauma nel Rwanda del post-genocidio

Based on ethnographic research in post-genocide Rwanda, this article analyzes two different approaches to the Politics of Memory in Rwanda: the “living memory” in the Jose Kagabo’s experience and the “duty of memory “ in the official memorializations. The institutionalization of the rwandan memorial sites provides a narrative of the massacres through the places, showing limits and contradictions about of a new national story telling .

Memory And Justice In Post-Genocide Rwanda by Timothy Longman (review)

Memory And Justice In Post-Genocide Rwanda by Timothy Longman (review)

Are Children or Adolescents More at Risk for Posttraumatic Stress Reactions Following Exposure to Violence?: Evidence From Post-Genocide Rwanda.

Whether children or adolescents exhibit higher levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in response to violence is an unresolved research question. We examine this issue in UNICEF's 1995 National Trauma Survey (NTS) of 8-19-year-olds (n = 942) who survived the Rwandan Genocide and lived and attended schools in the community. PTSS were assessed with a symptom checklist based on DSM-IV indexed using an overall score comprising the sum of scores on all items and mean item scores of each of five distinct factors identified in a factor analysis within this sample. Eighty percent of the sample had witnessed massacres; 25%, rape/sexual mutilation. The overall symptom score among children was significantly (p < 0.05) lower than among adolescents. Among the five separate factors, this direct association of age with symptom levels held for two: re-experiencing (p < 0.001) and dysphoric arousal (p < 0.05), but not for the remaining three: avoidance, numbing, and anxious arousal. This discordance in factorial response to violence may help explain prevailing inconsistencies in the age-PTSS association reported to date.

The history syllabus in post-genocide Rwanda

This case study examined the questions: How are relations between Hutus and Tutsis portrayed in recent History syllabi in post-genocide Rwanda, and how may the narrative about these relations affec...

Delivering Maternal Health Services in Rwanda: The Role of Politics

Studies examining the impact of different kinds of organisational and institutional reform on service delivery in the health sector in developing countries highlight and explain advances, strengths, weaknesses, shortcomings and failures in delivery. They rarely explore directly the role of the prevailing political arrangements in individual countries, specifically how politics is organised and practiced, in influencing approaches to, and the nature and quality of, service delivery. This paper seeks to contribute towards filling the gap. It explores the extent to which the operation of Rwanda’s political system in the light of the prevailing political settlement shapes service delivery and outcomes in the health sector. A political settlement begets specific rules of the game and incentives, constraints, opportunities and risks in its own context. All things being equal, in Rwanda’s dominant party/dominant leader political settlement, the short- to medium-term prospects of the current government losing power to opposition rivals are slim. Consequently, there is no pressure on the government to deliver on popular expectations or suffer electoral defeat. In the face of marked achievements in recent times, therefore, the paper explores the possible influences on service delivery in post-genocide Rwanda. It argues that the nature of political organisation and how politics works are decisive.

Rwanda’s military as a people’s army: heroes at home and abroad

ABSTRACTThis article explores the Rwandan military’s central role and functions in both domestic and foreign policy through the two concepts of ‘people’s army’ and ‘hero’. The analysis is informed by material collected during six months of fieldwork inside the Rwandan military. The overarching theoretical objective of the article is to increase our knowledge of the role that narratives play in creating identities in specific contexts. It therefore draws on and contributes to a rich literature grounded in social constructivist ontology, which examines the relationship between narratives and identities. Empirically, the article contributes to the literature exploring the Rwandan military’s collective identity construction in post-genocide Rwanda and the consequences this has for the military’s roles both at home and abroad. The authors argue that the political and military elite’s production of narratives around the concepts: ‘people’s army’ and ‘hero’ in relation to the national military has three aims: (1) to construct a new military identity; (2) to promote domestic stability and to enhance Rwanda’s international status; and (3) to keep the government in power.

Neither obedient nor resistant: state history as cultural resource in post-genocide Rwanda

ABSTRACTFollowing the 1994 genocide, scholars have criticised the Rwandan government's official account of national history and its restrictions on competing historical narratives. But what might Rwandans be doing with that state narrativebesidesconforming to it out of fear of reprisal? I argue that to understand what sustains official narratives we must grasp not only their coercive aspects, but also how social actors put them to work for different reasons. I offer four possible forms of agency in which Rwandans engage when they reproduce official history to show how – while forcibly imposed – government narratives are nonetheless cultural resources that people can turn to personal and collective visions, projects and desires. The article aims to develop a more robust understanding of how people respond to imposed narratives of nationhood and history, since it is important to attend not only to resistance, but also conformity to them.

Twenty years later, the cognitive portrait of openness to reconciliation in Rwanda.

With this work, we intended to draw a cognitive portrait of openness to reconciliation. No study had yet examined the potential contribution of high-level cognitive functioning, in addition to psychological health, to explaining attitudes towards reconciliation in societies exposed to major trauma such as post-genocide Rwanda. We measured the contribution of general cognitive capacity, analytical thinking, and subjective judgements. Our results show that higher cognitive capacity is not associated with greater openness to reconciliation. On the other hand, proneness to think analytically about the genocide predicts more favorable attitudes towards reconciliation. The latter effect is associated with more tempered judgements about retrospective facts (e.g., number of genocide perpetrators) and prospective events (e.g., risk of genocide reoccurrence). This work establishes the importance of cognitive functioning in the aftermath of political violence: A better understanding of the influence of information processing on openness to reconciliation may help improve reconciliation policies and contribute to reducing risks of conflict reoccurrence.

Identification and Critique of the Values Education Notion Informing the Itorero Training Program for High School Leavers in Post-genocide Rwanda

While the academic literature is replete with affirming that ‘values-explicit’ citizenship education programs are biased and indoctrinatory, there is scant attention to substantiate this claim. The present paper fills this gap; it investigates the values education notion informing Itorero, a non-formal citizenship education platform for high school leavers (HSLs) in post-genocide Rwanda. The research reported here used a survey questionnaire, focus groups and interviews. The article engages with character education, care ethics, cognitive moral development and values clarification approaches to highlight the values education notion deemed preferable to competing concepts. It is revealed that in educating HSLs for values, Itorero is vehemently committed to character education. I argue that the overreliance on this approach raises serious concerns particularly because values education as it is done in Itorero seems like the cultivation of supportive behavior towards the government in office. Its content focuses on understanding what the government wants and the crafting of dispositions required for the implementation of defined policies.

Germany, South Africa and Rwanda: Three Manners for a Church to Confess its Guilt

The paper examines three historical situations where Christian churches confessed their guilt for their implication in episodes of extreme violence, whether by acts of omission or commission: post-Second World War Germany, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda. In Germany and in South Africa several churches confessed their guilt rapidly and fairly comprehensively. In Rwanda only the Presbyterian Church did so. The other churches either abstained from making any statement or only acknowledged the crimes committed by some of their members. This paper argues that, for a large part, the political and military context explains the difference. In Germany the war was irremediably lost and in South Africa the apartheid government had accepted the necessity of a regime change. In Rwanda, by contrast, the government which had orchestrated the genocide had withdrawn to a neighbouring country and vowed to continue the fight. A second factor is the quality of the church leadership, strong in the first two cases, weak and divided in Rwanda except for the Presbyterian Church.