Rwandan State Research Articles

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.

Aid, trade and the post-war recovery of the Rwandan coffee sector

ABSTRACTWe investigate the post-war recovery of the Rwandan coffee sector. First, we look at the recovery of export earnings at the national level and show that the role played by the rise in international coffee prices largely outweighed the one played by domestic policies to boost coffee production and quality. Second, we analyze the subnational variation in the recovery of coffee tree investment and reveal the legacy of armed conflict. In 1999 – five years after the peak of the violence – highly violence-affected regions exhibit significantly lower tree planting and maintenance. Within a decade, the gap is however closed. We discuss the role that positive externalities generated by high-profile public investments in the coffee sector might have played in the catch-up process. We frame this discussion in the wider debate on the nature of the Rwandan State.

Gender, narrative and affect: Top-down politics of commemoration in post-genocide Rwanda

This article takes an interest in gendered memory politics and addresses the dearth of research on gender and commemoration in relation to the genocide in Rwanda. It analyses elite-produced gendered narratives at key sites of commemoration and investigates their affective role in constituting the post-genocide Rwandan state. Through a methodological approach of ‘the situated gaze’, three central observations are made. First, women are mourned as a specific category of rape victims and mothers. Second, women’s experiences of sexual violence are at the same time censored and de-individualized. Third, no other experiences, beyond being a victim, are taken into account. The article finds that the top-down affective memory politics circumscribes the role women played during and after the genocide, and restricts their agency within the present state project of ‘national unity and reconciliation’.

The making of a ‘superstar’: the politics of playback and live performance in post-genocide Rwanda

AbstractThis article considers the reconstruction of Rwanda's post-genocide music industry through the national music competition, Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It explores local ideas about ‘playback’ and ‘live’ music, and argues that these two performative categories can be understood as wider metaphors for the relationship between the Rwandan state and its citizens, particularly Rwandan youth. On the one hand, Guma Guma aims to create the ideal post-genocide celebrity subject who will ‘play back’ a unified, de-ethnicized Rwandan identity with body and words. On the other, during the first two seasons of the competition, audiences demanded ‘live’ performance and Guma Guma prompted heated debate about ‘taboo’ topics, revealing enduring differences along socio-economic, ethnic and regional lines. Rather than affirm an inclusive Rwandan identity, Guma Guma hinted at its fragility and underscored the multiple and conflicting ways in which young people identify themselves and evaluate ‘truth’ in the post-genocide era. The article contributes not only to literature on popular culture in Africa, but also to studies that focus on mediation and changes in recording technology. Although scholars have quite rightly attempted to dissolve the boundary between the live and the mediated, I suggest that the boundary continues to do cultural and political work, particularly in developmental states.

“Mundane Sights” of Power: The History of Social Monitoring and Its Subversion in Rwanda

Abstract:By tracing the Rwandan state’s “mundane sights”—everyday forms of presence and monitoring—the article sheds light on the historical development and striking continuities in “interactive surveillance” across a century of turbulent political change. It considers three emblematic surveillance technologies—the institution ofnyumbakumi, the identity card, andumugandaworks (and public activities more broadly)—which, despite their implication in genocide, were retained, reworked, and even bolstered after the conflict ended. The article investigates what drives the observed continuity and “layering” of social monitoring over time, highlighting the key role played by ambiguity and ambivalence in this process. The research expands the concept of political surveillance, moving away from the unidirectional notion of “forms of watching,” and questions any easy distinctions between visibility and invisibility in the exercise of power or its subversion.

Victoire in Kigali, or: why Rwandan elections are not won transnationally

ABSTRACTThis article brings together the literature on ‘electoral authoritarian regimes’ with the sub-fields of diaspora studies and transnationalism to evaluate the potential of political parties in exile to be forces for positive change in Rwanda. With this in mind, the article asks one simple question: is the participation of the Rwandan opposition in exile in electoral processes back home likely to be a positive force for change? It concludes that, in Rwanda at least, elections cannot be won transnationally. As such, those hoping for a more democratic Rwanda should look elsewhere. Operating in a transnational space appears to make life harder for the opposition, but not the Rwandan state. Further, the division, inconsistency, sudden shifts, splits, and volte-face of Rwanda’s diasporic opposition is produced, at least in part, by the competitive authoritarian nature of Rwanda. What the Rwandan case reveals, then, is at least one instance where unfair elections do not make future liberalisation more likely.

Transitional Injustice: Subverting Justice in Transition and Postconflict Societies

Diverse in many respects, one unifying element of research on transitional justice (TJ) concerns the fact that predicted outcomes of these processes are normatively appealing; specifically, advocates argue TJ promotes truth and reconciliation, prevents armed conflict and increases democratization. This perspective further assumes that justice efforts are implemented with these goals in mind. We argue that it is possible for governments to implement TJ without maintaining an interest in truth, peace, or democracy but rather with the intention of promoting denial and forgetting, perpetuating violence, and legitimating authoritarianism—a process we call transitional injustice. In this article, we provide indicators by which scholars and policy makers can determine if transitional injustice is taking place. To further our argument, we conduct a detailed examination of Rwandan politics following the violence of 1994 and demonstrate the ways in which the Rwandan state has been able to use justice processes towards alternative ends.

Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century. Edited by Ebenezer Obadare and Wendy Willems (Martleshans, U.K., James Currey, 2014) 256 pp. $80.00

In the year of his death, Patrick Chabal, a leading scholar of modern African history, politics, and literature, wrote the forward to this edited volume, which celebrates the everyday resilience, strength, and global consciousness of the continent’s citizenry. His contribution is a testament to the work’s scholarly importance as a beacon of interdisciplinary synergy that promotes ongoing dialogue and understanding by paving empirical pathways that lead to the facts about African resistances. Chabal praised the book’s scope—“the myriad ways ordinary people cope with and undermine the politics of hegemony pursued by the political elite” (xv)—as well as its approach: “It is because the exercise of power in Africa is largely informal, that we need to turn to the informal if we are to understand what resistance means” (xvi).Obadare and Willems bring together eleven chapters that each draw on critical theory to bridge the humanities and social sciences by reimagining “resistance by tracking its ‘parallel infrastructures’, i.e. the subtle ways in which it is mobilised, plotted and enacted” (2). They abandon the dichotomous trope of domination and resistance often enacted in the scholarly debates about structural violence. Instead, through a selection of interdisciplinary, contextually grounded case studies from South Africa (Bettina von Lieres, Innocentia J. Mhlambi, Grace A. Musila, and Daniel Hammett), Angola (Bettina von Lieres), Kenya (Ilda Lindell and Markus Ihalainen), Nigeria (Basile Ndjio and Jendele Hungbo), Cameroon (Ndjio), Rwanda (Susan Thomson), and Mali (Dorothea Schulz), the editors and contributors bring to light “informal modes of civic agency” that illuminate how everyday political action in Africa Works (4–5).1 Not only are the people in these cases studied outside institutional settings, with attention being paid to everyday lives rather than formal civil society, but the nation-state is also decentered and deconstructed as the object of resistance; the chapter authors oppose power in many forms, what the editors label “fractured sovereignty” (6–7).The chapters in Civic Agency in Africa exemplify this social action in a number of creative ways. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for example, engages “coloniality as a global power structure that dilutes, truncates and influences the direction of resistance away from direct confrontation with global imperial designs” (28). Postcolonial Africa is rife with tensions or latent resistance that has the potential to manifest outwardly as direct resistance, as seen in the Arab Spring. Von Lieres discusses “mediated forms of citizen action” in both Angola and South Africa as a way to mobilize society or “deepen democracy” (50, 52).2 Lindell and Ihalainen’s chapter explores the logic of subaltern urban hawkers in Nairobi, Kenya, to show the processual and emergent nature of “space-making from below” (66). Ndjio’s study focuses on Nigerian and Cameroonian conmen who refashioned the conventions of global capitalism, supplanting Weber’s Protestant-based ethics with new forms of African capitalism.3Thomson’s chapter exposes an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the Rwandan state’s handling of reconciliation after the genocide. She presents various opportunities for resistance that instill political consciousness, such as one of her interviewee’s ability to speak out and inspire the voiceless because she is classified as abasazi (foolish). In her words, “In Rwanda, everyone is broken so no-one pays attention to people like me” (116). Mhlambi’s, Musila’s, and Hammet’s chapters discuss “Cultural sites of opinion-making” in South Africa (127), analyzing, respectively, how neoliberal commercialization has stunted satire, how comedic ambivalence has created spaces for social commentary on race and sexuality, and how controversial political cartoons have been used as a form of dysphemism to re-engage public dialogue and debate. In his chapter, Hungbo offers a compelling argument about African music’s contribution to a popular ideological struggle through interpretive textual analysis. Finally, Schulz surveys the proliferation of local radio programs in Mali that attempt to establish imagined communities.4 Schulz employs the concept of “resonance” to elucidate “the working of the ‘forming forms’ of music broadcasts, that is, how they inform listeners’ recognition, and contestations of certain broadcasts as their ‘truly own’ tradition” (198).Critically, Chabal points out that “agency is usually understood as directed, meaningful, intentional and self-reflective social or political action” (xv). But he suggests that “it is not just the reflex opposition, a mere ‘re-action’ to the actions of the agents of the state” (xv–xvi). The reader must ask if the “arts of resistance” presented in this volume are embodied conscious choices or reflections of an already extant and embedded structural system of violence.5 Only the former has implications toward real societal transformation.6

Ludobójstwo w Rwandzie i jego polityczne konsekwencje

The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and its political consequences
 In April 2014, the international community commemorated the 20th Anniversary of the Genocide in Rwanda. A series of events took place in Rwanda and around the World to honour the memory of those who died in this act of ethnic violence. Dramatic events from 1994 were undoubtedly a turning point in the history of this small African country. For the last two decades, Rwanda was on the path of significant political, social and economic changes. The main aim of this article is to reconstruct the course of the Genocide and to provide a description of changes that have occurred in Rwanda during the past twenty years. The author focuses mainly on changes in the political sphere. The article presents the socio‑political structure of Rwanda until and after gaining independence. It explains how the events of 1994 shaped the current structure of the Rwandan state. The article identifies the international dimension of the effects of the Genocide – deterioration of bilateral relations with France, destabilization in the African Great Lakes region and development of international justice instruments.

Making Good Citizens from Bad Life in Post‐Genocide Rwanda

ABSTRACTThis contribution explores the attempts by international humanitarian agencies and the post‐genocide Rwandan state respectively to deal with exceptionality created by the genocide and return to normality. It does so by comparing two kinds of camps that deal with exceptional life: the refugee camps for Hutu who fled after the genocide and the Rwandan government's ingando re‐education camps. While there are resemblances between the exceptional space of refugee camps and the ingando camps, there are also subtle differences. While the international community is attempting to create universal citizens out of ‘bare life’, the Rwandan state is attempting to create good citizens by exorcizing a concrete historical moment of violence; the Hutu who enter the ingando are perceived as what I term ‘bad life’. In this sense, the Rwandan state's concept of a new beginning differs from universalist claims to transitional justice in that it is specific, political and at times violent. Creating a new Rwanda is a political project which involves casting the country in a specific image.

Bringing the peasants back in, again: state power and local agency in Rwanda's gacaca courts

Rwanda's genocide trials through the gacaca community courts, between 2002 and 2012, have attracted substantial critique and also become a key vehicle for analysing wider political and social dynamics, including policy-making under the Rwandan Patriotic Front. A common criticism of gacaca is that it allowed the Rwandan state to deploy the language of devolved, popularly owned justice while further centralizing and consolidating state power. Based on fieldwork conducted over ten years, including more than 650 interviews and observations of 105 gacaca hearings, the article responds to this criticism and argues that while we should be sceptical of the Rwandan government's overly romantic depiction of gacaca as organic, decentralized justice and critical of other dimensions of state policy, we should be equally sceptical of characterizations of gacaca as simply another means for the state to entrench its power and influence in the countryside. This article contends that both perspectives are reductionist and fail to acknowledge the complex ways in which Rwandan citizens engage with the state and participate in government-initiated community-level processes such as gacaca.

Staging the Rwandan Diaspora: The Politics of Performance

This article explores how the Rwandan state ‘stages’ its diaspora as agents of change. I argue that ‘staging’ – in the sense of creating a specific, positive image – is an important aspect of the present government's effort to create a new Rwanda of national unity and reconciliation. Although the diaspora mostly is articulated in policy documents in positive terms, there is also a strong acknowledgement of the so-called ‘negative forces’ of the diaspora. Staging the diaspora as agents of change is therefore a means to deal with this ambiguous perception of the diaspora and cultivate only its positive sides, and becomes part of a larger state-building project that is about ‘staging’ or ‘performing’ national unity and asserting state sovereignty. I argue that the Rwandan state performs its sovereignty and governs its hostile diaspora through processes of categorising the diaspora and through processes of inclusion and exclusion of certain categories.

Constructing the border from below: Narratives from the Congolese–Rwandan state boundary

This article is about the simultaneous subversion and perpetuation of political borders ‘from below’. Using the state boundary between the cities of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gisenyi in Rwanda as a case study, this article shows how people make sense of their border-related social world. By analyzing everyday narratives and practices of people who live on both sides of the border, this article reveals popular geopolitics at work and demonstrates the inchoate character surrounding the idea of ‘the border’. Border talk is examined in key narratives and narrative clusters to emphasize the primacy of certain thematic plots and to reveal which aspects of the border people prioritize and how they attribute meaning to the idea of the border. Views of the border ranging from a desired barrier against the demonized ‘other,’ and as a means of exclusion, to its conception as an institution that may be in need of reform but is essential to economic survival, make clear that approaching the border through narratives means allowing for its historicity and relationality. Border narratives and practices reveal some neglected aspects of violent conflict in the study region and provide insights into state–society relations, an understanding of the state’s legitimacy, and an understanding of the effects of the border as a social construction that influences everyday life.

Britain's hidden role in Rwandan state violence

Stan Cohen noted how in Stalinist Russia, ‘the past has to conform to the present to establish a version of history (a master narrative) to legitimate current policy’ (Cohen, 2001). In Rwanda, Paul...

Gender Balance and the Meanings of Women in Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Across Africa many countries have taken initiatives to increase the participation and representation of women in governance. Yet it is unclear what meaning these initiatives have in authoritarian single-party states like Rwanda. Since seizing power in 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front has taken many steps to increase the participation of women in politics such as creating a Ministry of Gender organizing womens councils at all levels of government and instituting an electoral system with reserved seats for women in the national parliament. This article explores the dramatic increase in womens participation in public life and representation in governance and the increasing authoritarianism of the Rwandan state under the guise of democratization. The increased political participation of women in Rwanda represents a paradox in the short term: as their participation has increased womens ability to influence policy making has decreased. In the long term however increased female representation in government could prepare the path for their meaningful participation in a genuine democracy because of a transformation in political subjectivity. (authors)

Turning interahamwe: individual and community choices in the Rwandan genocide

The first person to be found guilty of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was Jean-Paul Akayesu, the bourgmestre 1 of Taba Commune in Gitarama.2 The prefecture of Git...

Conflict and resources in post‐genocide Rwanda and the Great Lakes region

The legacy of the genocide of 1994 has spread from Rwanda to the wider Great Lakes region, and its most damaging effects have been felt in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), former Zaire. Here an economy based on pillage and force of arms has been organized by local elites, and the Rwandan state, ensuring also on behalf of the West that it is not excluded from the scramble to extract rare mineral deposits, obtain forest products and otherwise exploit the resources of the DRC. The most noticeable after‐effect of the genocide has been mass refugee movements and internal displacement. The damage to environments throughout the region has been dramatic, and has been exacerbated by patterns of growing social inequality. In addition, social institutions that might be able to both manage resource use and resolve conflicts, have all but collapsed under the weight of a violent form of ethnic politics. The main hope for the future lies in reviving some of these community‐level institutions in ways that can overcome some of the more poisonous effects of racial identity politics throughout the Great Lakes region. The necessity for political solutions to environmental and resource problems is very clear; what is less clear is how such solutions can be formulated and implemented.

The Congo war and the prospects for state formation: Rwanda and Uganda compared

This article analyses the effect of the Congo war on state power in Rwanda and Uganda. Drawing on theories of European state formation, it asks whether the Congo war has led to a strengthening of the state in the two countries. It is argued that this has not been the case. Neither the Rwandan nor the Ugandan state has been strengthened as a result of the war. While the war has weakened the state in Uganda, the remarkable strength of the Rwandan state just a few years after the 1994 genocide must be understood as a result of the security threat faced by the regime from Hutu militias, and not as a result of the Congo war. This means that security threats against the regime can, in certain circumstances, have the same effect on state formation as war had in early modern Europe. I also argue that changes in the state system have altered the links between war and state formation. The ‘war makes states’ connection presupposes a positive relationship between war, regime survival and state formation. In contemporary Africa there is no such link. On the one hand, state survival is guaranteed anyway, no matter how weak the state is. On the other hand, regime survival does not depend on mobilisation of resources through taxation, since resources are available from elsewhere.

The Rwandan Path to Genocide: The Genesis of the Capacity of the Rwandan Post-colonial State to Organise and Unleash a project of Extermination

This article focuses on the link between the capacity to unleash a programme of extermination between 1 January and 31 December 1994 and the particular development and structure of the post-colonial state in Rwanda. It traces this ability to plan, organise and implement such a programme to the character of the institutional framework of the Rwandan state. This premeditated and organised campaign of extermination is the result of the cumulative radicalisation and intransigence of the existing MRND (Mouvement Révolutionaire National pour le Développement) one-party state apparatus to the process of transition towards democracy, between 1990 and 1994, coupled with its retention of an autonomous source of political power. This intransigence, and the facility with which this state apparatus retained an unhindered capacity to institute this programme, are themselves seen to be the product of longer-term continuities between the development of the Rwandan post-colonial state and Belgian colonialism.

Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda

Any adequate account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda must acknowledge manipulation by external forces, domestic pressures and psychological factors. Even so, the nature of the Rwandan state must be seen as absolutely central. The genocide took place under the aegis of the state, and Rwandans were the main actors involved. Both precolonial legacies and colonial policies contributed to the formation of this state, whose increasingly autocratic and unpopular government was, by the early 1990s, facing serious threats to its hold on state power, for which genocide represented a last-ditch attempt at survival. Many of the mechanisms through which genocide was prepared, implemented and justified in Rwanda bore striking resemblances to those used during the twentieth century's other major genocide, the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.