In the mid-1990s, civil war and genocide ravaged Rwanda. Since then, the country s new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda s politics, economy, and society, and the country s accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. "Remaking Rwanda" is the first book to examine Rwanda s remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country s reconstruction. Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, "Remaking Rwanda" brings together experienced scholars and human rights professionals to offer a nuanced, historically informed picture of post-genocide Rwanda one that reveals powerful continuities with the nation s past and raises profound questions about its future.Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School LibrariansBest Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers"

Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

The modernised tradition of the Gacaca courts has become the key mechanism for dealing with the past in Rwanda. The process needs to establish accountability for all acts of genocide and to foster reconciliation. Nevertheless, popular narratives and survey results reveal that a widespread ‘crisis’ accompanied the initial stages of the Gacaca process. We argue that a problematic quest for the truth is short-circuiting reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. Truth-telling is the cornerstone of the transitional justice framework due to the design of the Gacaca tribunals. On the basis of twenty months of fieldwork in Rwandan villages, we locate tensions at different levels. The Gacaca system is a distinctively modern phenomenon despite its traditional appearance. The state-sanctioned speaking of the truth according to a prosecutorial logic runs counter to the core values of the customary institution and established societal practices. This friction is further enhanced by the underlying Judeo-Christian model of truth-telling introduced with the Gacaca system in a socio-political environment mediated by a culture of deceit and dominated by a war victor. In such a socio-cultural context, communication serves the interests of the power holders (national and local), and not necessarily the interest of truth-telling and justice.

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'Does the truth pass across the fire without burning?' Locating the short circuit in Rwanda's Gacaca courts

There appears to be a rift between the theoretical and normative understandings of what reconciliation means and offers, and what people expect to happen in postconflict scenarios. Here we present a conceptual framework that captures the definitional diversity surrounding the concept of reconciliation and then operationalizes it in order to analyze responses from postconflict populations. The illustrative application of our framework to responses from a representative survey of 1,843 Colombian citizens reveals that people’s convictions are just as diverse as scholars’. Nevertheless, significant proportions of respondents seem to understand reconciliation to be primarily a psychological and political process which aims to achieve the re-establishment of quotidian or day-to-day relations and cooperation; which should be preceded by the cessation of violence, dialogue, goodwill, and attitudinal and emotional change; and which should be accompanied by social welfare and security. It is noteworthy that underst...

Reconciliation: A comprehensive framework for empirical analysis

This article analyses over 400 life trajectories of ordinary peasants in order to complement top-down studies of the Rwandan political transition. Changes and differences according to the ethnicity of the respondents shed light on the Hutu–Tutsi bi-polarity which underlies the transition and reveal a reversal in perceived ethnic dominance accompanying the decisive moment in the political transition: the overthrow of the Hutudominated regime by the Tutsi-led RPF. This suggests that the experience of the nature of governance and the (perceived) proximity to power lies at the heart of ethnic awareness. The nature of governance at the periphery of society is explored, and the article demonstrates that the instrumental stance on ethnic identity adopted by the post-genocide regime is not only erroneous but counter-productive. Adjusting the socio-political environment in which identities thrive is more important than a direct focus on identity constructs when developing policies to prevent ethnically structured violence.

Peasants, power and ethnicity: a bottom-up perspective on rwanda's political transition

This article argues that the central need in a society in the aftermath of violent conflict is to rebuild the state’s representation function, which should be constructed around an inclusive politi...

Rebuilding an Inclusive Political Community After War

National reconciliation is a vague and 'messy' process. In post-genocide Rwanda, it presents special difficulties that stem from the particular nature of the Rwandan crisis and the popular participation that characterized the Rwandan atrocities. This article outlines the main approaches being used in Rwanda to achieve reconciliation, highlighting some of the major obstacles faced by these institutions. It then goes on to argue that certain 'Silences' are being imposed on the reconciliation process, including the failure to prosecute alleged RPA crimes, the lack of debate on, and the instrumentalization of, Rwanda's 'histories', the collective stigmatization of all Hutu as genocidaires, and the papering over of societal cleavages through the 'outlawing' of 'divisionism'. The role economic development can play in the reconciliation process is also discussed. Given the Government of Rwanda's central role in the reconciliation process and its progressive drift towards authoritarianism, the article ends with a reflection on the worrisome parallels between the pre and post-genocide socio-political contexts.

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Eugenia Zorbas

Papers

Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda