Navigating the middle ground: The political values of ordinary Hutu in post-genocide Rwanda

Chakravarty, Anuradha

doi:10.1093/afraf/adu018

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…And yet the intergenerational women's group is uniquely positioned to foster authentic connection, in part because it is not affiliated with the government. More than 25 years post-genocide, many Hutu Rwandans remain sceptical of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front and distrust the local officials tasked with implementing reconciliation policy (Thomson 2013;Chakravarty 2014). In such scenarios, policy developed outside the state is a crucial complement to the state-based work referenced above.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shaping policy, sustaining peace: Intergenerational activism in the policy ecosystem

Luttrell-Rowland

Engebretson

Segalo³

2021

Agenda

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Current discussions of peace and security-related policy in Africa focus disproportionately on the work of governmental actors, regional organisations, and the African Union. Implicit in such a framing is the assumption that policy change is driven primarily by state and international institutions. This paper pushes back on that assumption by showing how girls' and young women's grassroots activism can function as a source of innovative policymaking. Writing as a collective of activist-scholars on the ground in South Sudan,

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shaping policy, sustaining peace: Intergenerational activism in the policy ecosystem

Luttrell-Rowland

Engebretson

Segalo³

2021

Agenda

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“…The continent includes some of the most ethno-linguistically diverse societies in the world, while countries such as Nigeria feature over one hundred self-identified groups. Taken together with evidence that many-though far from all-citizens vote along ethnic lines (Bratton et al 2012;Dulani et al 2021), and that ethnic identity has played a significant role in some of Africa's most destructive wars (Abbay 2004;Chakravarty 2014), it makes sense that many scholars have worried that the strength of sub-national identities undermines the prospects for political stability and the provision of public goods.…”

Section: Democratisation In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

African exceptions: democratic development in small island states

et al. 2021

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Small island states are much more likely to have democratic regimes than large continental states. This trend also holds across Africa, where the five island states with populations of 1.5 million or less are all rated at least 'partly free' by Freedom House. In this article we explore what it is about being a small island state that might explain this trend. Building on studies from other small island states, we find that the interaction between the two contextual factors is key to explaining their diversion from mainland trends in the African context. Specifically, 'smallness' leads to closer links between citizens and politicians in addition to more effective service delivery, while 'islandness' promotes community cohesion and provides a buffer against instability and conflict in neighbouring states. This results in a positive feedback loop that guards against authoritarian excess. Our focus on population size and geography thus adds to the existing studies of the contextual drivers of African democratisation.

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“…Empathising with a perpetrator runs the risks of mitigating their crimes and negating the experiences of victims, not to mention the fear that readers will somehow be contaminated by the perpetrator's ideology although, in the case of Rwanda, there is evidence to suggest that most ordinary perpetrators did not in fact subscribe to the 'genocide ideology'. 59 Some authors use their texts to position perpetrators in terms of a moral hierarchy. For example, in The Shadow of Imana, Tadjo's portrait of 253 women prisoners suggests that she is personally more shocked by the acts of female perpetrators than those by male perpetrators: 'We would have preferred them [the women] to be innocent', she writes.…”

Section: According To Robert Eaglestone What Unites All Perpetrator Fictions About Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Intimate Enemies: Representations of Perpetrators in Literary Responses to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Hitchcott

2018

Perpetrating Selves

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as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally killed. 1 One of the distinguishing features of the Genocide against the Tutsi was the mass participation of ordinary citizens in the killings. 2 Victims were often attacked by neighbours, friends and even members of their own families. It is difficult, if not to say impossible to know exactly how many people actually took part in acts of genocide in 1994. Estimated numbers range from tens of thousands to as many as 3 million people slaughtering between 800,000 and 1 million victims. 3 Indeed, the extraordinarily high number of civilians involved, directly or indirectly, in acts of torture, mutilation, killing and rape, often accompanied by looting and damage to property was, as an African Rights report reminds us, 'unprecedented in the world '. 4 Describing her visit to an overcrowded Rwandan prison in 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo writes that '[t]he whole of society is represented here: former politicians, businessmen, civil servants, managers, teachers, artists, schoolchildren, students, peasant farmers, doctors, women, priests, pastors, nuns'. 5 1 What follows is closely based on a chapter in my book, Rwanda Genocide Stories:

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Navigating the middle ground: The political values of ordinary Hutu in post-genocide Rwanda

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Shaping policy, sustaining peace: Intergenerational activism in the policy ecosystem

Shaping policy, sustaining peace: Intergenerational activism in the policy ecosystem

African exceptions: democratic development in small island states

Intimate Enemies: Representations of Perpetrators in Literary Responses to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

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