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There has been an explosion of scholarly writing on Rwanda since the genocide in 1994. Until then, the country appeared to be unknown or ignored by scholars. This essay attempts to critically synthesize some of this new scholarship by focusing on primarily two issues: the types of explanatory models developed to explain the genocide and the positions authors have taken regarding the role of the international community. Within this focus, the essay also considers the shortcomings of the new scholarship. The huge amount of documentation generated by the International Criminal Tribunal has been largely inaccessible to scholars. Moreover, these microlevel data tend to be without scientific hypothesis. Yet theory-informed macrolevel analysis has been limited to mostly young scholars who happened to be in Rwanda just before the genocide. The predominantly case-study focus on the genocide neglects postgenocide Rwanda, whose ongoing political, social, and economic dynamics also merit more in-depth research.
Peter Uvin (Sat,) studied this question.