Remaking Rwanda: State building and human rights after mass violence

This edited collection is a very welcome addition to the literature on Rwanda's recovery following the civil war that culminated in genocide in 1994. Western media and policy makers, along with some academic commentators, have tended to paint a rather simplistic and positive picture of Rwanda's post-genocide trajectory. This book takes stock of Rwanda's achievements and challenges at an important juncture, and on balance its evaluation of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is quite critical. The collection is split into five parts: governance and state-building; international and regional context; justice; rural re-engineering; and history and memory. The analysis also reflects on broader themes crucial to understanding Rwanda's post-genocide trajectory and the ways in which these have been interpreted by ‘outsiders’. In particular, the chapters draw on interviews, observations, and the authors' considerable first-hand experience to demonstrate the tension between building a strong state in order to avoid future violence and the need to ensure that such a state respects human rights and does not itself become a source of violence, whether physical or structural. The volume also has much to say on the scale and scope of the Rwandan government's re-engineering project since 1994, not only of rural structures and lives but also across society more broadly. The ambition of the RPF-led government is not in doubt, and is foregrounded in the collection. Its manifestations are revealed across different sectors of society in chapters such as Waldorf and Straus's Introduction (entitled ‘Seeing like a post-conflict state’, and recommended reading for those interested by the challenges of reconstruction even beyond the Rwandan context), as well as those by Catharine Newbury and An Ansoms, chapters 14 and 15 on the rural context, and other chapters on governance and state-building, and on history and memory. Aside from these overarching contributions to debates on Rwanda's ‘transition’ there is much to commend in the closer focus of individual chapters. Thomson's account of being ‘required’ by the Minister of Local Government to attend an ingando (solidarity) camp to ‘learn the truth’ about the government's policy of national unity and reconciliation is a case in point. It demonstrates that although the government benefits politically from its careful circumscribing of acceptable political activity, those crafting such policies seem almost evangelical in their commitment to them, even in the face of criticism from both within (see Paul Gready's Chapter 5 on civil society) and without. The role of donors and external support in facilitating aspects of the Rwandan ‘miracle’ recovery, not least through financial backing but also through diplomatic and moral support – in the face of criticism over Rwanda's activities in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo – is well documented both here (chapters 6–9) and elsewhere. This brings me to what, to my mind, is the real strength of the collection. The chapters range in focus both in terms of scale, including observations on remaking Rwanda as viewed at the international, regional, national, and sub-national levels, and in scope, from the impact of different justice mechanisms in one small community (see Max Rettig's Chapter 12) to the broader questions of the accountability of Rwanda's military and political elite for crimes committed in its much larger neighbour. Yet despite this variety the collection feels well integrated, with each of the individual authors recognizing the importance of taking into account the role of both internal and external pressures in producing the outcomes and processes that they describe. The overall tone is certainly critical of the RPF, though the depth of criticism varies across chapters, but the book is never dismissive of the difficult and complex range of challenges that successive post-genocide governments have faced. It is a welcome addition not only to the literature on Rwanda's recovery, but also in terms of the insight it offers into the challenge of ensuring human rights are respected and promoted after mass violence, and that, in the end, the push from both international actors and state elites to build ‘strong’ states does not come at the expense of rebuilding society and a sustainable peace for war-affected populations.