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Post-genocide Rwanda has become a 'donor darling', despite being a dictatorship with a dismal human rights record and a source of regional instability. In order to understand international tolerance, this article studies the regime's practices. It analyses the ways in which it dealt with external and internal critical voices, the instruments and strategies it devised to silence them, and its information management. It looks into the way the international community fell prey to the RPF's spin by allowing itself to be manipulated, focusing on Rwanda's decent technocratic governance while ignoring its deeply flawed political governance. This tolerance has allowed the development of a considerable degree of structural violence, thus exposing Rwanda to the risk of renewed violence. RWANDA IS A COUNTRY FULL OF PARADOXES, difficult for outsiders to comprehend and to apprehend. Although donor assessments differ considerably, and despite concerns over political governance domestically and the country's interference in the DRC, many in the international community have given the post-genocide regime the benefit of the doubt. Rwanda became and has remained a 'donor darling'. 1 Since most observers would agree that the regime has achieved impressive results since 1994, many are ready to support it without asking too many questions. The International Crisis Group (ICG) remarked that 'If they sometimes privately agree that some things are going seriously *Filip Reyntjens

Filip Reyntjens's book analyzes political governance in post-genocide Rwanda and focuses on the rise of the authoritarian Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the RPF has employed various means - rigged elections, elimination of opposition parties and civil society, legislation outlawing dissenting opinions, and terrorism - to consolidate power and perpetuate its position as the nation's ruling party. Although many international observers have hailed Rwanda as a 'success story' for its technocratic governance, societal reforms, and economic development, Reyntjens complicates this picture by casting light on the regime's human rights abuses, social engineering projects, information management schemes, and retributive justice system.

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