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Twenty years after the end of the Rwandan genocide, knowledge production on the small country of a thousand hills remains a clamorous battle ground of post-and decolonial power and influence. In this essay I critically engage with the knowledge production on Rwanda in the West by conceptualising it as a Wilsonian intervention in the post-colony: paternalistically well-intended at the service of the peace, democracy and free trade liberal triad, while at the same time silencing, self-contradictory and potentially counterproductive. The Wilsonian interventionist form of knowledge production is coated in a language of critical engagement and care. At the same time it is and allows for a continuous external engagement in view of this Wilsonian triad (Acuto 2008, 463)-a highly particularist view on the good life, cast in universal terms. As a former journalist and a researcher from the Belgian Rwandan diaspora and building on a decolonial research strategy, in this essay I reflect on potentially different avenues to produce and consume knowledge on the country. I do this by discussing the challenges and creative opportunities of a recently started research project on Agaciro (self-worth): a philosophy and public policy in post-genocide Rwanda rooted in its precolonial past, centred on the ideals of self-determination, dignity and self-reliance. Rather than inscribing itself firmly into the canon that aims at informing on Rwanda, this research project seeks to contribute to a different mode of imagining, studying and enacting sovereignty in today's academic and political world, both permeated by the hegemonic principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P). INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTUALISING THE MAINSTREAM CANON ON RWANDA Commemorations and anniversaries tend to be ideal sites to investigate the quality and effects of our knowledge production. In the days leading up to the start of the 100 commemoration days on April 7th 2014, clear attempts were made to dig deeper into Rwanda's past and present. The mainstream media were inundated with a five minutes avalanche of news and background stories of a nevertheless silenced country. Mainstream, in this context, refers to a canon, a body of knowledge rather than individual pieces of work or authors. It more specifically refers to the collection of the majority of the best known, most accessible, most read accounts on Rwanda in the media and the scholarship. Often times, the glue between the two-a common feature in the knowledge production on Africa-are the many Western and internationally financed NGO and aid workers that provide information from the field. For many Western journalists, as well as some scholars, they tend to be the first point of contact, while on

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This review essay is a generative reading of four monographs and one special issue to rethink the discipline of International Relations (IR) and its syllabus anticolonially. At the centre of White Innocence by Gloria Wekker, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe, The Colonial Lives of Property by Brenna Bhandar, Beyond Coloniality by Aaron Kamugisha and the New Political Economy special issue titled Raced Markets edited by Robbie Shilliam and Lisa Tilley are issues of race and racism, neoliberalism and capital and (the afterlives of) colonisation and slavery. This essay deploys a narrative approach of the autobiographical example to write the themes and arguments of the works onto the international everyday, i.c. a period of five months (April-September 2019) and the five places (Toronto, Stellenbosch, (New) England, Ghana and Puerto Rico) in which these works were read. First, the themes of racism, capitalism and coloniality – to varying degrees disavowed and erased in both IR as a discipline and public opinion – appear as persistent, pervasive yet adapting across time, space and situatedness. Second, both the autobiographical examples and the works point at the equally omnipresent cracks in the system and invite reflection on anticolonial alternatives (of solidarity). In conclusion, the essay explores how these works could inform reconceptualisation of the IR syllabus, towards a discipline that engages with the world rather than itself, against the colonial status quo.

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