Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda

Abstract

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Imagining genocide heritage: Material modes of development and preservation in Rwanda

“…Government interventions also target the physical landscape, land use, and built structures through initiatives such as villagization and land reform (Ansoms, 2009; Newbury, 2011) and projects of urban development that aim to reshape the capital city, Kigali (Goodfellow, 2017; Shearer, 2017). Additionally, government-directed transformations make politically strategic use of the past through projects of education, including at heritage sites, especially for nation-building purposes (Giblin, 2012; Jessee, 2017). Heritage is also a key component of economic development efforts, particularly through the conservation and use of natural heritage for international tourism (Giblin et al, 2017), although in recent years, the government has sought to increase domestic and cultural tourism (Mazimhaka, 2007; Rwanda Development Board, 2016).…”

“…2 They are critical sites for the construction of national identity via the historical narratives advanced there, but they are also places of contestation between the government’s goals for history education and genocide survivors’ desires for commemoration (Dumas and Korman, 2011; Ibreck, 2010). While acting as places of mourning and commemoration, they are also deeply involved in the RPF’s politics of memory and identity (Jessee, 2017; Korman, 2013), especially through promoting official narratives about the genocide while suppressing unofficial ones (King, 2010; Longman, 2017: 65–90). The official histories promulgated at these sites are sometimes resisted, including by survivors (Ibreck, 2010), and their use of human remains has also been contested (Korman, 2015).…”

Motivational change in the perpetration of genocidal violence

“…With this approach, motivations for each individual action can be distilled, allowing for people to participate in different types of actions at different times. This allows us to comprehend better more complex political actors, who at once may be any combination of perpetrator, victim, rescuer and bystander (Baines, 2009; Bouris, 2007; Jessee, 2017). There is a broad array of psychological research on motivations (see also Heckhausen and Heckhausen, 2018; for an introduction, see Patall, 2012; Ryan, 2012; Strombach et al, 2016).…”

“…Within this study of the micro-dynamics of genocidal violence, there has been an important focus on the motivations of the people participating in violence, particularly in genocide, with many thought-provoking studies studying these men and women as cogs within a larger machine and endeavoring to understand their motivations for participating. There have been excellent studies conducted on the Holocaust (Browning, 2001; Dumitru and Johnson, 2011; Grabowski, 2013; Gross, 2003; Kühl, 2014; Lifton, 2000; Mann, 2000; Welzer, 2006), the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Fletcher, 2007; Fujii, 2009; Hogg, 2010; Jessee, 2017; McDoom, 2013, 2014; Smeulers, 2015; Smeulers and Hoex, 2010; Straus, 2006; Verwimp, 2005), as well as on the Armenian genocide (Mann, 2005), Bosnia in the early 1990s (Clark, 2009; Lieberman, 2006; Mueller, 2000; Petersen, 2002), the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s (Hinton, 2005; Williams and Neilsen, 2019; Williams and Pfeiffer, 2017), as well as on the microdynamics of intercommunal violence (Bergholz, 2013). These are complemented by more systematic and comparative approaches (Alvarez, 2001; Anderson, 2017; Waller, 2002; Williams, in press).…”

Music and the politics of the past: Kizito Mihigo and music in the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

“…Over the past two decades, RPF elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize and systematize the official narrative, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Over the years, the official narrative has been communicated through state-organized and citizen-driven channels using individual survivor stories (Ibreck, 2010; Jessee, 2017; Longman, 2017). Genocide memory is at the centre of national politics, foreign policy–making and socio-economic programmes in what has become an authoritarian political climate (Straus and Waldorf, 2011).…”