ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the mid-1990s, civil war and genocide ravaged Rwanda. Since then, the country’s new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda’s politics, economy, and society, and the country’s accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. Remaking Rwanda is the first book to examine Rwanda’s remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country’s reconstruction.

Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda brings together experienced scholars and human rights professionals to offer a nuanced, historically informed picture of post-genocide Rwanda—one that reveals powerful continuities with the nation’s past and raises profound questions about its future.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Scott Straus is associate professor of political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Lars Waldorf, senior lecturer in international human rights law at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, is coeditor of Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence and Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-Combatants.

REVIEWS

“Remaking Rwanda is an ambitious book, a rich and varied compilation that demonstrates the full complement of approaches, methods, and concerns informing the study of post-genocide Rwanda.”—Lee Ann Fujii, author of Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda

“This rich array of careful scholarship provides a valuable, multifaceted view of a country still struggling with the aftereffects of genocide and civil war. It offers an important corrective to the naively rosy picture of Rwanda that too often prevails in the American media.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

“An important contribution to scholarship both on Rwanda and on human rights. Many of the chapters, by leading and emergent Rwanda scholars, directly challenge received wisdom about governance in post-conflict-states, and raise serious questions about the impact of a range of transitional justice measures on longer-term peacebuilding.”—Chandra Lekha Sriram, author of Peace as Governance: Power-Sharing, Armed Groups and Contemporary Peace Negotiations

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Alison Des Forges: Remembering a Human Rights Hero

Kenneth Roth

The Historian as Human Rights Activist

David Newbury

Introduction: Seeing Like a Post-Conflict State

Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf

Part I. Governance and State Building

1. Limitations to Political Reform: The Undemocratic Nature of Transition in Rwanda

Timothy Longman

2. Instrumentalizing Genocide: The RPF's Campaign against "Genocide Ideology"

Lars Waldorf

3. The Ruler's Drum and the People's Shout: Accountability and Representation on Rwanda's Hills

Bert Ingelaere

4. Building a "Rwanda Fit for Children"

Kirrily Pells

5. Beyond "You're Either with Us or against Us": Civil Society and Policymaking in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Paul Gready

Part II. International and Regional Contexts

6. Aid Dependence and Policy Independence: Explaining the Rwandan Paradox

Eugenia Zorbas

7. Funding Fraud? Donors and Democracy in Rwanda

Rachel Hayman

8. Waging (Civil) War Abroad: Rwanda and the DRC

Filip Reyntjens

9. Bad Karma: Accountability for Rwandan Crimes in the Congo

Jason Stearns and Federico Borello

Part III. Justice

10. Victor's Justice Revisited: Rwandan Patriotic Front Crimes and the Prosecutorial Endgame at the ICTR

Victor Peskin

11. The Uneasy Relationship between the ICTR and Gacaca

Don Webster

12. The Sovu Trials: The Impact of Genocide Justice on One Community

Max Rettig

13. "All Rwandans Are Afraid of Being Arrested One Day": Prisoners Past, Present, and Future

Carina Tertsakian

Part IV. Economic Development

14. High Modernism at the Ground Level: The Imidugudu Policy in Rwanda

Catharine Newbury

15. Rwanda's Post-Genocide Economic Reconstruction: The Mismatch between Elite Ambitions and Rural Realities

An Ansoms

16. The Presidential Land Commission: Undermining Land Law Reform

Chris Huggins

Part V. History and Memory

17. The Past Is Elsewhere: The Paradoxes of Proscribing Ethnicity in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Nigel Eltringham

18. Topographies of Remembering and Forgetting: The Transformation of Lieux de Mémoire in Rwanda

Jens Meierhenrich

19. Teaching History in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Harvey M. Weinstein, Karen Murphy, and Timothy Longman

20. Young Rwandans' Narratives of the Past (and Present)

Lyndsay McLean Hilker

21. Reeducation for Reconciliation: Participant Observations on Ingando

Susan Thomson

Part VI. Concluding Observations

Justice and Human Rights for All Rwandans

Joseph Sebarenzi

The Dancing is Still the Same

Aloys Habimana

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index

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