Letter from Alison Des Forges to David Rawson

The letter itself is not the main focus of this document. Attached to the letter is a memo detailing new United States policy for Rwanda, following Paul Kagame establishing a new government in Rwanda.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/rawson_rwanda/1098/thumbnail.jp

Marking Space and Making Place: Geographies of Graffiti in Wellington, New Zealand

Contemporary graffiti dates from the 1960s when hip-hop style graffiti grew in popularity amongst youth in Philadelphia and New York. It has since spread throughout the world and its various forms and styles are considered both art and vandalism. In Aotearoa New Zealand, graffiti is seen in most urban areas and is regarded as a major problem for local authorities. Despite this, research concerning graffiti in New Zealand is sparse. This research contributes to emerging work on graffiti in Wellington and New Zealand. It aims to provide an insight into the geographies of graffiti in Wellington by exploring the visual, spatial, and temporal aspects of graffiti, as well as the social dynamics informing its production and distribution. Using this information I investigate parallels between what is happening locally and what has been documented in international research. To carry out the research aims, I employed qualitative observations of selected sites around the city over time and used photographs to interpret and document graffiti. I also carried out semi-structured interviews with some graffitists, in addition to people involved in city safety and efforts to stop graffiti. In framing the research I specifically draw from critical geography writing on discourse, power, resistance, place, and space which are particularly salient in regards to graffiti. The research documents similarities with international research in regards to the motivations, rules, and visual, temporal, and spatial aspects. However, Wellington graffitists interact with, and utilise, the city’s space in unique and multifaceted ways which reflect and exhibit localised differences worthy of consideration internationally. For instance, graffitists use, view, and read the urban environment in ways that result in them having an intimacy with the urban environment. Additionally, graffitists think about where they place their graffiti with regards to property, location, intended audiences, and observance to subculture rules

Marking Space and Making Place: Geographies of Graffiti in Wellington, New Zealand

Contemporary graffiti dates from the 1960s when hip-hop style graffiti grew in popularity amongst youth in Philadelphia and New York. It has since spread throughout the world and its various forms and styles are considered both art and vandalism. In Aotearoa New Zealand, graffiti is seen in most urban areas and is regarded as a major problem for local authorities. Despite this, research concerning graffiti in New Zealand is sparse. This research contributes to emerging work on graffiti in Wellington and New Zealand. It aims to provide an insight into the geographies of graffiti in Wellington by exploring the visual, spatial, and temporal aspects of graffiti, as well as the social dynamics informing its production and distribution. Using this information I investigate parallels between what is happening locally and what has been documented in international research. To carry out the research aims, I employed qualitative observations of selected sites around the city over time and used photographs to interpret and document graffiti. I also carried out semi-structured interviews with some graffitists, in addition to people involved in city safety and efforts to stop graffiti. In framing the research I specifically draw from critical geography writing on discourse, power, resistance, place, and space which are particularly salient in regards to graffiti. The research documents similarities with international research in regards to the motivations, rules, and visual, temporal, and spatial aspects. However, Wellington graffitists interact with, and utilise, the city’s space in unique and multifaceted ways which reflect and exhibit localised differences worthy of consideration internationally. For instance, graffitists use, view, and read the urban environment in ways that result in them having an intimacy with the urban environment. Additionally, graffitists think about where they place their graffiti with regards to property, location, intended audiences, and observance to subculture rules

Situating Sexual Violence in Rwanda (1990–2001): Sexual Agency, Sexual Consent, and the Political Economy of War

This article situates the sexual violence associated with the Rwandan civil war and 1994 genocide within a local cultural history and political economy in which institutionalized gender violence shaped the choices of Rwandan women and girls. Based on ethnographic research, it argues that Western notions of sexual consent are not applicable to a culture in which colonialism, government policy, war, and scarcity of resources have limited women’s access to land ownership, economic security, and other means of survival. It examines emic cultural models of sexual consent and female sexual agency and proposes that sexual slavery, forced marriage, prostitution, transactional sex, nonmarital sex, informal marriage or cohabitation, and customary (bridewealth) marriages exist on a continuum on which female sexual agency becomes more and more constrained by material circumstance. Even when women’s choices are limited, sometimes impossibly limited, they still exercise their agency to survive. Conflating all forms of sex in conflict zones under the rubric of harm undermines women’s and children’s rights because it reinforces gendered hierarchies and diverts attention from the structural conditions of poverty in postconflict societies

Green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of imposed innovation for the wellbeing of rural smallholders

Green Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefited smallholders in southern Asia and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda’s Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods, multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than ‘‘induced innovation”. The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade, and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages, and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be pro-poor or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people

“I’m only a dog!” : the Rwandan genocide, dehumanisation and the graphic novel

Graphic novels written in response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide do not confine their depictions of traumatic violence to humans, but extend their coverage to show how the genocide impacted on animals and the environment. Through analysis of the presentation of people and their relationships with other species across a range of graphic narratives, this article shows how animal imagery was used to justify inhumane actions during the genocide, and argues that representations of animals remain central to the recuperation processes in a post-genocide context too. Whilst novels and films that respond to the genocide have been the focus of scholarly work (Dauge-Roth, 2010), the graphic novel has yet to receive substantial critical attention. This article therefore unlocks the archive of French-, Dutch- and English-language graphic narratives written in response to the genocide by providing the first in-depth, comparative analysis of their animal representations. It draws on recent methodological approaches derived from philosophy (Derrida, [2008] trans. 2009), postcolonial ecocriticism (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010) and postcolonial trauma theory (Craps, 2012) in order show how human-centred strategies for recovery, and associated symbolic orders that forcefully position the animal outside of human law, continue to engender unequal and potentially violent relationships between humans, and humans and other species. In this way, graphic narratives that gesture towards more equitable relationships between humans, animals and the environment can be seen to support the processes of recovery and reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda

Essays on transforming security and development in an unequal world

These two papers add further dimensions to the discussions in IDS Bulletin 40.2 (March 2009) on ‘Transforming Security and Development in an Unequal World’ edited by Robin Luckham, Niagalé Bagayoko, Lucia Dammert, Claudio Fuentes and Michael Solis. Like the contributions to the latter, they were first discussed at the founding Colloquium of the Global Consortium for Security Transformation held at Kandalama, Sri Lanka in September 2007. Niagalé Bagayoko’s paper on ‘State, Non-State and Multilateral Logics of Action in Post-Conflict Environments’ considers the complexities of Northern policymaking and their impacts in post-conflict countries. It thus differs from but complements IDS Bulletin 40.2, which focuses mostly on security and development from a Southern perspective. She argues that a number of different policy logics are at work in the security, development, humanitarian and media etc domains, which are sometimes coordinated – but often in tension with – each other. Her approach thus differs from that of certain critical voices in the NGO and academic worlds, which hold that there is a danger that Northern security priorities might ‘securitise’ the humanitarian and development agendas, particularly in post-conflict environments. While these dangers are real, nevertheless one should not stereotype all international actors as ‘Northern’ or as promoting Northern security (e.g. anti-terrorist) agendas. It is instead more fruitful to view such actors as diverse players with conflicting interests that operate according to different policy logics. Lyndsay McLean Hilker’s paper on ‘Why Identity Politics Matters for Security and What Follows for Research and Policy’ spells out a general framework for analysis of identity-based violent conflict, drawing upon empirical examples, including Rwanda, where she has focused her own research. It is unique in its focus on the implications of analysis and research on identity politics for development policy. She contends that identity politics matter both to the persistence of insecurity and to the achievement of greater security. Evidence from multiple contexts demonstrates that identity provides an effective basis for group mobilisation into collective action – both violent and non-violent in nature. If we are to work to combat insecurity at the local as well as the global level, we need to look in more depth at the processes leading to violence in the name of identity in specific contexts, and explore the types of interventions that can prevent and respond to such violence. It is especially important to understand under what circumstances identity politics can be exercised in ways that are inclusive and empowering rather than exclusionary or violent. Keywords: security; conflict; ethnicity; identities; post-conflict reconstruction; humanitarianism; peace-building