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

‘Buying a path’: rethinking resistance in Rwanda

In this essay, I tell the story of Jean-Baptiste, the president of a motorcycle taxi drivers’ co-operative, and his struggle against the machinations of certain high officials in Kigali City Council. Crucial to this story is the way in which Jean-Baptiste’s attempts to retain his position in the face of powerful opposition pit certain agencies of Rwanda’s party state against others. I use this ethnographic narrative to question the way in which much scholarship on popular resistance in Rwanda, drawing on Scott’s simplified opposition between the powerful and the powerless, opposes ‘ordinary Rwandans’ to ‘the state’ as monolithic entities with opposed interests. Theorising Jean-Baptiste’s story in terms of Rwandan idioms of relative power and influence, I suggest that such a Manichean view of power and resistance in Rwanda oversimplifies social realities. I propose instead a model of power and resistance that sees the state as a field of capacities and possible relationships that it presents for certain people, where ‘paths’ to influence and security may by ‘bought’ – especially, but not exclusively, by those who are ‘strong’ and ‘high’

Veto Players in Post-Conflict DDR Programs: Evidence from Nepal and the DRC

Under what conditions are Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programs successfully implemented following intrastate conflict? Previous research is dominated by under-theorized case studies that lack the ability to detect the precise factors and mechanisms that lead to successful DDR. In this article, we draw on game theory and ask how the number of veto players, their policy distance, and their internal cohesion impact DDR implementation. Using empirical evidence from Nepal and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that the number of veto players, rather than their distance and cohesion, explains the (lack of) implementation of DDR

Policy Entrepreneurship by International Bureaucracies: The Evolution of Public Information in UN Peacekeeping

The UN Secretariat’s role in the expansion of peacekeeping after the cold war is debated. Different theoretical accounts offer competing interpretations: principal–agent models and sociological institutionalism tend to emphasize the Secretariat’s risk-averse behaviour; organizational learning scholarship and international political sociology find evidence of the Secretariat’s activism; constructivism analyses instances of both. I argue that the UN Secretariat can be both enthusiastic and cautious about new tasks depending on the circumstances and the issue area. For example, UN officials have been the driving force behind the development of public information campaigns by peacekeeping missions aimed at the local population. During the cold war, it was not regarded as necessary for UN missions to communicate with the public in the area of operation: their interlocutors were parties to the conflict and the diplomatic community. With the deployment of the first multidimensional missions in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, UN staff realized the need to explain the organization’s role to the local population and provide information about UN-supported elections. In promoting this innovation, they played the role of policy entrepreneurs. The institutionalization of this innovation, however, was not an automatic process and required continuous advocacy by UN information staff

Rwanda: The Crisis Continues

Document collected by the University of Texas Libraries from the web-site of the Reseau Documentaire International Sur La Region Des Grands Lacs Africains (International Documentation Network on the Great African Lakes Region). The Reseau distributes "gray literature", non-published or limited distribution government or NGO documents regarding the Great Lakes area of central Africa including Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.UT Librarie