Post-genocide identity politics in Rwanda

When the journal Ethnicities was launched in 2001, the first issue included an article by this author, which examined the politics of `race' and identity as central ingredients in the Rwanda genocide of 1994. This current article considers how political identities have been reconstructed since the genocide, especially from above. History, law and politics are examined, as central instruments in government efforts to construct a new Rwandan society and ensure that genocide will `never again' be possible. Evidence suggests that inequalities in income and land distribution have grown rapidly since 1994. At the same time, the poor and marginalized often find it difficult to openly express their views, including their political identities outside of officially circumscribed spaces and categories. Debates continue around numbers of victims and perpetrators, and new inter-elite conflicts have emerged along language lines. The article shows how race categories have been replaced with new terms, which arise from a particular reading of the genocide. A new foundation myth for Rwanda, a form of diasporic victim nationalism, is also briefly explored. Re-labelling Rwandans from above, the state continues to exercise tight control over the public expression of political identities. Open political debate is very difficult; the government frequently feels it is being attacked, and accuses critics of divisionism or harbouring a genocide mentality. If more inclusive forms of Rwandan-ness are to emerge in future, state controls will need to be relaxed, so that more complex forms of political identities can finally emerge

Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda

Any adequate account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda must acknowledge manipulation by external forces, domestic pressures and psychological factors. Even so, the nature of the Rwandan state must be seen as absolutely central. The genocide took place under the aegis of the state, and Rwandans were the main actors involved. Both precolonial legacies and colonial policies contributed to the formation of this state, whose increasingly autocratic and unpopular government was, by the early 1990s, facing serious threats to its hold on state power, for which genocide represented a last-ditch attempt at survival. Many of the mechanisms through which genocide was prepared, implemented and justi®ed in Rwanda bore striking resemblances to those used during the twentieth century's other major genocide, the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews

Enacting Citizenship and the Right to the City: Towards Inclusion through Deepening Democracy?

In this introductory article, the main theoretical concerns guiding this thematic issue are briefly discussed, alongside an overview of relevant literature on rights and urban citizenship. We draw on the work of Engin on ‘enacted citizenship,’ and combine Hannah Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city,’ for inspiration. The hope is that these concepts or theoretical tools help our contributors explore the ‘grey areas’ of partial inclusion and exclusion, and to connect the informal with the formal, migrants with professionals, locals with those from elsewhere. Since the contributions in this issue come from practitioners as well as scholars, we are interested in very different forms of urban citizenship being enacted in a range of settings, in such a way as to overcome, or at least side-step, social, economic and political exclusion within specific urban settings. In this introduction we reflect on urban migrants organising and mobilising to enact their own citizenship rights within specific urban spaces, and present each of the eight published articles, briefly illustrating the range of approaches and urban citizenship issues covered in this thematic issue. The examples of urban enacted citizenship practices include efforts to construct economic livelihoods, gain access to health care, promote political participation, reweave the social fabric of poor neighbourhoods, and provide sanctuary. All of which, our contributors suggest, requires the engagement of the local urban authorities to allow room for the informal, and to accept the need for improved dialogue and improved access to public services

Urunana Audiences at Home and Away: Together 'Hand in Hand'?

Urunana (‘Hand in Hand’) is Rwanda’s first radio soap opera. The production emerged during the late 1990s from a three-way transnational production partnership between: The Great Lakes section of the BBC World Service; the Well Woman Media Project of the London-based NGO, Health Unlimited; and a group of dramatists and broadcasters working in Rwanda. Broadcast by the BBC World Service, the production was initially produced and edited by Health Unlimite. It is now produced by the Urunana Development Communication (see www.urunanadc.org/), which estimated that the program is regularly listened to by almost 70 per cent of Rwandans.2 Urunana is explicitly adapted for the Rwandan context from the format of a long-running BBC Radio 4 soap opera, The Archers, which dramatises the ups and downs of rural characters in England (see Bielby and Harrington, 2002; Jordan, 2007: 7; Soares, 2008). Since 2008, when Urunana won a prestigious media development award for encouraging audiences to discuss safe sex, family planning, and other issues that are generally considered taboo in Rwanda, the program has started to be of interest to researchers in gender, health and media outside the field of ‘edutainment’.3 Our interest in this article is in exploring how the soap opera is produced, but first of all how it has helped to promote women’s sexual health and mend relationships in post-genocide Rwanda

The 2007 "NO CAFTA" movement in Costa Rica

This study addresses political participation rights from the perspective of a social movement. We focus on the case of the NO movement which emerged in Costa Rica in 2007 in the run-up to the Referendum on ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The study explores some ways the NO movement sought to make political participation rights real for voters during the Referendum campaign. The central focus is on how political participation rights were claimed and exercised by members of the movement. We consider how more democratic understandings of political participation emerged, during the campaign process itself from the NO movement's practices. The main findings are that the NO movement's understanding of political participation rights was intimately connected to how the movement framed its own collective actions, which were understood as a defence of a historically and socially-embedded Costa Rican model of development. This in turn arose from a certain, shared nationalist vision that combined liberal democracy, economic nationalism and welfarist redistribution. During the CAFTA Referendum process, the NO movement's members sought to realize participation rights through both formal and informal claims and practices. On the one hand, NO movement participants demanded -- and claimed -- formal institutional accountability for the protection of these rights. At the same time, they relied heavily on their own efforts to open up and protect new spaces for collective action. The NO movement thus defended its own members' and supporters' rights to political participation in several ways. In our view, this process helped promote wider critical awareness of the prospects for active citizen involvement in public decision making processes in Costa Rica generally. The study suggests that even in the absence of effective legal regulations that can be used to protect people's political rights to participate, a movement can sometimes build effective rights realization "from below", through creating spaces for democratic participation of citizens. It is argued that this is often a crucial dimension of rights realization and that rights to political participation can be exercised by citizens as well as claimed from the state. One of the main democratic contributions of the NO movement was to help open up new debates what kind of state, what kind of society, and what kind of economic development Costa Ricans wanted. Contestations of existing power relations were central to the pre-Referendum debates around CAFTA. And this study suggests that the NO movement thus challenged neoliberal notions of development and democracy both through its messages and through its organizational practices during the Referendum campaign. Authoritarian exclusionary and vertical logics, as well as the principles of competence and commercialization, came into question in the process

Réunion

The year 2002 reminded the people of Réunion of the power of nature. Cyclone Dina caused destruction and the Piton de la Fournaise volcano erupted twice, causing lava to spill over on to the coastal road and pour into the sea. The main political events were the French presidential elections, local general elections for the French Parliament and local district elections for the Department Council. In Reunion,the results represented a victory for what can be termed a "blue wave", blue being the colour associated with the right-wing parties in France. These parties not only won the municipal elections in 18 out of 24 councils, but also took control of the General Council, which was previously a left-wing stronghold. Réunion’s voters followed metropolitan trends in this swing towards right-wing parties. They did not, however, follow national trends in voting for the French National Front during the second round of the presidential elections