Re-Examining Resistance in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Abstract

The scholarship on Rwanda interprets a large swathe of rural activities as types of resistance to government policies instituted by the current ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). This paper presents a detailed life history of an elderly rural man who actively resisted ethnically discriminatory violence in Rwanda in 1973, 1990 and the 1994 genocide. His decision not to participate in the violence provides an archetypal example of active resistance and allows for an analysis of what it means to resist state power in a particular time and place. This ethnographic research provides one route to nuance the current interpretations of resistance in Rwanda. It proposes that the dominant accounts of peasant resistance, which draw heavily on the theoretical work of James C. Scott, often neglect power differentials within rural communities and fail to take adequate account of the normative dimensions that underpin an individual’s decision to resist. It concludes with a call for a more careful analysis of how and why people resist state power in Rwanda.

Keywords: Rwanda, resistance, gacaca, thick description