Research Guides: Genocide Studies: Rwanda

Library Catalog

On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries

Rwanda by Ensign/Bertrand This book focuses on the innovative path Rwanda has taken in governance and reconciliation, gender equity, education, health and economic growth. The authors spent a decade working and researching in the country to prepare this path-breaking book.
Call Number: DT450.44 .E57 2010
The Rwandan Genocide by Alexander Cruden (Editor); Gale Editors (Editor) This volume provides a brief overview of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and then explores major factors that caused it, political corruption, and the repercussions of the violence. It offers a multinational perspective on the controversies surrounding the genocide, the current implications, and long-lasting effects. Personal narratives are included that will captivate your readers, giving them first-hand accounts of those who lived through it or were directly impacted by it.
Call Number: DT450.435 .R826 2010
The Order of Genocide by Scott Straus Winner of the Award for Excellence in Government and Political Science (AAP) The Rwandan genocide has become a touchstone for debates about the causes of mass violence and the responsibilities of the international community. Yet a number of key questions about this tragedy remain unanswered: How did the violence spread from community to community and so rapidly engulf the nation? Why did individuals make decisions that led them to take up machetes against their neighbors? And what was the logic that drove the campaign of extermination? According to Scott Straus, a social scientist and former journalist in East Africa for several years (who received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his reporting for the Houston Chronicle), many of the widely held beliefs about the causes and course of genocide in Rwanda are incomplete. They focus largely on the actions of the ruling elite or the inaction of the international community. Considerably less is known about how and why elite decisions became widespread exterminatory violence. Challenging the prevailing wisdom, Straus provides substantial new evidence about local patterns of violence, using original research--including the most comprehensive surveys yet undertaken among convicted perpetrators--to assess competing theories about the causes and dynamics of the genocide. Current interpretations stress three main causes for the genocide: ethnic identity, ideology, and mass-media indoctrination (in particular the influence of hate radio). Straus's research does not deny the importance of ethnicity, but he finds that it operated more as a background condition. Instead, Straus emphasizes fear and intra-ethnic intimidation as the primary drivers of the violence. A defensive civil war and the assassination of a president created a feeling of acute insecurity. Rwanda's unusually effective state was also central, as was the country's geography and population density, which limited the number of exit options for both victims and perpetrators. In conclusion, Straus steps back from the particulars of the Rwandan genocide to offer a new, dynamic model for understanding other instances of genocide in recent history--the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia, the Balkans--and assessing the future likelihood of such events.
Call Number: DT450.435 .S765 2006

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Streaming Video

Rwanda: After the Genocide
After World War I, Belgium took control of Rwanda from a defeated Germany and promoted the rule of the Tutsi tribe over the entire country. The 1959 Rwandan Revolution saw Hutu activists force more than 100,000 Tutsi into neighboring countries. Violence began again when the country gained its independence in 1962. The repression continued for decades, but economic growth lessened the violence. Over 100 days in 1994, the Rwandan Genocide killed 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. This episode looks at what has happened in the country since then. A Rwandan wedding ceremony and the birth of new families demonstrates the progress in healing old wounds. Also featured, is an interview with Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. Roth discusses the impact of the war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and around the world. Part of the series Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television. Original broadcast title:: Rwanda: After the Genocide, Show #306. (26 minutes)

From Baylor University Institute for Oral History

Websites

Rwanda
from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Online From CCBC Libraries

Becoming Human Again by Donald E. Miller; Lorna Touryan Miller (Contribution by); Arpi Misha Miller (Contribution by) Genocide involves significant death and trauma. Yet the enormous scope of genocide comes into view when one looks at the factors that lead to mass killing, the struggle for survival during genocide, and the ways survivors reconstruct their lives after the violence ends. Over a one hundred day period in 1994, the country of Rwanda saw the genocidal slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of members of the Hutu majority government. This book is a powerful oral history of the tragedy and its aftermath from the perspective of its survivors. Based on in-depth interviews conducted over the course of fifteen years, the authors take a holistic approach by tracing how victims experienced the horrific events, as well as how they have coped with the aftermath as they struggled to resume their lives. The Rwanda genocide deserves study and documentation not only because of the failure of the Western world to intervene, but also because it raises profound questions about the ways survivors create a new life out of the ashes of all that was destroyed. How do they deal with the all-encompassing traumas of genocide? Is forgiveness possible? And what does the process of rebuilding teach us about genocide, trauma, and human life?
ISBN: 9780520343771
Publication Date: 2020
Rwanda by Susan Thomson A sobering study of the troubled African nation, both pre- and post-genocide, and its uncertain future The brutal civil war between Hutu and Tutsi factions in Rwanda ended in 1994 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front came to power and embarked on an ambitious social, political, and economic project to remake the devastated central-east African nation. Susan Thomson, who witnessed the hostilities firsthand, has written a provocative modern history of the country, its rulers, and its people, covering the years prior to, during, and following the genocidal conflict. Thomson's hard-hitting analysis explores the key political events that led to the ascendance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leader, President Paul Kagame. This important and controversial study examines the country's transition from war to reconciliation from the perspective of ordinary Rwandan citizens, Tutsi and Hutu alike, and raises serious questions about the stability of the current peace, the methods and motivations of the ruling regime and its troubling ties to the past, and the likelihood of a genocide-free future.
Publication Date: 2018
Harvest of Skulls by Abdourahman A. Waberi; Dominic Thomas (Translator) In 1994, the akazu, Rwandan's political elite, planned the genocidal mass slaughter of 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and Hutu who lived in the country. Given the failure of the international community to acknowledge the genocide, in 1998, ten African authors visited Rwanda in a writing initiative that was an attempt to make partial amends. In this multidimensional novel, Abdourahman A. Waberi claims, "Language remains inadequate in accounting for the world and all its turpitudes, words can never be more than unstable crutches, staggering along... And yet, if we want to hold on to a glimmer of hope in the world, the only miraculous weapons we have at our disposal are these same clumsy supports." Shaped by the author's own experiences in Rwanda and by the stories shared by survivors, Harvest of Skulls stands twenty years after the genocide as an indisputable resource for discussions on testimony and witnessing, the complex relationship between victims and perpetrators, the power of the moral imagination, and how survivors can rebuild a society haunted by the ghost of its history.
Publication Date: 2017
From War to Genocide by André Guichaoua; Don E. Webster (Translator); Scott Straus (Foreword by) In April 1994 Rwanda exploded in violence, with political, social, and economic divisions most visible along ethnic lines of the Hutu and Tutsi factions. The ensuing killings resulted in the deaths of as much as 20 percent of Rwanda's population. André Guichaoua, who was present as the genocide began, unfolds a complex story with multiple actors, including three major political parties that each encompassed a spectrum of positions, all reacting to and influencing a rapidly evolving situation. Economic polarities, famine-fueled privation, clientelism, corruption, north-south rivalries, and events in the neighboring nations of Burundi and Uganda all deepened ethnic tensions, allowing extremists to prevail over moderates. Guichaoua draws on years of meticulous research to describe and analyze this history. He emphasizes that the same virulent controversies that fueled the conflict have often influenced judicial, political, and diplomatic responses to it, reproducing the partisan cleavages between the former belligerents and implicating state actors, international institutions, academics, and the media. Guichaoua insists upon the imperative of absolute intellectual independence in pursuing the truth about some of the gravest human rights violations of the twentieth century.
Publication Date: 2015
After "Rwanda" by Jean-Paul Martinon Is writing about peace after the Rwandan Genocide self-defeating? Whether it is the intensity of the massacres, the popularity of the genocide, or the imaginary forms of cruelty, however one looks at it, everything in the Rwandan Genocide appears to defy once again the possibility of thinking peace anew. In order to address this problem, this book investigates the work of specific French and Rwandese philosophers in order to renew our understanding of peace today. Through this path-breaking investigation, peace no longer stands for an ideal in the future, but becomes a structure of inter-subjectivity that guarantees that the violence of language always prevails over any other form of violence. This book is the very first monograph in philosophy related to the events of 1994 in Rwanda.Jean-Paul Martinon is Programme Leader of the MPhil-PhD Programme in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has written monographs on a Victorian workhouse (Swelling Grounds, Rear Window, 1995), the idea of the future in the work of Derrida, Malabou and Nancy (On Futurity, Palgrave, 2007), the temporal dimension of masculinity (The End of Man, Punctum, 2013), and the event of knowledge in museums (The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Bloomsbury, 2013). In each case, he writes in an attempt to make sense of time: its staging in museums, its advent, its gender, its neglect, the ethics that derive from it, and the way it is used and abused to structure human life. www.jeanpaulmartinon.net
Publication Date: 2013
Genocide Lives in Us by Jennie E. Burnet In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women faced the impossible--resurrecting their lives amidst unthinkable devastation. Haunted by memories of lost loved ones and of their own experiences of violence, women rebuilt their lives from "less than nothing." Neither passive victims nor innate peacemakers, they traversed dangerous emotional and political terrain to emerge as leaders in Rwanda today. This clear and engaging ethnography of survival tackles three interrelated phenomena--memory, silence, and justice--and probes the contradictory roles women played in postgenocide reconciliation.     Based on more than a decade of intensive fieldwork, Genocide Lives in Us provides a unique grassroots perspective on a postconflict society. Anthropologist Jennie E. Burnet relates with sensitivity the heart-wrenching survival stories of ordinary Rwandan women and uncovers political and historical themes in their personal narratives. She shows that women's leading role in Rwanda's renaissance resulted from several factors: the dire postgenocide situation that forced women into new roles; advocacy by the Rwandan women's movement; and the inclusion of women in the postgenocide government. Honorable Mention, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association
Publication Date: 2012