David Mwambari
Biographic Data
| ID | 355535 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Mwambari |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Mwambari |
| SIGNATURE | MWAMBARI D |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9126-6538 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 156 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Citizenship dilemma: How second-generation Rwandan migrants navigate life challenges in post-colonial Kenya
This paper explores the lived experiences of second-generation Rwandan labor migrants living in Kisii, Nandi and Kericho counties of Kenya. It examines how colonial policies and histories of famines in the 1940s in Rwanda and post-colonial Kenyan continue to shape descendants of Rwandan migrants today economically, politically and socially. Available literature often considers colonial history to make sense of cyclical violence, civil wars, genoc…
Vernacular memories: Recalling Rwanda’s 1943–44 famine during the Covid-19 hunger crisis
This article explores how the vernacular memory of the 1940s-era Ruzagayura famine was deployed to critique the contemporary Covid-19-induced hunger crisis in Rwanda. It methodologically advances memory studies scholarship by emphasising the importance of textual analyses of oral histories, poetry, proverbs and panegyrics, especially when transmitted on social media. This crucial revision can begin to redress the Eurocentric knowledge production …
Global crisis and research production: Covid-19 as shaper and shaker or micro-interruption
This special issue asks what happens to international research and collaboration when the research community becomes temporarily immobilized. The COVID-19 global pandemic powerfully disrupted normal ways of doing research and, therefore, created a perfect natural experiment of the 'otherwise' for digital qualitative research in sensitive contexts. The collected papers argue that the lessons extracted from this recent global health crisis should s…
Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Postgenocide Rwanda
This book analyzes how a master narrative of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi evolved into a hegemonic narrative. It identifies key actors of the evolution and enforcement of the master narrative in the first two decades after the genocide and civil war ended. Primary and secondary sources and rarely analyzed Rwandan folklore examine how Rwandans—identified as Champions, Antagonists, and Fatalists of the master narrative—responded through lang…
Bodily Scars as Lived Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Scholarship about politics and the body in conflicts has gained prominence in academic debates. This article advances these conversations by arguing that bodily scars are potent 'carriers' of memories of mass atrocities committed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Using both semi-structured interviews and a wide range of secondary sources, this study found that bodily scars - as physical manifestations of wartime torture and pain - …
Fatal misconceptions: Colonial durabilities, violence and epistemicide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region
The contributions of this special issue explore the concept of colonial durabilities in a bid to unearth both the concrete and invisible sites through which coloniality continues to circulate and materialise in the African Great Lakes Region (GLR). Colonial durabilities, we argue, are non-linear dynamic processes that suffuse the realities and structures of international and national politics, as well as the conduct of daily life. These become pa…
In Memory of Peacekeepers: Belgian Blue Helmets and Belgian Politics
This article explores the interactions between the memories of Belgian peacekeepers killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the weight of the colonial past, and the Belgian foreign policy. Using interviews with Belgian politicians and diplomats, families of peacekeepers, former blue helmets, as well as a corpus of official speeches, this article finds that the memorialization of blue helmets has influenced Belgian political choices on three levels…
The impact of open access on knowledge production, consumption and dissemination in Kenya’s higher education system
Open access (OA) journal publishing is presented in the literature as both an opportunity for and a threat to academics, authors and higher education systems. Institutions with information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure have enabled their academics to freely retrieve accessible content in various disciplines, which in turn increases the rate and quality of publications from these institutions. Using semi-structured interviews…
Covid-19 and research in conflict-affected contexts: Distanced Methods and the Digitalisation of Suffering
This research note explores the pressing ethical challenges associated with increased online platforming of sensitive research on conflict-affected settings since the onset of Covid-19. We argue that moving research online and the 'digitalisation of suffering' risks reducing complexity of social phenomena and omission of important aspects of lived experiences of violence or peace-building. Immersion, 'contexting' and trust-building are fundamenta…
Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda
While academic literature has long explored the ways in which colonial reification of identity and narratives underpinning unequal racialised status of colonial subjects contributed to cycles of violence in the Great Lakes region, including in Rwanda, few ask the complementary question: Does the colonial legacy imprint on the ‘post-conflict’ era, shaping post-genocide attempts at nation-building and identity re-engineering carried out in the name…
Agaciro, vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda
Recent debates in post-genocide and post-war Rwanda have explored how official commemorations of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in many ways borrow and ‘mimic’ the Holocaust memory ‘paradigm’. The academic canon on post-1994 Rwanda focuses the mostly on politics around this official memory that has evolved into hegemonic memory and on how it has been mobilized to promote a selective memory of the past. However, there is little analysis of vernacu…
Black muslim women in security studies
We are interested in the politics of stigmatised bodies at the intersection of race and gender, seen as threats and/or victims. Using the case study of Kenya, this essay examines how the recent history of the War on Terror and counter-terrorism measures have shaped policy, practice, and scholarship on security to brand Black Muslim Women in Kenya as terrorist suspects. It asks how Black Muslim women are alienated in security studies due to their …
Women's overlooked contribution to Rwanda's state-building conversations
This paper does not directly engage the state-formation, political settlement and state-building debates in Africa but it foregrounds the notion of conversation as the lens through which to examine Rwanda’s state-building history. In particular, it explores an overlooked perspective from Rwanda’s state-building trajectory by focusing on a particular class of actors – women – whose voices also contributed to inter-elite and elite-society state-bui…
Covid-19 responses and human rights in selected African countries
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the need for states to strike a delicate balance between implementing measures to curb the spread of coronavirus, and respecting the rights and dignity of the populace. Human rights organisations warned that COVID-19 mitigation measures, such as the use of digital surveillance to trace and track population movement and the introduction of emergency laws that extend the government’s power to lock down countries, i…
Music and the politics of the past: Kizito Mihigo and music in the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the post-genocide government spearheaded the creation of genocide commemorations. Over the past two decades, political elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize the memorialization, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Ordinary Rwandans have responded to the annual commemorations using creative means of support fo…
Local Positionality in the Production of Knowledge in Northern Uganda
This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and …
Women-Led Non-Governmental Organizations and Peacebuilding in Rwanda
This paper examines the dynamics of women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in peacebuilding in Rwanda. Can women successfully lead peacebuilding initiatives under the post-genocide environment that currently exists in Rwanda? How do they contribute to peacebuilding in this complex and sensitive political context? These questions and their corollaries are raised every day not only in Rwanda, but also in other post-conflict environments in…
Local Positionality in the Production of Knowledge in Northern Uganda
This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and …
Covid-19 and research in conflict-affected contexts: Distanced Methods and the Digitalisation of Suffering
This research note explores the pressing ethical challenges associated with increased online platforming of sensitive research on conflict-affected settings since the onset of Covid-19. We argue that moving research online and the 'digitalisation of suffering' risks reducing complexity of social phenomena and omission of important aspects of lived experiences of violence or peace-building. Immersion, 'contexting' and trust-building are fundamenta…
Music and the politics of the past: Kizito Mihigo and music in the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the post-genocide government spearheaded the creation of genocide commemorations. Over the past two decades, political elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize the memorialization, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Ordinary Rwandans have responded to the annual commemorations using creative means of support fo…
Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda
While academic literature has long explored the ways in which colonial reification of identity and narratives underpinning unequal racialised status of colonial subjects contributed to cycles of violence in the Great Lakes region, including in Rwanda, few ask the complementary question: Does the colonial legacy imprint on the ‘post-conflict’ era, shaping post-genocide attempts at nation-building and identity re-engineering carried out in the name…
Covid-19 responses and human rights in selected African countries
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the need for states to strike a delicate balance between implementing measures to curb the spread of coronavirus, and respecting the rights and dignity of the populace. Human rights organisations warned that COVID-19 mitigation measures, such as the use of digital surveillance to trace and track population movement and the introduction of emergency laws that extend the government’s power to lock down countries, i…
Agaciro, vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda
Recent debates in post-genocide and post-war Rwanda have explored how official commemorations of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in many ways borrow and ‘mimic’ the Holocaust memory ‘paradigm’. The academic canon on post-1994 Rwanda focuses the mostly on politics around this official memory that has evolved into hegemonic memory and on how it has been mobilized to promote a selective memory of the past. However, there is little analysis of vernacu…
Women-Led Non-Governmental Organizations and Peacebuilding in Rwanda
This paper examines the dynamics of women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in peacebuilding in Rwanda. Can women successfully lead peacebuilding initiatives under the post-genocide environment that currently exists in Rwanda? How do they contribute to peacebuilding in this complex and sensitive political context? These questions and their corollaries are raised every day not only in Rwanda, but also in other post-conflict environments in…
Vernacular memories: Recalling Rwanda’s 1943–44 famine during the Covid-19 hunger crisis
This article explores how the vernacular memory of the 1940s-era Ruzagayura famine was deployed to critique the contemporary Covid-19-induced hunger crisis in Rwanda. It methodologically advances memory studies scholarship by emphasising the importance of textual analyses of oral histories, poetry, proverbs and panegyrics, especially when transmitted on social media. This crucial revision can begin to redress the Eurocentric knowledge production …
Bodily Scars as Lived Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Scholarship about politics and the body in conflicts has gained prominence in academic debates. This article advances these conversations by arguing that bodily scars are potent 'carriers' of memories of mass atrocities committed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Using both semi-structured interviews and a wide range of secondary sources, this study found that bodily scars - as physical manifestations of wartime torture and pain - …
Women's overlooked contribution to Rwanda's state-building conversations
This paper does not directly engage the state-formation, political settlement and state-building debates in Africa but it foregrounds the notion of conversation as the lens through which to examine Rwanda’s state-building history. In particular, it explores an overlooked perspective from Rwanda’s state-building trajectory by focusing on a particular class of actors – women – whose voices also contributed to inter-elite and elite-society state-bui…
Fatal misconceptions: Colonial durabilities, violence and epistemicide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region
The contributions of this special issue explore the concept of colonial durabilities in a bid to unearth both the concrete and invisible sites through which coloniality continues to circulate and materialise in the African Great Lakes Region (GLR). Colonial durabilities, we argue, are non-linear dynamic processes that suffuse the realities and structures of international and national politics, as well as the conduct of daily life. These become pa…
Global crisis and research production: Covid-19 as shaper and shaker or micro-interruption
This special issue asks what happens to international research and collaboration when the research community becomes temporarily immobilized. The COVID-19 global pandemic powerfully disrupted normal ways of doing research and, therefore, created a perfect natural experiment of the 'otherwise' for digital qualitative research in sensitive contexts. The collected papers argue that the lessons extracted from this recent global health crisis should s…
In Memory of Peacekeepers: Belgian Blue Helmets and Belgian Politics
This article explores the interactions between the memories of Belgian peacekeepers killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the weight of the colonial past, and the Belgian foreign policy. Using interviews with Belgian politicians and diplomats, families of peacekeepers, former blue helmets, as well as a corpus of official speeches, this article finds that the memorialization of blue helmets has influenced Belgian political choices on three levels…
The impact of open access on knowledge production, consumption and dissemination in Kenya’s higher education system
Open access (OA) journal publishing is presented in the literature as both an opportunity for and a threat to academics, authors and higher education systems. Institutions with information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure have enabled their academics to freely retrieve accessible content in various disciplines, which in turn increases the rate and quality of publications from these institutions. Using semi-structured interviews…
Black muslim women in security studies
We are interested in the politics of stigmatised bodies at the intersection of race and gender, seen as threats and/or victims. Using the case study of Kenya, this essay examines how the recent history of the War on Terror and counter-terrorism measures have shaped policy, practice, and scholarship on security to brand Black Muslim Women in Kenya as terrorist suspects. It asks how Black Muslim women are alienated in security studies due to their …
Women-Led Non-Governmental Organizations and Peacebuilding in Rwanda
This paper examines the dynamics of women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in peacebuilding in Rwanda. Can women successfully lead peacebuilding initiatives under the post-genocide environment that currently exists in Rwanda? How do they contribute to peacebuilding in this complex and sensitive political context? These questions and their corollaries are raised every day not only in Rwanda, but also in other post-conflict environments in…
Music and the politics of the past: Kizito Mihigo and music in the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the post-genocide government spearheaded the creation of genocide commemorations. Over the past two decades, political elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize the memorialization, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Ordinary Rwandans have responded to the annual commemorations using creative means of support fo…
Local Positionality in the Production of Knowledge in Northern Uganda
This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and …
Covid-19 responses and human rights in selected African countries
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the need for states to strike a delicate balance between implementing measures to curb the spread of coronavirus, and respecting the rights and dignity of the populace. Human rights organisations warned that COVID-19 mitigation measures, such as the use of digital surveillance to trace and track population movement and the introduction of emergency laws that extend the government’s power to lock down countries, i…
Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda
While academic literature has long explored the ways in which colonial reification of identity and narratives underpinning unequal racialised status of colonial subjects contributed to cycles of violence in the Great Lakes region, including in Rwanda, few ask the complementary question: Does the colonial legacy imprint on the ‘post-conflict’ era, shaping post-genocide attempts at nation-building and identity re-engineering carried out in the name…
Agaciro, vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda
Recent debates in post-genocide and post-war Rwanda have explored how official commemorations of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in many ways borrow and ‘mimic’ the Holocaust memory ‘paradigm’. The academic canon on post-1994 Rwanda focuses the mostly on politics around this official memory that has evolved into hegemonic memory and on how it has been mobilized to promote a selective memory of the past. However, there is little analysis of vernacu…
Black muslim women in security studies
We are interested in the politics of stigmatised bodies at the intersection of race and gender, seen as threats and/or victims. Using the case study of Kenya, this essay examines how the recent history of the War on Terror and counter-terrorism measures have shaped policy, practice, and scholarship on security to brand Black Muslim Women in Kenya as terrorist suspects. It asks how Black Muslim women are alienated in security studies due to their …
Women's overlooked contribution to Rwanda's state-building conversations
This paper does not directly engage the state-formation, political settlement and state-building debates in Africa but it foregrounds the notion of conversation as the lens through which to examine Rwanda’s state-building history. In particular, it explores an overlooked perspective from Rwanda’s state-building trajectory by focusing on a particular class of actors – women – whose voices also contributed to inter-elite and elite-society state-bui…
Fatal misconceptions: Colonial durabilities, violence and epistemicide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region
The contributions of this special issue explore the concept of colonial durabilities in a bid to unearth both the concrete and invisible sites through which coloniality continues to circulate and materialise in the African Great Lakes Region (GLR). Colonial durabilities, we argue, are non-linear dynamic processes that suffuse the realities and structures of international and national politics, as well as the conduct of daily life. These become pa…
In Memory of Peacekeepers: Belgian Blue Helmets and Belgian Politics
This article explores the interactions between the memories of Belgian peacekeepers killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the weight of the colonial past, and the Belgian foreign policy. Using interviews with Belgian politicians and diplomats, families of peacekeepers, former blue helmets, as well as a corpus of official speeches, this article finds that the memorialization of blue helmets has influenced Belgian political choices on three levels…
The impact of open access on knowledge production, consumption and dissemination in Kenya’s higher education system
Open access (OA) journal publishing is presented in the literature as both an opportunity for and a threat to academics, authors and higher education systems. Institutions with information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure have enabled their academics to freely retrieve accessible content in various disciplines, which in turn increases the rate and quality of publications from these institutions. Using semi-structured interviews…
Covid-19 and research in conflict-affected contexts: Distanced Methods and the Digitalisation of Suffering
This research note explores the pressing ethical challenges associated with increased online platforming of sensitive research on conflict-affected settings since the onset of Covid-19. We argue that moving research online and the 'digitalisation of suffering' risks reducing complexity of social phenomena and omission of important aspects of lived experiences of violence or peace-building. Immersion, 'contexting' and trust-building are fundamenta…
Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Postgenocide Rwanda
This book analyzes how a master narrative of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi evolved into a hegemonic narrative. It identifies key actors of the evolution and enforcement of the master narrative in the first two decades after the genocide and civil war ended. Primary and secondary sources and rarely analyzed Rwandan folklore examine how Rwandans—identified as Champions, Antagonists, and Fatalists of the master narrative—responded through lang…
Bodily Scars as Lived Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Scholarship about politics and the body in conflicts has gained prominence in academic debates. This article advances these conversations by arguing that bodily scars are potent 'carriers' of memories of mass atrocities committed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Using both semi-structured interviews and a wide range of secondary sources, this study found that bodily scars - as physical manifestations of wartime torture and pain - …
Vernacular memories: Recalling Rwanda’s 1943–44 famine during the Covid-19 hunger crisis
This article explores how the vernacular memory of the 1940s-era Ruzagayura famine was deployed to critique the contemporary Covid-19-induced hunger crisis in Rwanda. It methodologically advances memory studies scholarship by emphasising the importance of textual analyses of oral histories, poetry, proverbs and panegyrics, especially when transmitted on social media. This crucial revision can begin to redress the Eurocentric knowledge production …
Global crisis and research production: Covid-19 as shaper and shaker or micro-interruption
This special issue asks what happens to international research and collaboration when the research community becomes temporarily immobilized. The COVID-19 global pandemic powerfully disrupted normal ways of doing research and, therefore, created a perfect natural experiment of the 'otherwise' for digital qualitative research in sensitive contexts. The collected papers argue that the lessons extracted from this recent global health crisis should s…
Citizenship dilemma: How second-generation Rwandan migrants navigate life challenges in post-colonial Kenya
This paper explores the lived experiences of second-generation Rwandan labor migrants living in Kisii, Nandi and Kericho counties of Kenya. It examines how colonial policies and histories of famines in the 1940s in Rwanda and post-colonial Kenyan continue to shape descendants of Rwandan migrants today economically, politically and socially. Available literature often considers colonial history to make sense of cyclical violence, civil wars, genoc…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (9 works) · Genocide (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (5 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (5 works)