Genocide-time

Political violence reckoning in Rwanda

Bibliographic Data

ID2260144
AuthorsNatacha Nsabimana (0000-0002-9911-0204, Department of Anthropology University of Chicago, United States, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume125
Issue4
Pages761-770
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13927
OpenAlexW4387100753
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited30

This article looks at how political violence in Rwanda, that of the genocide against Tutsi in 1994 and beyond, is remembered, narrated, and embedded in everyday sociality. It makes two related arguments. Taking the aftermath of Rwanda's Gacaca courts (a transitional justice mechanism implemented between 2005 and 2012) as my point of entry, I argue first that violence, though narrated as past in these courts, is imagined as returning in the future, and the present is the space to prepare for this inevitable return. This structuring temporal logic, or genocide-time, undergirds everyday social relations between the protagonists of Gacaca courts years after their official end. Second, both survivors and perpetrators of the genocide claim forms of racialized victimhood, a legacy of European imperial categorizations of Rwandans into Hutus and Tutsis. Genocide-time signals a temporal moment in which ethnic categories, crucial for colonial management, become racialized and deeply entangled with political violence. Shared claims to racialized victimhood today, I argue, index this longer history

Criminology · Economic Justice · Everyday life · Genocide · Political science · Politics · Sociality · Sociology · Transitional justice · Cambodian History and Society · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Political Conflict and Governance

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