5- The Rwandan Genocide

Résumé

When Victims Become Killers:
Colonialism, Nativism, and the
Genocide in Rwanda
by Mahmood Mamdani
Princeton University Press, 2001,
364 pp., $16.95,
ISBN 0-691-05821-0

Any student of Rwanda could observe that the 1994 genocide has induced a number of persons and organizations to devote their research capacities to document and explain it. There is no doubt that these analyses have contributed greatly to a better understanding of the Rwanda crisis, especially to the questions of how and why it happened. It is also evident that these analyses have been concerned with a certain mode of knowledge and have privileged certain research questions at the expense of others. Scholarship on the genocide has been divided between a dominant position that sees the violence as the instrument of choice of a select Rwandan political elite and a second position that views the violence as yet another example, though a particularly brutal one, of primordial passions frequently occurring in terra incognita, or as an outcome of “state failure”.