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Introduction: Seeing Like a Post-Conflict State f
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3 Introduction Seeing Like a Post-Conflict State scott straus and lars waldorf Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance. Scott 1998, 89 Official declarations are one thing; reality is another. . . . [N]ational reconciliation does not mean forcing people to subscribe to an ideology or to obey a new form of authority unquestioningly. . . . That is extremely dangerous . The country ha[s] already seen the results of a cult of authority. Sibomana 1999, 139 Overview: Remaking Rwanda In the early 1990s, Rwanda was devastated by civil war and genocide. During one hundred days in 1994, an interim regime orchestrated the systematic massacre of three-quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority and the murder of Hutu who opposed the regime and the genocide. This genocide was undoubtedly one of the worst atrocities of the last century. It was committed 4 I n t r o d u c t i o n during an armed conflict that had begun in October 1990 with the invasion of Rwanda by mostly Tutsi exiles fighting under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The genocide ended in mid-July with the RPF’s complete victory over the genocidal forces. Along the way, the RPF committed widespread and systematic massacres of Hutu civilians. Since 1994, the RPF-led government has practiced a deft authoritarianism that justifies its restrictions on political parties, civil society, and the media as necessary measures to guard against a recrudescence of ethnic violence. The RPF has also pursued a highly ambitious policy of reconstruction and development that it adroitly frames in the preferred language of international donors: good governance, decentralization, gender mainstreaming, poverty reduction, rule of law, and transparency. Yet the RPF not only aims to alter Rwanda’s governance and economic structures; it also seeks to alter social identities, cultural norms, and individual behavior. The RPF has undertaken a series of dramatic political, economic, and social projects, including the world’s boldest experiment in transitional justice, comprehensive land tenure and agricultural reform, forced villagization, a de facto ban on ethnic identity, reeducation of the population, and the systematic redrawing and renaming of Rwanda’s territory, among other things. In other words, the RPF has engaged in political , economic, and social engineering whose high-modernist ambitions and tactics resemble what James Scott (1998) described in Seeing Like a State. It is not an overstatement to compare the RPF’s top-down reconstruction to those brought about by the French revolutionaries or by Kemal Ataturk. The RPF’s boldness is not only evident in social engineering at home. It has also forced regime change and economic exploitation on neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—a country about ninety times larger than Rwanda. The RPF initiated two wars with the DRC. The first (1996–97) entailed a march across Congo’s vast expanse that culminated some 1,500 miles west of Rwanda in the overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko’s thirty-two-year-long rule. The second (1998–2003) involved the capture of nearly one third of Congolese territory. Since then, Rwandan forces and Rwandan proxies have fought in the eastern Congo on various occasions. Rwanda entered the DRC partly for security reasons. In 1994 the rump genocidal regime relocated to the DRC with more than a million Hutu refugees and from there prepared to reinvade Rwanda. In later years, Rwanda faced a Congo-based Hutu rebel threat drawn in part from the former génocidaires. But in both cases, the RPF’s ambitions exceeded its legitimate, short-term security needs. In the first invasion, its objective became to unseat a neighboring regime. In the second, the RPF funneled Congo’s remarkable mineral wealth to Kigali. Rwanda was not alone: as many as seven states intervened in—and profited from—the DRC. But [44.193.80.126] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:56 GMT) I n t r o d u c t i o n 5 Rwanda was the central, initiating external actor. And both times, Rwanda’s actions in the various wars caused extensive suffering and death: as the chapters by Filip Reyntjens and Jason Stearns and Federico Borello show, Rwandan forces massacred tens of...