Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood by Marc Sommers (review)

Marc Sommers has written a remarkable book on the plight of youth in postgenocide Rwanda. Sommers’s findings draw upon semistructured interviews with central and local government officials, as well as focus groups and questionnaires with youth, meaning Rwandans between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five. Adults living in Sommers’s two urban and three rural research settings were also interviewed on issues confronting Rwandan youth since the 1994 genocide. The bulk of Sommers’s sample was made up of poor, unemployed male youth with no more than a primary school education. His is the first systematic and book-length study that confronts the often discussed but little analyzed matter of young Rwandans striving to reach adulthood. In remedy, Stuck offers profound policy insights on the “imminent prospect of producing almost an entire generation of failed adults” (193). To make his case, Sommers assesses the likelihood of Rwandan youth remaining “stuck” in not only failing to acquire sociocultural adulthood through marriage, land acquisition, and building one’s own family home, but also through limited employment and other economic opportunities. The results are astounding—the book’s descriptive accounts show that the land and agriculture policies of the government of Rwanda are currently failing the majority of its youth, both male and female. This failure is sizeable, considering that three in four Rwandans are under the age of thirty. Central to the bleak picture that Sommers paints for everyday youth realities is the idea that uneducated, poor youth want government support, and indeed, they look to the government for socioeconomic assistance. He also finds, contrary to what most policymakers believe, that youth do not present a “major risk to renewed fighting and conflict” (198). The book ends with a list of policy recommendations for both the Rwandan government and various actors working with youth in postconflict and development situations.

Sommers’s commitment to producing a study that is policy relevant is the primary weakness of his study, as he trades academic rigor for popular appeal. Stuck lacks a clear theoretical framework. Instead, the author works through the concepts of failed masculinity, rapid urbanization, and strong government without sufficiently explaining why he chose this approach for analyzing his interview material. For readers intimately familiar with the Rwandan context, the choice is obvious—the postgenocide government has introduced a variety of institutional and cultural changes through its ambitious postgenocide reconciliation and reconstruction policies. Sommers does not adequately analyze the reasons why the government introduced these policies, nor does he assess its rationale for seeking to make such dramatic social, political, and economic changes—changes that directly affect youth, male youth in particular, as postgenocide policies are rooted in a fairly one-dimensional and negative view of pregenocide society and culture. Sommers does not situate his analysis within this broader context, central to which is the government’s effort to change how Rwandans understand themselves and the new postgenocide order. These behavioral and cultural changes require all Rwandans to stop using the labels of “Hutu,” “Tutsi,” and “Twa,” and instead to focus on becoming “Rwandan.” This matters, because this government has implemented a policy of maximal prosecution of male Hutu who were resident in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, and the policy of behavioral change targets youth. Presumably, most if not all of the young men that Sommers consulted have direct experience with these changes, yet their lived realities are not assessed through this essential prism.

Sommers’s recommendations to the Rwandan government—that it vigorously advocate for crucial priorities and reform its approach to youth concerns—are muted by a lack of meaningful analysis of both the institutional and cultural context in which youth live their lives since the genocide. For example, Sommers interprets much of the interview material he gathered from Rwandan youth through local actors (notably Sector and Cell officials). As he does not contextualize Rwanda’s policy-making environment, readers are...