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The Rwandan genocide has become a touchstone for debates about the causes of mass violence and the responsibilities of the international community. Yet a number of key questions about this tragedy remain unanswered: How did the violence spread from community to community and so rapidly engulf the nation? Why did individuals make decisions that led them to take up machetes against their neighbors? And what was the logic that drove the campaign of extermination? According to Scott Straus, a social scientist and former journalist in East Africa for several years (who received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his reporting for the Houston Chronicle), many of the widely held beliefs about the caus...
Since all-out interstate wars for the time being seem to belong to the past, con flict studies focus more and more on domestic conflicts. This is a broad field, not only because the arbitrary line between war and sub-war violence disap pears and the analyst is confronted with phenomena reaching from criminal violence and clashes between communities to violent conflicts of long duration and civil wars with massacres and genocides as their characteristics. It is also because there are so many different types of conflicts to be analyzed, so many different types of behavior to be studied, whereas there is often little informa tion available on what is really going on. Against the background of i...
In Democratic Engineering in Rwanda and Burundi the author argues that a democratic model which is suitable for single-cultural societies may not be applicable in multicultural societies; he illustrates that the liberal and socialist theories have not addressed the issue of national minorities which threatens peace and stability in most African countries. The author investigates the form of democratic engineering that would harmonise ethnic relations and guard against ethnic discrimination and violence. He explores the consociational and integrative theories to identify a suitable democratic system that would stabilise Rwanda and Burundi. He analyses the pros and the cons of the present options adopted by Rwanda and Burundi to address the question of ethnicity and also assesses the potential of a number of other solutions.
In Dissimilar Coffee Frontiers Sven Van Melkebeke compares the divergent development of coffee production in eastern Congo and western Rwanda during the colonial period. The Lake Kivu region offers a remarkable case-study to investigate diversity in economic development. In Rwanda, on the eastern side of the lake, coffee was mainly cultivated by smallholder families, while in the Congo, on the western side of the lake, European plantations were the dominant mode of production. Making use of a wide array of largely untapped archival sources, Sven Van Melkebeke convincingly succeeds in moving the manuscript beyond a case-study of colonizers to a more nuanced history of interaction and in presenting an innovative new social history of labor and land processes.
In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and 'nationalization' of political competition.
Le génocide de 1994 a attiré l'attention du monde entier sur le Rwanda. Ce pays d'Afrique orientale étant largement christianisé, cette crise politique et morale majeure a soulevé l'inévitable question de la responsabilité des Eglises. Le livre de Ian Linden, enfin traduit en français, apporte les réponses solides et nuancées d'une recherche historique méthodique, qui a su mettre en valeur la richesse des archives des Pères Blancs. On peut y suivre pas à pas la façon dont l'ancienne société rwandaise et sa royauté sacrée ont été confrontées à l'irruption des Européens, il y a un siècle. En 1900, la fondation de la mission du Sacré-Cœur de Save au sud du pays ouvre u...
The Politics of African and Middle Eastern States: An Annotated Bibliography is a record of books written about the politics, history, and the lives of the leaders of Africa and the Middle East. The book is divided per chapter according to the geographical area being discussed. Each chapter contains a list of books that fall under the following categories: Political History; Political Systems and Government; Biographies, Memoirs, Speeches, and Writings; and External Relations. Chapters I to VII cover different regions of Africa, while Chapters VIII to XI cover the Middle East. The text is a recommended for historians and political scientists, especially those interested in the areas mentioned in the book. The selection also serves a guide to those who plan to have further readings or make a paper about the political history, government, and development of the areas mentioned .