Studying Agaciro: Moving Beyond Wilsonian Interventionist Knowledge Production on Rwanda

In this post, Dr. Olivia Rutazibwa (Lecturer in International Development and European Studies, University of Portsmouth) offers an outline of her new article, which was recently published in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Twenty years after the end of the Rwandan genocide, knowledge production on the small country of a thousand hills remains a clamorous battle ground of post- and decolonial power and influence. This essay critically engages with the knowledge production on Rwanda in the West by conceptualizing it as a Wilsonian intervention in the post-colony:  paternalistically well-intended at the service of the peace, democracy and free trade liberal triad, while at the same time silencing, self-contradictory and potentially counterproductive. The Wilsonian interventionist form of knowledge production is coated in a language of critical engagement and care. At the same time it is and allows for a continuous external engagement in view of this Wilsonian triad — a highly particularist view on the good life, cast in universal terms. As a former journalist and a researcher from the Belgian Rwandan diaspora and building on a decolonial research strategy, in this essay I reflect on potentially different avenues to produce and consume knowledge on the country. I do this by discussing the  challenges and creative opportunities of a recently started research project on Agaciro (self-worth): a philosophy and public policy in post-genocide Rwanda rooted in its precolonial past, centred on the ideals of self-determination, dignity and  self-reliance. Rather than inscribing itself firmly into the canon that aims at informing on Rwanda, this research project seeks to contribute to a different mode of imagining, studying and enacting sovereignty in today’s academic and political world, both permeated by the hegemonic principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P).

A full version of Olivia’s article is currently available to download for free from the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.  

CFP deadline reminder: Progress, change and development: past, present and future

Deadline for paper proposals = Friday 16th January 2015.

“Progress, change and development: past, present and future” is an international conference, to be held at University of Portsmouth, 4- 6 June 2015, with the generous support of the Centre for European and International Studies Research, the Society for the Study of French History and the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France.

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference will be to bring some of the generation who were involved in attempts to bring about change in the 1960s and 1970s together with researchers, theorists, practitioners, activists from the younger generations today. It will examine and debate how progress and development were conceptualised, practised and imagined during the periods of national liberation struggles, of decolonisation and its aftermath, of political and social upheaval and change. It will analyse successes and failures on all levels and explore new ways of thinking that are being developed at the present time, particularly those that break with the prevailing consensus.

By bringing the different generations into contact and interaction with each other, it is hoped to create a forum to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and understanding of the earlier period, on the one hand, and the expression and elaboration of new ideas of progress and development and how they might be achieved, on the other.

It will look at specific struggles in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, as well as the international links connecting these movements. Possible themes will include the following:

  • National liberation and nation-building
  • Globalisation and anti-capitalism
  • Transnational movements
  • Economic and social development
  • Theoretical, philosophical and other considerations
  • Race
  • Gender
  • Education and new academic approaches
  • Young people
  • Progress in the cultural field
  • Media, information and communication

Confirmed speakers include Samir Amin (Third World Forum, Dakar), Alice Cherki (psychoanalyst), Beïda Chikhi (Université de Paris – Sorbonne), Catherine Lévy (CNRS) and Jacques Sauvageot (Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rennes).

Proposed papers should be 20 minutes in length, in English or in French. Please send an abstracts of no more than 250 words to francophone@port.ac.uk by the deadline of Friday 16th January 2015.