New Books In Genocide Studies

How do you put Humpty-Dumpty back together again? Susan Thomson's new book Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (Yale University Press, 2018) examines the postwar history of Rwanda to consider the ways the Rwandan genocide shaped governance, policy and memory in that country.  She begins by recounting what we now know about the genocide, revisiting older interpretations, revising some common assumptions and rethinking earlier arguments.  But most of her book is about the way the RPF understood the genocide and its causes and how that understanding shaped the choices Paul Kagame and his party made about governing Rwanda. Her conclusions are sobering.  The RPF, she argues, has governed in a way that divides Rwandans into victims and perpetrators, leaving no space for the complexities of real life.  In doing so, government policies have made it more difficult for individuals to mourn and for communities to wrestle seriously with what happened in their homes, hills and churches.  And, under the RPF, a saniti