Twenty years on from the Rwandan genocide, there are worries that President Paul Kagame’s growing authoritarianism threatens to undermine Rwanda’s development successes.
20 years after the genocide, the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has shown once again how justice is indispensable for sustainable peace.
In contemporary Rwanda, women are willing to speak out and actively shape public discourse on such issues as the government, ethnicity, the genocide, and sexual violence.
Whilst the genocide was transpiring in Rwanda in 1994, there was only one morally defensible course of action for the international community – intervention.
UN and foreign military interventions may have postponed the 1994 genocide that occurred in Rwanda, but they would not have solved the underlying problems that led to it.
The prosecution of wartime sexual violence in Africa has created a debasing narrative about the bodies of African women, raising doubts over justice’s impartiality and independence from local influences.
The question we must ask ourselves is whether the complexity of considerations excuses inaction when confronted with situations of severe human rights violations.
Censuring Rwanda for its involvement in DR Congo could put its prominent UN peacekeeping contributions at risk. Rwanda has shown some willingness to negotiate a withdrawal of M23 from Goma.
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Hutus killed about 700 hundred thousand Tutsis. This piece will discuss institutions and processes of reconciliation since the genocide, discussing both their positive and problematic aspects.
While the development of R2P as a concept has been the preserve of international relations theoreticians (albeit ones with large amounts of practical experience), its implementation rests on the practitioners of the day. And these practitioners deal in the world of realpolitik with all of its inconsistencies, relativities and competing national interests.
