Trajectories of Authoritarianism

Summary

The introduction explores the argument at the core of the book. Despite authoritarianism scholars’ predilection for a focus on crises and elites, trivial authoritarian moments and what we sometimes take to be trivial relations are part of a country’s larger trajectory of authoritarianism. They even suggest — just as larger crises do — some of authoritarianism’s inherent fragility.

A famous Hollywood director once said that movies are the same as life with the boring parts cut out. I found that this was precisely right. The boring parts of the revolutions had simply finished up on the floors of the television studio cutting rooms all over the world. What the world had seen and heard were only the most dramatic and symbolic images. This was all right, but it was not all.

—Slavenka Drakulić,

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, xiv.¹

In mid-1970, rumors began circulating about the health of the then Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda. As Rwanda’s head of state and president of the de facto state party, the Mouvement démocratique républicain-Parti du mouvement pour l’émancipation hutu (MDR-Parmehutu), the ailing president was at the core of the country’s authoritarian regime. The rumors about his health were reinforced by his frequent absences from public political life, as he spent much of his time at his home in Gitarama, a little less than hour away from the capital, Kigali. Furthermore, according to one observer, the president’s purported ill health coincided with a “worrying slowing down of political activity”: No official Ministers’ council was held for months, and the Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) did not hold plenary sessions or engage in commission work.²

The rumors persisted for months, as did theories about the source of the president’s illness. Some suggested that Kayibanda suffered from some kind of malaise or depression, others that alcohol and tobacco were to blame or slowed his recovery, contrary to the rather ascetic public persona he had maintained. Another rumor suggested the president may have faked health problems to test his ministers’ loyalty, looking to see if they would act against him if his hold on power appeared to be weakening.

The president’s condition remained a topic of speculation well into 1971. Kayibanda’s health had gotten so poor, the whispers suggested at some point, that the president had considered resigning, but he had been dissuaded by some of his closest advisers, and especially the ministers who attended a council in September 1971. To add to the intrigue, this same inner circle appeared to be the main source of the rumors about the president’s health. The French Ambassador at the time, Jean-F. de La Boissière, indicated to the Quai d’Orsay that “the rumours that irritate the President, but which are to some extent true, have been spread by personalities from his entourage, belonging to the higher reaches of the Government and the Administration.”³

The government confronted the rumors with periodic communiqués denying anything was wrong with the president. Kayibanda also used his infrequent public appearances to castigate those who spread the rumors. In one instance, he angrily targeted

the enemies of public tranquility – Rwandans or Europeans – who spread falsities according to which, tired and sick, he will soon leave for Europe with his family to get treated. All these people are wrong. They are wasting their time, because what they claim cannot convince anyone. Everything that is said I am informed of, because the people are vigilant and have remained loyal, knowing that I devote all my strength to them and would give them my blood if needed.⁴

Despite the salvos of counter-information and Kayibanda’s protestations, the rumors and uncertainty affected his reputation, especially perceptions of his ability to lead. Belgian observers, among the better-informed external actors in Kigali at the time considering their former colonial rule of the territory and continuing influence, indicated they sensed a growing malaise around the president. They went as far as to suggest that further decline could eventually – admittedly, possibly years down the line – open the door to political change. “How long will this go on for,” asked the Belgian ambassador, “I fear that an improvement of the President’s general health is unlikely […] It must necessarily mean that one day there will be political change.”⁵ Finally laying to rest all the conjecture, Kayibanda made an apparent recovery and eventually returned to a more active role. He continued to serve as president for two more years, even entrenching his power in his final year of rule through constitutional modifications, until he was ousted by a coup in 1973.

This episode of Rwandan history is never recounted when scholars discuss post-independence Rwanda and the events they believe shaped the country. And, indeed, the president’s illness and the speculation it generated seems trivial in the context of the violence Rwanda experienced during Kayibanda’s time in power and a quarter century later, when genocide swept the country.

The story of Kayibanda’s illness also seems perhaps trivial in the broader context of the uglier face of authoritarianism scholars commonly focus on, especially the coercion and oppression we associate with it. In Rwanda’s authoritarian story, which has now largely come to be associated with the genocide, this episode is one of the “boring parts” left on the editing room floor, by most scholarly assessments. But the banal uncertainties surrounding an ailing president are as much part of the country’s trajectory, and of the high and lows of authoritarian governance generally, as the more striking events of Rwandan history.⁶

Indeed, these trivial authoritarian moments are part of a country’s larger trajectory of authoritarianism, and they even suggest – just as larger crises do – some of authoritarianism’s inherent fragility. In the ongoing struggle to contain and control, the concentration of power can be thrown off by an illness. A close circle of advisers and associates can be a source of both strength and intrigue. To say nothing of a regime’s popular groundings, often born of perceptions of strength, which can wax and wane with events as banal as ill health. These seemingly trivial moments, their ambiguity, the kind of dull grating on authority and power they constitute also make and, in their own way, break authoritarianism. A sudden death or an overthrow may take down an authoritarian regime quickly and dramatically, but the little speculation, the rumors of weakness, and the questioning and uncertainty, pull and tear at the bases of a regime on a regular basis, thus weakening its foundations.

They are just as part of the authoritarian trajectories as authoritarianism’s more dramatic moments are, calling on us to rediscover some of the middle-range, more routine and more local forms of making and breaking in the authoritarian system.

Reappropriating Trajectories of Authoritarianism

We have tended to neglect these boring parts. Instead, we gravitate toward the ugliest, most extreme faces of authoritarianism when thinking of authoritarian governance. Authoritarianism is associated most naturally with notions of power, of the privileged few, and of coercion and control. It is understood as a rigid, top-down form of governance that violently, whether in a physical or structural sense, demands and generally obtains deference. Lay visions of authoritarianism, and of the surveillance and repression we associate with it, have an inescapable quality – that is until we imagine the regime breaking up, with the attendant blazes and barricades accompanying its demise. In both the literary world and the “real” world, we hear of examples of far-extending authority – regimes reaching deep into citizens’ lives to erase private space. In this conceptualization, the authoritarian regime is a gray realm of surveillance, denunciation and defeat, and life within its reach lived in the shadow of the government and its dutiful agents. It is often, in our minds, the world of the most punitive days of an Amin or a Hussein. To the point where some conflate and use interchangeably the concepts of “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism.”

Straus reminds us of the necessity to distinguish between the nature of a regime and its capacities,⁷ but these common perceptions of authoritarianism tend to stress authoritarian regimes’ strength, in the form of attained control, as opposed to their struggles to achieve and maintain power. Conceptions of authoritarianism based on strength rely on a static portrayal of achieved power, in the form of overwhelming control, endemic coercion, and complete achieved obedience on the part of the citizenry. In reality, authoritarianism is an ongoing dynamic process, as those in the inner circle work to keep power and influence, or attain it. Though we often reduce them to the “ruled,” citizens’ position in the system is just as dynamic, as ordinary people continue to navigate their circumstances even if under authoritarian control.

Recent academic literature on authoritarian regimes has tended to echo this common understanding of authoritarianism, promoting an understanding of authoritarianism as an achieved state, rather than a dynamic process. In response to the enthusiasm surrounding the “third wave” of democratization, which some saw as the final extinction of non-democracy and the glorious victory of democracy,⁸ others countered that many authoritarian regimes have weathered the democratization wave quite well. In this newer literature, scholars of “authoritarian resilience” have examined the mechanisms that allow these regimes to endure. Mostly, this endeavor has taken the form of looking at national-level institutional or organizational means deployed to prevent or address political challenges, largely understood as stemming from national-level challengers. But these studies, framed as they are around endurance, commonly assume regimes fall into one of three categories: stable dictatorship, unstable dictatorship, or democracy. The changes captured by these models are first and foremost shifts across these three types.⁹ And the answers on offer to explain why, despite our optimism, a relatively important number of authoritarian regimes have been able to maintain themselves have centered on national-level institutional arrangements. Or they have focused on the struggle to ensure “power-sharing” between elites that truly matters, for most scholars, for the making or breaking of an authoritarian regime¹⁰.

These more static or achieved understandings of authoritarianism, in which flux is largely understood as taking place across types of regimes following radical breaks, and predominantly from an institutional standpoint, come at a cost: the neglect of what Pepinsky called “deep politics.”¹¹ I take these “deep politics” to refer to the substrate of events, dynamics, and trends underlying the more apparent moments, features, and actors of authoritarianism that authors have focused on. The emphasis on endurance, strength, or lack thereof and on national-level factors and actors has drawn attention away from the less dramatic – but equally important – ebb and flow of authoritarian management, that is the changes within trajectories, and the national-subnational and subnational dynamics that also shape authoritarian regimes. This rather monolithic approach obscures the regular engaging, vying, and navigating that forms the day-to-day life of authoritarianism and plays its part in the creation, reproduction, or undermining of an authoritarian system, from the top of the system to the bottom.

This book seeks to provide a more granular take on authoritarianism,¹² the more alive and lived understanding of the phenomenon, from the regime’s core to local implementers and its public(s), that a small number of proponents of an ethnographic or anthropological understanding of authoritarianism have called for.¹³ It is meant as the rediscovery of the routine or more ordinary relations, practices, and events of authoritarianism, too often assumed to be its “boring parts,” but that also matter to its destiny.¹⁴ I propose to do so through a reappropriation of the concept of “trajectory.”

An authoritarian regime can be conceived of as a trajectory, a path, a course, not just in terms of the transition from one type of political regime to another, but in and of itself. To start, authoritarian regimes, like democratic ones for that matter, are never monolithic, but rather evolve over time, as alliances shift, new players come in, and challenges emerge. Authoritarianism is a constant, nondeterministic navigation of these elements, although, as the authoritarian resilience literature points out, regime solidity or strength, available capacities, and institutional/organizational arrangements play a very important role in determining how smooth or bumpy the ride is. Several authors have pointed to the importance of studying authoritarian regimes over time, as key shifts may occur from emergence to settled and unsettled times¹⁵. But this must also be done while taking into account the more “ordinary” navigation, as it unfolds over the longue durée.

As importantly, authoritarianism should also be understood as a composite trajectory, made up of the trajectories of the different actors in the system, which includes national elites, as well as local elites and citizens. A predominantly institutional or structural focus has left a rather flat understanding of agents’ engagement with the system. Agency is secondary in these conceptualizations, taken to matter little outside of institutions or unsettled times. But authoritarianism is a human system, deployed, lived with, and engaged by agents, in the sense of agency, at all levels of society. Some have called for the rediscovery of the agent elements in authoritarianism, such as the quality of leadership demonstrated by national elites.¹⁶ Yet many aspects of agency in authoritarian regimes remain neglected, especially beyond the national level. Little attention is paid to how authority is deployed across levels, all the way down to intermediaries, local administrators, and the citizen and her relationship with the authoritarian state; the notion of “reach” employed in many discussions of authoritarian systems implies this level of engagement, but reach itself is commonly assumed rather than assessed.

When agency is sometimes addressed, it is predominantly through the lens of “gain,” as the primary motive behind relations across elites, whether inside or outside of the authoritarian system. This notion of gain is inherent to assumptions about the functioning of authoritarian systems: Key authoritarian supporters are gained through threats or bought off. They are therefore motivated by gaining or maintaining security or the advantages and rents afforded to the inner circle and supporters. While the point is not to deny that actors act with purpose, this notion of gain is rather limited. It cannot capture the full diversity of motives, stemming from different personalities, possibilities, challenges, and other factors. Depictions of motives or behavior for other actors are similarly narrow. Actors other than national elites are implicitly understood either to obey or to resist authoritarian power. Yet, local administrators and the regime’s various publics navigate the system in their own ways, for their own reasons. As a result, in all but the most controlling regimes, authoritarianism on the ground takes on different shapes, even across the same state.

To be sure, the neglect of these different elements of authoritarianism (the trivial or non-juncture points of an authoritarian trajectory, what lies below the national level, more diverse forms of engagement with the system) does not necessarily imply that scholars have been blind to these realities. Rather, the focus on a regime’s most formative moments and elite, national-level players with their aggregate depictions of motives is often a strategy to capture the most obvious, and most generalizable, elements of the authoritarian experience – that is, the parts that matter most in the making and breaking of systems. But breaking points rarely appear out of thin air. They often are formed by an accumulation of other trivial trends that create a context conducive to breakage. Authoritarianism, therefore, needs to be studied beyond the confines of its most dramatic moments and elite circles, as many recent episodes of protest born of growing frustration at the local level remind us.¹⁷

Reappropriating the notion of authoritarian trajectories in such a way leads to a different set of questions from those generated by the focus on endurance. More than identifying major factors in a regime’s resilience or lack thereof, this reappropriation is aimed at a fuller exploration of the makeup of an authoritarian course. How does an authoritarian system evolve over time? What does a trajectory perspective suggest about national elites, official and unofficial, and their relation to the overall system, including other echelons of the regime? How should we understand the engagement by and role of local authorities and publics in the system?

Do these neglected dynamics have something to contribute to our understanding of authoritarian resilience or decline? I believe they do, as they constitute the brittle base on which authoritarianism rests. If, over time, authoritarian management of this entire set of relations and realities continues to accumulate contradictions, as we can assume is often the case when the basis of ruling is exclusion, this base may increasingly crack and open the space for the more dramatic moments we associate with authoritarianism. In a sense, seen from the lens of a trajectory, authoritarianism is inherently caught in a Humpty Dumpty paradox, where the choices and moves it makes to balance itself nonetheless take place in a situation that contains its own seeds of precarity. Moves, even moves toward stability, can bring the system closer to the brink.

Pre-genocide Rwanda

To begin answering these questions, the book turns to a single case: post-independence Rwanda. Single-case studies have not been the method of choice in recent literature on authoritarianism, which has tended instead to prefer medium-N analyses or multiple case studies. But the tide may be turning in this regard in comparative politics.¹⁸ And when it comes to studying the fine grain of a trajectory, which requires both depth and a longue durée look, a single exploratory case has much to offer, especially in terms of granularity.¹⁹

The book thus focuses on a case that has been especially susceptible to the achieved focus and monolithic outlook often adopted in studies of authoritarianism: post-independence Rwanda. Both pre- and post-genocide regimes in Rwanda have been categorized in scholarship as strongly, especially for the Second Republic, effectively authoritarian. Academics and non-academics alike have also ascribed to the three regimes that have succeeded each other in Kigali since independence an inescapable quality, especially for “ordinary citizens” caught in them.²⁰ While there is no denying the recourse to authoritarian strategies and practices in Rwanda with the violence and oppression they entail, the tendency to adopt an achieved understanding of authoritarianism has led to the neglect of the shapes authoritarianism took in the country, including outside of major episodes of violence that shook Rwanda, and for the people experiencing political trends. More broadly, it has led to the neglect of Rwanda’s authoritarian trajectory over time, collapsing instead our understanding of authoritarian realities around very finite moments of Rwandan history, and especially the transitions across regimes.

In large part, the issue has been the long shadow the 1994 genocide casts over interpretations of the post-independence period and the country’s political system and environment at the time. The genocide against the Tutsi²¹ was one of the most intense episodes of violence of the twentieth century. It saw the death of more than half a million Tutsi, as well as parallel violence claiming the lives of a significant number of Hutu.²² Scholars tend to associate genocide with achieved authoritarianism: Genocidal violence is often believed to flow from an efficient state structure able to move orders from authorities at the top down to an obedient or complicit population.²³ In other words, genocide is generally thought of as state-led violence. Hence, scholars look to the decades prior to the genocide for the construction of a deadly structure capable of ensuring compliance and of indoctrinating Rwandans to hatred. As the authoritarian public, we also too often assume Rwandans were subjugated by the system. These are assumptions that, in Rwanda, have not been really questioned, though the country’s political developments and especially its authoritarian story during those decades do not support such a clear narrative.

The period covered by my analysis spans approximately thirty years (1959/1960 to 1990), from the creation of Rwanda’s modern political institutions, around independence, up to what many now call the “radicalization period,”²⁴ which was ushered in by a war between the Rwandan government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that started in October 1990. During these thirty years, Rwanda was ruled by two distinct regimes, one under the presidency of Grégoire Kayibanda (First Republic)²⁵ and the other under Juvénal Habyarimana (Second Republic). Over the course of these decades, Rwandan national authorities lived through many ups and downs; experienced challenges of a military, political, and economic nature; and led the country through slow, but significant development.

Yet these three decades are commonly described in singular terms. Interpreting the period through the lens of the genocide, analyses now focus on the regimes’ coercive and controlling authority, often believed to be strong across the board, and its related ability to reach into citizens’ lives and make Rwandans into pliant authoritarian, and in 1994 murderous, subjects. The sole distinction made across the period generally centers on the First and Second Republics’ different relation to ethnocentrism. The First Republic is described as highly anti-Tutsi and the Second Republic, at least its president, as more accommodating although also ethnocentrically inclined, that is to say inclined on keeping ethnic identities and divisions salient. In doing so, scholars collapse the discussion of identity in Rwanda around ethnicity, to the neglect of the much broader and historically complex suite of identities Rwandans possess. As anthropologists and historians long debated prior to the genocide, Rwandans also identified according to lineage, effective in establishing proximate ancestry and rules for occupying the land, as well as according to clans, supra-categories that cut across ethnic identities and therefore could not simply be lineage based.²⁶ Clan identity appeared to serve, at least prior to modern Rwanda, an important role for Rwandans: Each Rwandan knew which clan they belonged to. As has been argued, because they cut across other identities, these clans served as the base for a purported or real, depending on the author, unity of Rwandans prior to ethnic divisions. Neither lineage nor clan disappeared by independence. To these should be added regional differences, based on real historical and geographical variations despite the modest size of the country. Regional differences mattered in pre- and post-independence Rwanda, including to its political life, as Chapters 3 and 7 illustrate. Regional differences also had impacts on how lineage and clan were conceived, with noticeable regional specificities in terms of how identity categories were expressed and lived. In other words, the identity landscape on offer is oversimplistic, as it overly focuses on ethnicity. Some scholars have criticized this ethnic focus.²⁷

However, as is the core of my argument, these narratives also largely focus on the regimes’ critical moments, especially those moments when regime survival seemed most challenged. Little consideration has been given to the mundane ebb and flow of deploying authoritarianism in Rwanda. Very little is said about Rwandans outside of national authorities, further reinforcing the notion of an overwhelming omnipresent state lording over obedient, citizens.

Presciently, René Lemarchand already warned in 1966 against this “snapshot” approach to understanding the country. As he explained, “[t]he picture which emerges from the literature is little more than a snapshot view of Rwanda society at any given period of history. In turn the omission of dynamic elements from their total historical context has led certain scholars to vastly oversimplify, and therefore misinterpret, political realities.”²⁸ These depictions of pre-genocide Rwanda, like our understandings of authoritarianism, call for a finer and especially more dynamic understanding.

When it comes to Rwanda, David Newbury once said that “arguing over the genocide means essentially arguing over history – or arguing over whether or not to include history.”²⁹ Similarly, arguing over understandings of authoritarianism should mean arguing over what to include in the story of its trajectory. But no one has really picked up the debate over recent history in Rwanda and how pre-genocide regimes are represented. And few have entered the argument over what matters to the story of authoritarianism, especially if we want to get to a fine-grained picture of the workings of authoritarian power.

This, then, is what this book is meant to do: To redirect attention away from static conceptualizations of authoritarianism and in so doing pick a historical, and trajectory-focused, argument centered around pre-genocide Rwanda.

Structure of the Book

The book is therefore fundamentally about Rwanda regimes in place following independence and prior to the war in 1990.³⁰ It argues that these regimes were never that strong or able to extend their control with the ease and effectiveness we often assume. Regimes in pre-genocide Rwanda, like many similar regimes, experienced authoritarianism as a process to achieve and secure control, not as a reality of established control and attendant compliance. Emerging from colonial rule on shaky grounds – both in terms of regime groundings and the strength of the state apparatus that could be used to materialize and demonstrate control, the two pre-genocide Rwandan Republics were continually working to manage military/political competitors and the regular challenges of governing amid political and economic constraints. They never fully attained the reach and compliance commonly assumed. National and local realities of authoritarianism proved throughout the period much more complex and ambiguous, allowing some space to carve out individual trajectories within the system. Overall, these regimes accumulated contradictions, forms of exclusion and discontent among elites and the population. Their trajectory is one of elusive control, rather than its establishment. Pre-genocide Rwanda demonstrates that the crises we focus on to understand authoritarianism are never solely born of critical junctures and the dramatic jousting of national elites. They also often find their source in the more neglected ordinary moments of authoritarianism, when regimes are unsuccessful in managing regular political confrontations and contradictions, and where their reach of ordinary citizens is never as complete as we assume.

Chapter 1 looks at some of the conceptual and theoretical debates surrounding authoritarianism. In doing so, it explores the contribution a focus on authoritarian trajectories can make to our understanding of realities under authoritarianism. This chapter also briefly explores some of the challenges of studying authoritarianism from a historical lens in the Rwandan context. It raises constraints – historical and authoritarian – regarding access to material, but also turns to the issue of talking to people who have lived authoritarianism and continue to do so. Chapter 2 turns to what pre-genocide Rwanda adds as a case to explore authoritarianism. Many would dismiss outright the country as too exceptional to illustrate the authoritarian realities at the core of the book. But Rwanda not only epitomizes in scholarship the common “achieved lens” perspective regarding authoritarianism, it does so while in the African context that has also in its own way given rise to some of the more stereotypical depictions of authoritarianism and state fragility. The chapter is thus an opportunity to set Rwanda within a broader African context, as well as explore some of the “achieved” depictions of authoritarianism Rwanda has given rise to, which the book challenges.

The next chapters turn to a rediscovery of the First and Second Republics through the novel lens of their authoritarian structures and the challenges they faced. At their core is the argument that Rwanda was never as “strong” an authoritarian state as has commonly been depicted, in the sense of its regimes’ exerting extensive and exclusive control. Authoritarianism remained a resilience strategy, a process to ground power and command of the territory and people more than its embodiment. Chapter 3 revisits the beginnings and ends of the First and Second Republics to shed alternative light on moments too often presumed to be known, but rarely explored anew in the “background summaries” produced to situate the genocide or in work on contemporary Rwanda.³¹ Whether the 1959 “Social Revolution” or the coup d’état marking the passage from the First to the Second Republic, few have recounted these events in a manner that conveys their flux and complexity. They have instead largely been retold in recent years through the lens of the ethnic conflicts too often presumed to dominate Rwandan political life. In other words, Chapter 3 revisits many of our assumptions about moments in Rwandan history we believe we know, but have tended to study only inasmuch as they fit a specific narrative regarding Rwandan politics and violence. The chapter is therefore a first opportunity to show the importance of the granular outlook at the core of the book.

Chapter 4 explores the shape of authoritarianism in Rwanda over the course of the 1959/1960–1990 period. The chapter focuses on mapping and discussing the institutional manifestations of this authoritarianism, from structures to strategies. It presents Rwanda as akin to a “soft authoritarian state,” a categorization that has gained growing traction in the comparative study of authoritarianism. The notion of soft authoritarianism has been particularly useful in drawing attention to a larger toolkit of strategies, including of a symbolic and normative nature. These symbolic strategies were an essential part of how authoritarianism manifested in Rwanda following independence. The following chapter, Chapter 5, therefore explores this expanded repertoire of authoritarian strategies as deployed during the First and Second Republics. Both chapters help show how unexceptional Rwanda’s authoritarianism was, even if it made way to exceptional violence.

Manifestations of authoritarianism are never sufficient to capture authoritarian trajectories. The book explores, as a result, challenges to Rwandan authoritarian stability over the course of the period. Chapter 6 looks at some of the security challenges the country experienced in the first years of the First Republic and again at the end of the Second Republic. In other words, it focuses on challenges to Rwandan authorities’ monopoly of legitimate violence. If we tend to take armed challenges as the main or most important security threat a regime can face, divisions among its security sector also ranks high as a source of instability. Chapter 7 delves into contentious and competitive relations among security sector actors, especially given how important they were in Rwandan political life over the course of the period, and especially during the Second Republic born of a military coup. If these two chapters verge on looking at the more radical challenges to authoritarianism generally discussed in comparative politics – the ones that break the system, Chapter 8 turns instead to the “political and economic grind.” It turns to the ongoing political and economic friction the two republics experienced throughout their life span. Though never a challenge to the republics’ absolute survival, this grind nonetheless undermined their ability to achieve control, chipping away at the bases of and confidence in the two regimes. This set of chapters is therefore largely centered on the national level, the level favored by comparative authoritarianism scholars. But together these chapters highlight the necessity to understand this national level through the lens of ongoing, more regular – some would even say mundane or banal – challenges.

There is more, however, than national realities of authoritarianism. Chapter 9 shifts the focus away from the capital and national level to address the question of reach. To what extent were local representatives of regimes and ordinary Rwandans subjugated by authoritarianism? While “achieved” depictions of authoritarianism suggest a vertical, overbearing chain to compel obedience from top to bottom, local-level administrators and ordinary citizens were never absolute cogs in the authoritarian system in place in Rwanda. The chapter explores the ambiguous realities of lived authoritarianism under the two republics as seen through the eyes of Rwandans who lived them.

Finally, the Conclusion further explores what is gained from seeing authoritarianism through the granular lens of a trajectory. It is also an opportunity to look at how this outlook on authoritarianism in Rwanda reconciles explanations of the genocide centered on the variety of the killings and across regions with what came before the violence, as it is an opportunity to engage literature on authoritarianism regarding what fosters resilience or instability in a manner that moves beyond the rigid frames of “achieved authoritarianism,” or the “end points” of control and crisis.

As is apparent from the topic and its treatment, this book does not adopt ethnicity, ethnocentrism, and violence as the logical points of entry to explore Rwandan political history. Some may fault my analysis for this approach, which purposefully takes most of the focus off these now conventional pivots of Rwandan scholarship. This is not meant to deny and minimize the cataclysmic ethnocentric violence³² the country experienced in 1994, or some of the earlier episodes before 1994: a violent targeting of the Tutsi, especially in Gikongoro in 1963–1964 (further discussed in Chapter 6), and violence of an ethnic nature and beyond in 1972 and especially 1973 (briefly discussed in Chapter 3). Nor is it meant to minimize the many forms of oppression and discrimination Rwandans have experienced simply for belonging to the wrong ethnic group, region, or socio-economic class. Finally, nor do I ignore that Rwandans continue to experience forms of state violence, oppression, and discrimination related to ethnicity even today. Ethnicity, ethnocentrism, and ethnic violence have been an important and tremendously scarring part of Rwandans’ lives. To borrow from Norma Roumie, who wrote on a completely different, yet just as divided society, there is certainly an “ethnic nerve” in Rwanda.³³ It has flared at different times in Rwandan history, sometimes in the most dramatic form it could.

But ethnicity, ethnocentrism, and ethnic violence are not a deterministic story in Rwanda. They have been a regular feature of the country’s history not because they are fundamental in Rwanda, but because politics and power have regularly been structured in an exclusive manner, by all sides.³⁴ We must rediscover exclusive politics and understand them in Rwanda ahead of ethnicity. Not the other way around. This includes eventually understanding violence in Rwanda as born of politics, even if it targets identities. This is one of the reasons why, in several chapters, I start from this dominant ethnic reading or interpretation, the one more familiar to many, only to unpack it and delve further into what is missing from it. If I begin, for example, with ethnic targeting ahead of the coup that instituted the Second Republic in Chapter 3, it is in large part because it is commonly and unquestioningly cited as the driver of the coup, even though this interpretation glosses over many other factors and events behind it. Similarly, if I begin with reprisal violence that followed armed incursions into Rwanda in the 1960s, and especially the massacres of 1963–1964 in Chapter 6, it is because they are also one of the most known and cited critical moment of ethnic violence in Rwanda, to the point of often overshadowing the cross-border attacks that initiated them and followed them.

In sum, the book looks at authoritarian politics and the political defined broadly, including in their more routine forms, because they can help us shed alternative light on Rwanda, on the neglected period that preceded the genocide and those that followed. And they can shed light on the role of ethnicity, ethnocentrism, and ethnic violence in the broader political game, rather than assuming ethnocentrism is necessarily the politic in Rwanda.