This edited collection assesses Rwanda's political, economic and social trajectory since the 1994 genocide and civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead, including a sizeable proportion of the country's minority Tutsi population. The editors are themselves prominent scholars on the genocide and have here put together an extremely important evaluation of present day Rwanda. This book will be of significant interest to scholars of political violence, post-violence politics and reconstruction, and the Rwandan genocide. It is currently the most inclusive and broad-based assessment of present-day Rwanda, and cogently challenges widespread perceptions of the country.

The book consists of twenty-two substantive chapters (including a helpful introduction) and two “concluding observations.” It is divided into five parts: Part I focuses on governance and statebuilding; Part II examines the international and regional contexts; Part III addresses post-genocide justice; Part IV looks at rural engineering and redevelopment; and Part V examines the production of collective memory in politics, civil society and education. The contributors are mostly non-Rwandan but have extensive field experience in the country and include both well-known analysts and younger scholars from across the social sciences.

The overall assessment of the Rwandan state is quite critical. In contrast to overly positive journalist and donor community reports of the post-genocide recovery that continue to dominate public understandings of Rwanda, this volume notes that much of the country's economic progress and political stability have been due to extensive foreign aid channeled through the authoritarian rule of President Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader of the insurgency that overthrew the genocidal Hutu regime. This is not to say that government successes go unacknowledged; rather, the contributors provide careful evaluations of a host of policies and note their accomplishments and failures. Indeed, what emerges from these discussions is a profile of a highly complex country: one where political contestation is carefully managed through laws banning “divisionism” and “genocide ideology,” the press is curtailed, justice rarely touches members of the government, and memory politics bend in the interests of the leaders. Rwanda is also, however, a country where the government has rebuilt the economy, reformed the land tenure system and reshaped gender imbalances in politics and the economy. Nevertheless, even these successes have been marred by heavy-handed implementation with little local consultation. The editors note “real concerns about the medium- and long-term social and political consequences of Rwanda's post-genocide model” (p. 7), and fear that violence may return if the leadership does not open politics to real democratic contestation. “[S]tability, order and growth do not preclude severe breakdowns and violent conflict” (p. 7).

Several general findings stand out in this book. First, the current government's historical and ideological roots are in a guerrilla force (the Rwandan Patriotic Force, or RPF) that privileged discipline, loyalty and security above deliberation or political tolerance. These values have shaped the regime's attitudes toward internal and external threats and democratic politics. Paul Gready's investigation of the state's control over civil society and Susan Thomson's analysis of Ingando, or “reconciliation” and reeducation camps, testify to the general concern over internal challenges. Second, authoritarian control is maintained through a variety of techniques ranging from overt repression to the selective cooption of potential challengers. Multiparty elections are managed to ensure that no meaningful opposition emerges. Timothy Longman's discussion of Rwanda's “undemocratic transition” (p. 27) and Bert Ingelaere's reconstruction of “social engineering campaigns” (p. 68) helpfully trace the ways in which the government extends its reach to silence potential political threats. A third finding focuses on institutional history. The current regime has successfully carried out a variety of economic reforms, but its top-down method of policy implementation reflects a long history of a highly centralized, activist state in Rwandan political life. A variety of chapters attest to the ways in which “current practices of state-centered social control are strongly rooted in Rwandan political culture and institutions, and thus post-genocide Rwanda exhibits strong patterns of continuity with pre-genocide Rwanda” (p. 14). None of the contributors argues that the present regime is likely to commit domestic genocide in the near future, but the institutional similarities with the past are troubling. Fourth, it seems that the regime's political support is narrow (pace the questionable 2010 presidential elections where Kagame allegedly won 93% of the votes) and has diminished as the government has repressed moderate Hutu and Tutsi dissidents over the past fifteen years. Fifth, the international context has been central to supporting and shaping the government's political goals. Chapters by Eugenia Zorbas and Rachel Hayman show how the international community has provided extensive financial aid to the regime to facilitate post-genocide reconstruction, which in turn has given the government greater flexibility to further its political, security and economic priorities. Simultaneously, continued instability in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where many perpetrators of the genocide live, reinforce Rwanda's security concerns. Chapters by Filip Reyntjens, Jason Stearns and Federico Borello explain how Rwanda played a seminal role in the two DRC wars of the past fifteen years to secure its own borders and enrich its coffers, with little accountability for its own crimes. These five findings furnish a theoretically informed account of how centralized state power is shaped by external security dilemmas and domestic economic imperatives to sustain an authoritarian developmentalist regime. In some respects, the volume confirms James Scott's thesis of authoritarian states' desires to implement high-modernist projects, but here security plays a crucial role in shaping state goals.

Remaking Rwanda differs from many scholarly works in that it has taken center stage in an ongoing and highly acrimonious political debate. Its critical treatment of the government has already generated numerous accusations of genocide denial from Kagame's defenders. These charges are unfounded, given that the book acknowledges the genocide as the defining feature of recent Rwandan history and many of the contributors are well known for earlier work on it.

In such a wide-ranging volume, there are bound to be a few areas that are left unexplored. It would be helpful to have a chapter placing Rwanda in the context of other post-violence cases, to assess how its particular features and trajectory differ from other transitions. For instance, have legacies of strong state institutionalism and security threats interacted in the same ways elsewhere? Do security concerns affect “high modernist” developmentalism (p. 223) in similar patterns in other countries?

A somewhat more substantial point concerns the baseline for evaluation adopted in the volume. Rwanda is criticized for various political shortcomings and abuses, but compared to what? When evaluated according to general democracy principles—electoral competitiveness, rule of law, freedom of speech—adopted by most contributors, it does poorly (especially evident when atrocities in neighboring DRC are considered). However, in comparison to similar post-violence cases (Cambodia, Guatemala) it has done relatively well along a variety of economic and stability measures, as well as when compared to neighboring African countries. Greater comparative contextualization would likely show this complex picture. Although this reviewer finds the book's critiques persuasive, the baseline evaluation question could have received further elaboration by placing Rwanda in a comparative framework.

Remaking Rwanda makes an important scholarly contribution to the post-conflict literature, and should be read widely. Its arguments bring greater theoretical sophistication and understanding to a case that continues to receive widespread attention.