Marie-Eve Desrosiers’ book makes a significant contribution to the study of Rwanda, authoritarian regimes and everyday governance. The book offers an in-depth and nuanced analysis of Rwanda's key but often neglected era – its two post-independence republics that followed colonial rule and preceded the 1994 genocide. One of Desrosiers’ key contributions is to understand authoritarian governance during this era on its own terms, rather than through the lens of the 1994 genocide. In so doing, Desrosiers paints a picture of a system that is far from exceptional, and far from an inevitable precursor to one of the most horrific atrocities on the African continent. If anything, the regimes under Gregoire Kayibanda and later Juvenal Habyarimana could be defined as ordinary forms of soft authoritarianism. But precisely because the book refuses to bring itself into the orbit of the study of the 1994 genocide that dominates the scholarship on the country, it makes us rethink the way in which political regimes operate, transform and ultimately contribute to widespread political violence.
An important contribution of Desrosiers’ work is its systematic deconstruction of the notion of the regimes’ ‘achieved control’ – the notion that the government's reach and authority are present and effective – an assumption that has been especially prevalent in the scholarship on Rwanda. Desrosiers instead opts for a more fluid and dynamic understanding of political power, deploying the notion of authoritarian trajectories and everyday political grind to foreground the continuous friction of authoritarian governance, and control as something continually belaboured, expanding and contracting, and always imperfect.
In a series of carefully crafted and meticulously researched chapters, Desrosiers takes us on a journey to understand authoritarian governance not through moments of rupture and crisis, but instead its everyday challenges, balancing acts and contradictions. She depicts a Rwanda where the political elites struggle to exert control over territory, have to navigate tensions in the security sanctum and within political ranks, and where local governance, despite its ever-inventive deployment of events, activities and governance structures, struggles to assert its authority.
Just as she works against the notion of achieved control, Desrosiers also veers away from another dominant lens – that of ethnicity – in understanding the political dynamics and rifts in Rwanda. Desrosiers shows a range of factors that were more important to regime stability including regionalism and grievances around regional exclusion, exile politics and intra-regime fractures. The book also offers a great exposition of the structure of ideological legitimation and a well-crafted historicisation of legitimation repertoires, many of which we still encounter in contemporary Rwanda.
To further expand on these significant contributions, it would have been useful to place the analysis in conversation with literature on the state and state formation, rather than simply literature on authoritarian regimes. Inevitably, issues around control and reach tie to structures of statehood and political geography with Rwanda indeed possessing characteristics in this respect that set it aside from many countries that surround it. How does ordinary authoritarianism interact with not so ordinary political geography? Are state and regime separate or intertwined? Further theorisation around these issues would have been a really welcome addition to existing debates. If all authoritarian contexts evidence imperfect control, is Rwanda still unique in the sense that it provided greater potential for reach, and ultimately coercion at local level?
The book's de-emphasizing of ethnicity is very welcome, but in a sense also obscures one of the major differences in authoritarian governance pre- and post- genocide, something that could have been highlighted at least briefly in the closing of the book. The two Republics have been led by Hutu-dominated political parties and political elites, in stark contrast to Tutsi-dominated (and specifically returnee dominated) elites of the post-genocide Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)-led government, governing a divided, traumatised country, and a distrustful majority and one that it distrusted. If the two Republics have been ‘ordinary authoritarianisms’, it would have been useful to know whether contemporary Rwanda is unique in the context of Rwanda's broader historical trajectory, or indeed among authoritarianisms more broadly. Is the devastating violence the impetus for a more pervasive form of governance and control, or is it the other way around?
Naturally, no book can capture all there is to say about a complex topic and if anything, these suggestions and questions point to the rich problematic and thought-provoking analysis that Desrosiers’ book offers. Desrosiers has made an important contribution to our understanding of governance in Rwanda, asking us to revisit many core assumptions about an era many thought they knew. But she also makes a contribution to the study of authoritarianism more broadly, changing our focus on elites, institutions and strategies of stability to a more granular, ambiguous and uncertain practice of power.
