Writing in World Politics almost three decades ago, Timur Kuran explained why the mass mobilizations and eventual collapse of seemingly durable (communist) regimes took the world, including close observers, by surprise. He argued that widespread preference falsification by ordinary citizens living under authoritarian rule conveyed the impression of a wellspring of popular support when precisely the opposite was the case. Political scientists trying to indirectly infer popular dissatisfaction from quantitative measures of democracy or lack thereof, or from indices of corruption and quality of governance, can never quite tap into the extent or intensity of popular grievance and how ordinary citizens understand, rank, and articulate their reasons for opposing or undermining public policy.
Susan Thomson’s political ethnography bolsters this view, by giving us insight into the extent of Rwandan citizens’ dissimulation on issues ranging from economic policy to national reconciliation policy. Whispering Truth to Power sheds light on a reconstructed postgenocide state that is posting overall economic growth and is strong enough to implement public projects from above, but remains nonetheless quite fragile given societal perception of a ruling elite in pursuit of power and wealth, disconnected from popular aspirations and circumstances. The cracks are barely visible—but they exist in the acts of small resistance that Thomson identifies. The author discusses how “subtle, indirect, and nonconfrontational” actions such as “staying on the sidelines,” “irreverent compliance,” and “withdrawn muteness” can expose the façade of a citizenry united behind public policy (pp. 150–59).
It may seem counterintuitive that a population resists reconciliation or development. However, Thomson argues that the reasons are hardly that a poor and barely literate population recuperating from the collective trauma of civil war and genocide does not understand its own interest in peace and economic welfare. Instead, she argues that public policies enmeshed ordinary citizens in multiple and overlapping forms of social control from which they sought relief by avoiding interaction with local officials—to “find . . . peace” (in the respondents’ frequent usage), and to “restore their . . . dignity” (to quote the author, p. 176). Thomson’s respondents describe how the definition of genocide “survivor” set up distributional conflicts among members of the three main ethnic groups. These included the alienation felt at the lack of memorialization, compensation, or justice for non-Tutsi survivors of the civil war and genocide; the fear of being surveilled and reported; the heavy-handed reallocation of land toward “rational use”; the imposition of fines and fees upon a population struggling to meet basic needs; and the requirements of participation, with proper dress, facial expression, and comportment in everyday life and during special events such as genocide commemoration. In this context, waking up early to go to one’s field and avoid the public meeting, laughing from the back of a crowd, and sticking out one’s tongue at a local official behind his back are “desperate acts of persons living in extreme poverty, emotional pain, continual fear, and constant isolation” (p. 155). These acts make “daily life more sustainable,” and if someone “does no more than maintain his or her resources—land holdings or access to school fees . . . in the face of attempts . . . to take them away for any reason, then the individual is practicing everyday resistance.”(p. 133).
In the first half of the book (Chapters 1–3), Thomson undertakes a historical analysis of the Rwandan state, identifying continuities in the use of violence as state strategy in the pregenocide and postgenocide periods. The heart of the book is the second half; Chapter 4 outlines the “practices of national unity and reconciliation,” Chapter 5 is devoted to “everyday resistance to national unity and reconciliation,” and Chapter 6 looks at “everyday resistance to the gacaca [local genocide courts] process.” Two points are particularly noteworthy: First, the alienation from the state occurs across the ethnic spectrum. One’s status at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy (the respondents are drawn from the three lowest categories in the socioeconomic spectrum) seems to determine basic attitudes toward the state. Second, these vulnerable respondents are simply “holding the line” against a ruling elite trying to rebuild at great speed while dismissing the sacrifices involved, costs imposed, and the fears of the population so long as they complied with policy dictates (p. 133). Thomson writes of a technocratic elite that seeks performance legitimacy in the public goods provisioning and social welfare arenas (by checking administrative corruption, and by delivering results on the education and health fronts), while choosing to remain tone-deaf to ground-level anxieties—ethnic, economic, and political— and moving to aggressively silence every opposition with allegations of “negative ideas” and “genocide ideology.”
The book acknowledges the limitations of a small sample and seeks to make bounded general claims (p. 186). However, readers will wish that the author had presented more of the original ethnographic material to delve deeper into the process by which a policy of reconciliation came to be experienced as “an oppressive force in [peoples’] daily lives” (p. 109). Thomson shows how the state put continuous pressure on poor citizens, preventing them from acting on their individual preferences, and how the state’s suspicion and surveillance of nonstate spaces created the need to mask one’s feelings. But this raises the question: What is the substance and form of individual preferences in the realm of reconciliation? What options would ordinary citizens have exercised when it came to the difficult business of reconciliation, assuming there were spaces available “outside the glare of state power” (p. 162)? Did the respondents imagine reconciliation as a purely nonstate matter, or did they see an evenhanded reconciliation policy connected to the political prospects of the ruling elite? In some of the narratives, there is reference to such sentiments as “none of my people have power,” and “[we are] slaves to this government like our ancestors were slaves.” Such expressions suggest that perhaps ethnicity and class intertwine in more problematic ways than a socioeconomic class framework can accommodate (pp. 107, 157).
Thomson appropriately refrains from “overemphasizing individuals’ ability to . . . mitigate sociopolitical structures of domination,” and chooses to focus instead on the meaning of specific forms of resistance for understanding a system of state power (p. 133). But Whispering Truth to Power does more than this. It shows how such types of micro-level resistance and dissimulation reinforce the larger structure by denying officials the information that they need to adjust policy, and by paradoxically convincing officials of the correctness of their own prejudices—namely, that sullen silence, foot dragging, and the like are evidence of the masses’ ignorance and backwardness. Such behavior is consequently used by officials as evidence that ordinary citizens must therefore be instructed, coerced, and continually taught by a technocratic elite with a more sophisticated understanding of the country’s needs. In the tradition of James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Seeing Like a State (1998), Thomson’s book is a valuable read for all those interested in issues of reconciliation as public policy, and in state–society relations in postconflict transitions.
