Prior to 1994, Rwanda’s domestic politics garnered little extensive attention. Since its genocide, however, scholars have perpetually analyzed the conditions realized by catastrophe. Marie-Eve Desrosiers’s Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide offers a revisionist political history of Rwanda’s First (1962–73) and Second (1973–90) Republics by “subverting the notion of ‘trajectory’ to emphasize the dynamic nature of authoritarianism” (39). By design, Desrosiers targets a durable assumption in both scholarship and popular memory: that pre-genocide Rwanda was ruled by unusually strong and tightly disciplined regimes capable of reaching deep into society and, eventually, of mobilizing that society for genocide. Across nine chapters, besides a conceptual introduction and conclusion, Desrosiers traces two regimes that are constantly improvising against armed incursions, security-sector rivalries, chronic economic strain, and their own administrative limits, never achieving the level of control retrospectively ascribed to them by post-1994 scholarship as a means to “redirect attention away from static conceptualizations of authoritarianism” and demonstrate its “moving” capacities (14).

Drawing on archival research and interviews, Desrosiers reconstructs the First and Second Republics as irresolute rather than proficient. In the first two chapters, Desrosiers makes the case for a “trajectory” approach against a comparative literature that, in its turn toward institutions, has lost sight of authoritarianism’s “deep politics,” and further argues against Rwandan exceptionalism, situating both Republics within a broader pattern of resource-poor and weakly institutionalized African “soft authoritarian” states (6). What follows, in Chapter Three, is an unsettling of the standard historical record itself, revisiting the founding and terminal moments of each republic (the 1959 Social Revolution, independence, the 1973 coup) and positioning them as being more contingent than conventional nationalist or ethnic narratives allow. Chapters Four and Five give insight to how each regime attempted to govern: the institutional architecture that evolved from Grégoire Kayibanda’s narrowing multiparty system to Juvénal Habyarimana’s single-party MRND, and the parallel apparatus of rhetoric and ritual through which both sought to persuade rather than coerce. The book’s empirical center, Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight, detail the pressures such mechanisms were built to manage: a decade of recurring armed border incursions and the 1963–64 reprisal massacres, whose notoriety, Desrosiers argues, obscures the chronic insecurity beneath them; rivalries within the security services, crystallized in the 1979–80 Lizinde affair; and the slower erosion of authority through political infighting and economic strain acute by the late 1980s (258). Chapter Nine closes its empirical arc at the level of local administrators and ordinary citizens, using the interviews to depict a system that was real and at times punitive, but unevenly enforced and quietly maneuverable.

The book’s principal contribution is disciplinary and attempts to expand the confines of what we deem authoritarian by centering the granular and reframing time prior to the “achieved” catastrophe. The comparative authoritarianism’s institutionalist turn has explained regime durability largely through national-level structures, specifically parties, elections, and elite power-sharing. By recentering the granular and the local across a multi-decade arc, Desrosiers extends a smaller ethnographic tradition running through Wedeen, Shue, Bayart, and Hibou, showing how authoritarian strategies accumulate and generate their own contradictions over time (32). The main argument is embedded into the title—authoritarianism in pre-genocide Rwanda was elusive rather than achieved. Conceptually, this reframes authoritarianism as a composite trajectory of elite maneuvering, local discretion, and citizen navigation, displacing the rigid definitive schemes common to the field. Empirically, it rests on the evidentiary base traced above, taking seriously material that previous scholarship has largely relegated to prelude. And while ethnicity is decentered as the automatic point of entry, it is done so without minimizing its eventual catastrophic salience, allowing Desrosiers to show how failures of control were as often rooted in economic strain and elite factionalism as in ethnic ideology. All of which allows for a recounting of the 1994 genocide as never being a single, centrally executed program flowing from decades of totalizing control as is otherwise regarded.

While Desrosiers proposes a provocative reorientation of regime control as being an unstable process that requires constant renewal as opposed to being constantly achieved, a subtle tension emerges in the granular period. Desrosiers faults existing scholarship for treating pre-genocide Rwanda as a static snapshot fixed by the genocide that followed, yet her own object of study is itself defined by that same terminus, as she focuses on the time period between 1962 and 1990. Additionally, although the book insists on Rwanda’s vitality to the wider study of authoritarianism, its sustained comparison to other cases remains largely implicit, and its closing gesture toward postgenocide continuities under the Rwandan Patriotic Front is correspondingly brief. Despite this, Desrosiers has made “achieved control” an assumption that scholars of Rwanda, and of authoritarianism more broadly, must continuously consider.