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Training for Model Citizenship pp 1–35Cite as

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Introduction

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Abstract

How do people in post-genocide Rwanda relate to the state and to themselves as its citizens, in light of the government’s pursuit of model citizens in the Itorero civic education program and local, everyday government? In her exploration of these questions, Sundberg draws on the Foucauldian governmentality theory and scholarship on the state and citizenship, and departs from three ethnographic spaces: the daily workings of the Itorero program, the everyday government of a local neighborhood in Kigali, and the testimonies of ordinary Rwandans living in Kigali. Based on these fields of knowledge, Sundberg proposes one way of studying authoritarian rule: by looking at how certain government practices engender in people experiences of exposure to the state’s power and violent potential.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The exact number of victims is not known. Estimates range from five hundred thousand (HRW 1999, 15) to more than a million (Rutembesa 2011, 517).

  2. 2.

    “Itorero ry’Igihugu means “National Itorero.” I use the words “Itorero” and “Itorero ry’Igihugu” interchangeably to refer to the contemporary government program, unless otherwise stipulated.

  3. 3.

    The program mostly targeted ex-militia returning from exile in the DRC.

  4. 4.

    Rwanda’s Gini coefficient (measuring income inequality) is estimated at 0.49 (World Bank 2014).

  5. 5.

    Rwanda’s domestic military tribunal has found a few RPF soldiers guilty of killings around the time of the genocide, although no sentence exceeded two years in prison (HRW, 2003).

  6. 6.

    I mainly use the term “neighborhood” to designate what in Kinyarwanda is called umudugudu (imidugudu in plural). Umudugudu refers to the smallest administrative unit in Rwanda (comprising on average 50–150 households). In rural areas, umudugudu is usually translated as “village.”

  7. 7.

    I use the terms “trainee” and “participant” interchangeably to refer to a person trained in Itorero.

  8. 8.

    The lectures held at the NURC center are usually recorded onto audio files for the participants to bring home. This allowed me to listen to the lectures I had missed after the training was over.

  9. 9.

    Ubwenegihugu stems from the two words umwene, meaning “master” or “owner,” and igihugu, meaning “country” or “land.”

  10. 10.

    The term “ethnicity” will be used to refer to the identities Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. This is the term that scholars of Rwanda have been using for the past half century. Meanwhile, the assumed nature of these identities has changed many times over the centuries and is still subject to multiple interpretations in Rwanda and beyond, ranging between e.g. races, castes, classes, political, or socio-professional statuses, and colonial constructions.

  11. 11.

    Outside the field of anthropology, another insightful study of authoritarian rule in capitalist society is Teresa Wright’s (2010) analysis of the communist regime in China and the popular support it enjoys despite economic liberalization.

  12. 12.

    In 2014, 31 percent of Rwanda’s state budget was financed by foreign aid (DfID 2014).

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  1. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Molly Sundberg

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  1. Molly Sundberg
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Sundberg, M. (2016). Introduction. In: Training for Model Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58422-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58422-9_1

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