Rwanda is perhaps the only state in Africa which is internationally recognized for its success in strengthening resilience, passing from horrors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis to become one of the most successful and unified states in the region. In fact, resilience as a power of governance was at the heart of President Paul Kagame’s post-genocide regime. Illustrating last year, the country launched a massive community participatory framework for the evaluation of resilience led by the Ministry of National Unity and Civic Commitment (Minubumwe), in collaboration with the Swedish NGO arrest. The University of Rwanda, in Kigali, was therefore an important place for our third workshop on the decolonization of resilience (a networking project funded by AHRC) bringing together academics and political experts from Ghana and South Sudan to discuss the project to reconstruct the State of Rwanda by building new mechanisms of governance of resilience.
Resilience as a mode of governance can be a new concept for some Er Readers, perhaps more familiar with resilience as approaching psychology and engineering (“bounce” or to face constraints) or perhaps with the resilience of ecosystems (the ability to adapt and change). Resilience as a mode of governance is procedural, aspiring to operate beyond or outside the liberal modernist conceptions of politics. In fine, the policy is less likely to be conceived as a distinct formal sphere, limited to the elections every five years and operating separately from the private or social and economic sphere. The governance of resilience is less interrupted by distinct political measures with a beginning and an end and less likely to have discreet objectives. Instead, the governance of resilience is likely to involve rolling processes in the development of iterative and adaptive policies and public consultation and commitment processes.
For some commentators, resilience as a cohesion framework is due to the current trauma of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, for others, it is a coverage for a repressive regime, which was criticized for a lack of human rights and civil freedoms and for having delighted in progress in the DRC. This article suggests that a key reason for which resilience appeared in Rwanda is the lack of mediation mechanisms connecting the ruling regime to the population. Not only were the governing institutions largely nonexistent in the wake of the 1994 genocide, but the Rwandan Rwandan entrants Rwandan who resumed the regime had small roots in Rwanda itself in the minority Tutsis population. In fact, some authors argue that there was little connection between the Rwandan Tutsi community and those of the Dimensive Diasporical Liberation Army in Uganda. In this context, not only governance by resilience is trying to compensate for the lack of relationship between the State and the population that it also seeks to guarantee that no populist movement can emerge which could destabilize the regime. Instead of collective democratic mechanisms for legitimization and political discussion, there are distributed mechanisms of governance, responsibility and mobilization of the population thanks to the downward application of the participatory and advisory programs which reach the level of the household and the village.
Post-genocide Rwanda has become more and more the resilience governance model, a resilient state LetterIn his attempts to present the State as a facilitator or facilitator of the People’s Agency. In Rwanda today, governance is a process of social mobilization motivated by the State but with a very clear “ascending program”. While the sovereign state is governed directly from the summit – with the apocryphal dicton attributed to Louis XIV, “the state is me” (“I am the state”) – the Rwandan state has the opposite declaratory philosophy, that “the citizen is the first”. It is with the citizen as an individual that the process of state construction, reconstruction, to become resilient, begins. In today’s Rwanda, political, ethnic and regional identities are held to be replaced by those of resilience, where to be a good citizen means that there is little distinction between its own agent and the good of the nation. During the workshop, a certain number of participants argued that they had not distinguished between their own interests and those of the Rwandan state.
Central to resilience as a governance regime is the collapse of obstacles between the political and legal sphere (formal equality) and the social and economic sphere (where there is the free game of difference). Often, this rupture is understood simply in the language of neoliberalism; In terms of political responsibility for the poorer or marginal sections of the population to bring the burden of economic inequalities. This is not really the case in Rwanda, although mutual aid is certainly at the heart of the Rwandan state, often encapsulated in the concept of Value (“dignity”). Will Jones supports: ‘Value implies that each Rwandan should be an active agent in their own, as well as development, rather than a passive or defenseless recipient. People and communities are regularly invited to solve their own problems, in particular by implementing the main parts of the government development program. »»
However, the “neoliberalization” of the state goes further in Rwanda than elsewhere. It is clear that the governance of resilience does not essentially concern the withdrawal of the state of the social and economic sphere, but rather its insertion. This is clear in Rwanda via the development of Imihigo (“Vouet Public”) as a form of performance contract, initially used to centralize control over local authorities, then extended to civil servants and institutions, then extended to the level of individual households, to make wishes and to be held to take into account their personal and family performance objectives at the village level. At our workshop, the participants gave examples of performance networks caused in family places, anti -social behavior, performance behavior.
As important as these modes of jamming the public and the private are, it is in the reshuffle of the political sphere that the governance of “cultivated” resilience of Rwanda is probably the most innovative. Democracy is widely considered to be divided into the post-genocide state, where the elections could lead to revised ethnic rivalries and the Hutu majority population voting potentially against the regime led by Tuts. Resilience strives to postpone or move the democratic mechanisms of the search for facts and consensual construction. At the most basic level, the governance of resilience concerns the commitment, measurement and feedback, the Rwandan State has led mass consultation exercises, an annual national dialogue and a considerable infrastructure of the collection and consultation of data, to monitor your own performance and search for citizens and other comments from stakeholders.
To this end, the community participative framework for the evaluation of resilience led by the Ministry of National Unity and Civic Commitment (Minubumwe), is indicative of the level of commitment of the State in the resilience of construction at all levels of the individual household. The evaluation itself was a mass exercise in participatory research, involving more than 2,000 people in discussion groups as well as 4,500 people questioned, asked to assess their own resilience through a certain number of key indicators, in particular “humility”, “emotional conscience”, “hope”, the “ management of self-management and “here and” here and now “. The investigation concludes that “the averages national scores reveal a society which has notable forces in collaboration, empathy and certain cognitive skills, but which could improve its spiritual well-being, its humility, its emotional expression and its ability to deal with psychological trauma”. Resilience is held to retain Rwandan development, but is also considered a fundamental force of the approach of the governing regime.
Once the resilience provides the framework in which the effectiveness of the government, social stability and economic progress is discussed, there is little space for the “Western” ideas of liberal rights and freedoms, which only lead to social division and economic and political conflicts. The interesting aspect of the “cultivated” resilience of Rwanda resilience is that it is not imposed by Western institutions and NGOs, but nevertheless has a result similar to the resilience programs discussed in other contexts such as Ghana and Sudan du Sud, where external projects to strengthen resilience tend to see the liberal constructions of political conflict.
In this context, resilience, as a mode of mobilization and “post-political” societal engagement, allows a relatively open discussion on problems, questions of social support for good parenting to those of corruption in government agencies and, in fact, facilitates awareness and responsiveness. It may be that, rather than simply seeing resilience as a neocolonial mechanism retaining international hierarchies, new modes of political experimentation in African states can have important (positive and negative) lessons for those who seek to find ways to fight against “democratic discomfort” within Western societies.
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