Making good citizens from bad life in post-genocide Rwanda

This paper explores the attempts by international humanitarian agencies
and the post-genocide Rwandan state respectively to deal with
exceptionality created by the genocide and return to normality. It does so
by comparing two kinds of camps that deal with exceptional life; the
refugee camps for Hutu who fled after the genocide and the Rwandan
government’s re-education camps. While there are resemblances between
the exceptional space of refugee camps and the ingando camps, there are,
however, also subtle differences. While the international community is
attempting to create universal citizens out of ‘bare life’, the Rwandan state
is attempting to exorcise a concrete historical moment of violence, and the
Hutu who enter the ingando are produced as what I term ‘bad life’. In this
sense, the idea of a new beginning in Rwanda differs from universal claims
to justice in the legalistic sense and is in stead specific, political and at
times violent. It is a political project of casting a new Rwanda in a specific
image.