Navigating Post-Genocide Social Relations Memory, Power and Legacy in Rwanda

This book offers new empirical and theoretical perspectives on Rwanda, thirty years after the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. While Rwanda remains one of the most intensively studied post-conflict societies, important questions persist about how memory, power, identity, and everyday social relations continue to shape life within and beyond its borders. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, the volume is grounded in extensive fieldwork with survivors, former perpetrators, women, diaspora communities, researchers, and other actors navigating the complex legacies of genocide.

Rather than focusing exclusively on state institutions or elite political narratives, contributors examine how power is experienced and negotiated from the ground up. Chapters explore memorialization, gender, displacement, transitional justice, community reintegration, environmental narratives, research ethics, and the politics of memory, demonstrating how ordinary people navigate both the opportunities and constraints of post-genocide society. Together, these contributions advance interdisciplinary debates while highlighting voices and experiences that have too often remained at the margins of scholarship.

Navigating Post-Genocide Social Relations is essential reading for students and scholars in genocide studies, memory studies, African studies, transitional justice, conflict resolution, political science, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practitioners and policymakers working in post-conflict reconstruction and human rights.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Genocide Research.