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I want to focus on the relevance of COVID 19 for our thinking about multilevel peace building and reconciliation,

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because COVID really has challenged peace building efforts across the globe, it's exacerbated the drivers of conflict in many places.

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It's disrupted peace endeavours in many locations. And so I think we need to think through the implications of COVID specifically,

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but also the implications of all encompassing shocks, society wide shocks for our understanding of peacebuilding.

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And shocks, of course, can come in many forms, and some shocks are more shocking than others.

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I'm going to talk today, particularly about pandemics,

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but this is hopefully an entry point into discussions about the relevance of environmental crisis,

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economic collapse, political upheaval such as we've seen around Brexit in Northern Ireland.

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As Brandon talked about today or the peace referendum in Colombia.

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As Andre talked about, the shocks come in lots and lots of different forms,

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and I think we need to think through the implications of this for for peace efforts.

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Now I'm going to focus, particularly on Rwanda today, but I'm hoping that some key features of the Rwandan case illuminate much bigger issues that I

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hope have some relevance for other contexts I've been researching in Rwanda nearly every year.

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For the last 20 years, I've been conducting longitudinal research in the same 12 communities since 2003.

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And this includes doing fieldwork in Rwanda during COVID last year as part of a book that I'm working on at the moment.

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So I'm going to draw very heavily on that recent period of fieldwork.

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And I think that the Rwandan government is right when it says that COVID is Rwanda's biggest challenge since the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994.

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This is a country that, as many will know, has gone through, I think,

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a pretty remarkable transformation in that period and yet I think really has rocked the

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society to its foundations in a way that all ways that I'll talk about in just a moment.

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I'm going to very briefly focus on four issues in this presentation, and Gwen, I know,

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is a justifiably very strict chair, so she's going to keep me to 20 minutes on this.

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I firstly want to say something about how I think based on my research, every day, Rwandans interpret the concept of reconciliation.

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Secondly, I want to look at how Rwanda has pursued reconciliation with, I would argue, considerable success.

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Thirdly, I'll look at how COVID has challenged this.

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And then fourthly, I want to point to some broader lessons from this experience for context around the world.

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So full parts to this presentation.

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Let let me begin by just briefly discussing how I think my respondents in Rwanda since 2003 have talked about reconciliation.

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I think one of the things we have to recognise right at the outset is that

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Rwanda is quite remarkable in the sense that I'm like all of its neighbours.

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It has not experienced mass violence on its territory since the genocide in 1994.

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That might seem like a very simple thing to point out,

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but it's remarkable how often gets overlooked in the story of Rwanda's trajectory since the Genocide.

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And I think it's particularly remarkable when you put it in the context of hundreds of thousands of

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convicted genocide perpetrators now living side by side with genocide survivors on densely crowded hills.

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Because that's the socioeconomic, that's the demographic reality of Rwanda today.

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Now, of course, Rwanda has been embroiled in conflict elsewhere in the region,

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and it's undoubtedly been a generator of conflict outside of its borders.

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But I think it's important to begin with the reality of what has happened inside the country since '94.

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One of the very strong refrains coming through my research since 2003 across the ethnic divide with actors at all levels of Rwandan society

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and follow up interviews in the same communities over many years is a very strong desire for something much more than peaceful coexistence.

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I was particularly struck by Brandon's comments about some scepticism about

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peaceful coexistence as the ultimate endpoint in a place like Northern Ireland.

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The concept of peaceful existence is treated with enormous suspicion in Rwanda,

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mainly because between 1973 and 1994, many people would characterise that period as one of peaceful coexistence.

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But of course, it was a period in which serious divisions and tensions in Rwandan society were left,

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addressed and laid the seeds for the genocide in 1994, so that there's a real suspicion about peaceful coexistence.

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Now this, I think, is important.

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We see that reconciliation has real purchase in the Rwandan to write in a second, I'll talk about the specific components of that,

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but I want to situate this debate about this peaceful coexistence and reconciliation in the literature at the moment,

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because many of you will be familiar. And Andre and I have been talking about this for a very long time.

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There's a very strong literature on what is now known as agonistic peacebuilding or agonistic reconciliation,

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which basically says that the best fits post-conflict societies can hope for is to create spaces for non-violent dialogue,

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and that most calls for reconciliation involve openly romantic,

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overly optimistic attempts to fundamentally resolve past conflicts and past identities.

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And so for that reason, there's this emphasis on basically people continuing the conflicts of the past,

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but in a non-violent fashion and a very heavy emphasis on dialogue. Now, to simplify things in the Rwandan context,

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most of my respondents would dismiss that argument out of hand and would say, that's not enough for us.

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We need to aim for something more than that.

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We do need to rebuild and reconceive relationships at all levels of society and in completely different ways.

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And also, talk is not enough. The agonistic emphasis on dialogue alone is insufficient.

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One of the things that runs through my research in Rwanda is a very strong emphasis that reconciliation involves action.

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It involves cooperation. It involves engagement.

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So we've got the agonistic literature, which I would argue we we should be sceptical of.

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I think it's it's insufficiently robust. I think it's insufficiently optimistic.

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It narrows the parameters of what certain societies may be able to achieve or belief is important.

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More broadly, I would say in the literature or much of the literature, reconciliation is becoming a bit of a dirty word.

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Some of you may have even seen recently a special issue in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,

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with a piece by Richard Wilson on the theme of Reconciliation.

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The idea that that conflicts are often so intractable that reconciliation is simply fanciful.

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And so I think the Rwandan experience, at least my respondents, I think, would challenge that kind of view as well.

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To summarise the view of reconciliation that I think comes out of at least my Rwandan research is that this is not a romantic concept at all.

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It's incredibly practical and I often ask my respondents What would reconciliation look like?

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What are we looking for at different levels of society? And I emphasise very practical things.

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We eat and drink together. We work together on each other's farms, very heavy emphasis on on cooperative agricultural activities.

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We attend each other's weddings and funerals. We help each other during illness.

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Now come back to that because that's particularly salient in the current context,

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and we help each other during other crises that befall members of our community.

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So these are not romantic. These are not abstract things.

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These are very concrete day to day activities that many of my respondents believe signifies that reconciliation is starting to take place,

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and it's something practically that that should be aimed for.

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And in much of my work, I've argued that I think actually Rwanda has made substantial strides in achieving this kind of reconciliation.

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So then secondly, how is one to going about this in a multilevel sense, because that's the emphasis of our conference today.

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What are their mutually reinforcing processes at different levels, if for one society that have been important in pursuing reconciliation,

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not in a very schematic way, want to suggest that there are three crucial processes, but but do different things at different levels?

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One has been to get at Community Courts 12000 village trials between 2002 and 2012 that prosecuted 400000 genocide cases.

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I think what's particularly important about this enormous, imperfect, unruly, unpredictable process of village justice for George Floyd,

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for all of those ten years is that I firstly created a really important space for open

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contestation and confrontation between community members about the past and about the future.

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And also that it delivered punitive justice.

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Now this is something we haven't talked about too much today, the importance of punishment that in the Rwandan case,

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not just in the genocide survivor community, but even in some segments of the perpetrator community,

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there is a sense that the perpetrators to go back and live peacefully on the hills with their neighbours,

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that there needs to have been some sense of direct reckoning with the past and

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some kind of punishment and the that used a very creative form of punishment,

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particularly community service through get it to do so. I think that could such a process getting these trials out in the open,

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generating a public debate and delivering a very tangible form of justice to genocide

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perpetrators was incredibly important for the overall pursuit of reconciliation.

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The second crucial process towards reconciliation, but Rwanda has embarked on is a really systematic welfare system.

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This is something that we often don't hear in debates about Rwanda. What is remarkable, I think about the Rwandan story over the last 28 years,

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with all of its problems with all of its political conflicts, it's increasing.

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I would say authoritarianism is that this very illiberal state has in fact delivered the

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most systematic welfare programme in the region just once one small into one small.

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One indicator of that is that in the space of 15 years,

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Rwanda halved its child mortality rate because of massive investment in health care and health services.

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So that, of course, reduces the fear of death in the context of childbirth,

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a really important issue for well-being and people's ability to think about the future.

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But crucially, and this is one of the things that I've been mapping in my research since 2003 is a very sustained sense at the local level,

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especially in rural areas that but state welfare in health care,

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education and other areas has drastically decreased socioeconomic inequality across the ethnic divides.

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And I can't overstate the importance of this,

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that when Khatami stands up and says we are older one now and we need to overcome ethnic identity and embrace a sense of wonder and identity,

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many of my history respondents are very suspicious of that kind of dialogue.

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Well, that kind of discourse, except when they see that there is some tangible reality in their day to day life,

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their own socioeconomic uplift matches this rhetoric of a greater sense of abundance.

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And it has numerous other problems, but at least in socioeconomic terms.

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This, I think, has been absolutely essential to dealing with some of the the key drivers of the genocide in nineteen ninety four.

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What's crucial here, too, is that in discussions about socio economic inequality after 1994,

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people often point to Rwanda as very drastic Gini coefficient.

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But but that I think shrouds are much more important reality that that is often a Gini coefficient generated by the

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disjuncture between the social economic reality in Kigali and that socioeconomic reality out in the rural areas.

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And undoubtedly, there is a massive gold. But that's not how the vast majority of rural respondents understand inequality.

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They don't compare themselves with people living in Kigali because it might as well be another planet.

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They compare themselves with their neighbours. And there we are, seeing a high degree of equality manifesting, especially in the last 20 years,

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and many of my Hutu respondents told me very openly I never expected to be in the RPF to do this.

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They expected that a minority Tutsi government would do what every previous Rwandan regime had done,

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which was to fight about their own ethnic group, and they're pleasantly surprised by what they've experienced under the RPF.

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Now they're fearful of the RPF in many other respects government surveillance, repression, the rest of it.

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But on these really important socioeconomic terms, there has been, I think, some really important improvements there,

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and I was going to give examples of and share a couple of anecdotes that I'm aware of of the time.

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The third, I think, important process contributing to reconciliation in Rwanda is at the community level.

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So we've got a chat show which was a state orchestrated, community based approach.

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We got the welfare system, which is delivered by the state but below the purview of the state.

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After a charter, we've seen a range of really important informal, locally driven processes with a key emphasis on dialogue.

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There's this huge national patchwork of associations, student clubs, economic cooperatives, church groups, you name it.

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You go to any community in Rwanda and there'll be 20 of these groups who who meet every week,

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sometimes multiple times a week, to talk about current and historical problems.

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And I've sat in on hundreds of these meetings and in many respects, they replicate much of the discourse of the church.

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We're going to meet in open spaces and talk about the underlying problems in our community,

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and we're going to seek some kind of collective solution to that.

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These are quieter, less visible forms of reconciliation between individuals and groups,

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and I think they crucially complement what we've seen at the national level

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so that multiple processes at different levels are performing complementary.

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Peace and reconciliation related dimensions.

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And I think it's when you put these things together with it, we start to get a sense of why Rwanda is where it is today.

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The third big theme of this lecture, then, is what is Kober done to all of this?

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And I think that the crux here is that Tony Abbott has really challenged the

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basis of reconciliation that was laid by those three really important processes.

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The reasons for this are probably pretty self-evident in many respects.

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One crucial impact of trovate in Rwanda, and it should be said that Rwanda dealt with Typekit pretty well, its numbers were very, very low,

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but it came at an enormous cost, particularly in terms of the collapse of the formal and informal economies leading to massive food insecurity now.

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I was locked down with my wife and three children. I have to start having COVID.

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This week is not a patch on being locked down with my wife and three children aged under six.

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Never. And we were. We were locked down into daily at two different junctures over five months.

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I was in the countryside most of the time,

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but in the lockdowns I was obviously totally and also doing much more researching Kigali than I've done in a long time because of lockdown.

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I've never seen so much begging in Rwanda. In my 20 years of going there.

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There is a real cultural opposition in Rwanda to begging, especially from foreigners.

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There is a deep cultural discourse around self-reliance now.

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Kovic push people to the edge because many people really were on the brink of starvation, especially in Kigali.

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Now this, I think,

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is important for understanding the impact of COVID and our thinking about shocks is that there wasn't uniform impact of Typekit across the country,

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particularly there was a big rural and urban divide.

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One of the things that was really striking during my fieldwork in the countryside last year was the substantial resilience of rural communities,

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both in a socioeconomic but in a relational sense during COVID, in contrast to what was going on in Kigali.

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And I think that this wasn't only about COVID it.

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I think it points to the fact that those three reconciliation contributing processes are met before perhaps it taken greater root in rural areas.

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There had been much higher Kichcha turnouts in the countryside.

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This tends to be a lot less government surveillance of people's everyday interactions in the countryside.

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Maybe that's helped rural communities get further along the pathway towards reconciliation.

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But crucially, during COVID,

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one of the things that became so important was that rural communities could continue to grow food and they could continue to eat.

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In contrast to urbanites, particularly in Kigali, who could do no such thing,

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and one of the ways that this manifest was suddenly they were rural to urban remittances.

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So many of my rural respondents were sending mobile money, and sometimes, even despite the lockdown restrictions,

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smuggling food to their relatives in Kigali, one of my long term respondents is a convicted genocide perpetrator.

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In my research, I commented. Yet he laughed when he told me the lengths that he'd gone to to get tomatoes, maize, bananas to his relatives in Kigali.

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And Nakatani, which is one of the other big towns that this guy is seriously clever,

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and he has all sorts of connexions and networks, and he made them work to his advantage.

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The U.N. food programme should sign Cypriots up immediately, but that was the kind of thing that was happening in many,

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many rural communities, completely reversing the trend of remittances from rural to urban areas.

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And this is where I think Graham Simpson's presentation on the previous panel really struck a chord with me when he talked about urban youth.

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I'm not just curious, but specifically urban youth,

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because I think there's a big problem that COVID has created in the Rwandan context amongst youths living in Kigali.

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These were an urban poor that was already poor before COVID in the midst of COVID.

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There was massive land expropriation and housing destruction that was happening right across Kigali.

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This is part of the rejuvenation of of Kigali to the Army's Vision 2030 50.

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And so this was producing huge anger,

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particularly amongst those living in Kigali and particularly amongst young people who had been promised that the economic growth and the

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opportunities that many people had experienced since 1994 would continue ad infinitum and private absolutely put the brakes on that.

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And it suddenly put the brakes on the Rwandan welfare system, which many people had relied on very heavily up until then.

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To summarise, I think the major impact of COVID in terms of peace building and reconciliation in Rwanda was that it

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created a huge amount of psychosocial trauma for people that put a huge stress on community relations.

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A mantra in so many of my interviews, especially in Kigali, was that people had become selfish.

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They had stopped caring about others. There was a huge amount of anger directed towards the government because of the breakdown in the welfare system.

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Just this week, I was talking sorry. Last week I was talking to some colleagues of mine who worked on special therapy in Rwanda,

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and they're saying that this has been the toughest year that I can remember around the commemoration period in April.

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But because of COVID, they've they've seen a drastic increase in people's trauma and a real weakening of many community relations.

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I think the reason for this is that COVID in many respects directly undermine the way that Rwanda had specifically gone about reconciliation.

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So much of Rwanda's recovery has been based on an idea of proximity of people engaging directly with one another,

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whether that was through the church, whether that was through community dialogues.

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It wasn't agonistic. It wasn't. It wasn't about expecting that you couldn't.

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You couldn't get to a more optimistic future. It was. It was much more in-your-face than that.

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There was a high degree of engagement and also a sustained welfare programme had been really important in this respect.

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Well, it is a challenge. Both of past lockdown meant that people couldn't visit one another.

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People started muttering about each other and also many people were locked down in their homes.

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Then there was drone surveillance in Kigali, and in some villages,

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people would suddenly look up in the sky and there would be a government drone hovering over their house,

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which was hugely shaming for them in the community because their neighbours started

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muttering about what that family was doing to contravene the strictures of the lockdown.

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So I would argue, and I'm being systematic here because at the time that the one does come a long way in sense of reconciliation,

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but because of it, I would say it's a country partly in flux. There's a serious process of reorientation going on.

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I would say most acutely in Kigali, but it's there in the countryside as well.

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And those 28 years of hard work on reconciliation are really being profoundly challenged.

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In two minutes, Gwen, please forgive me. Why is this important beyond Rwanda?

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I think it's crucial that we that I talk about Rwanda in detail because I think these things,

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the impact of Target is so profoundly important for that society.

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But I also think that there are things too that we should keep an eye on in other contexts and let me literally deliver them as bullet points.

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The first one is we've got to be prepared for shocks. When we think about peacebuilding and reconciliation, expect the unexpected.

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We have to build shocks more systematically into peacebuilding and reconciliation theory and practise.

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As Tanya said earlier today, and I think it was such a crucial point.

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Peace building is perpetual. It's never a one.

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It's never a set peace process. It's ongoing, and I look forward to Cedric's presentation in a minute on adaptive peace.

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Peace building has to be multifaceted and dynamic within the same society.

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There are different actors at different levels who have different needs,

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and those needs change over time, and peace building and reconciliation have to respond in that sense.

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One of the things that comes through very strongly, I think in the Rwandan case is that we've got to focus on Kigali.

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And I think that there has been a tendency sometimes to think that the great economic boom of the city was was going to carry.

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So many people will. I think it's leaving people behind. COVID has exacerbated that, and that has huge repercussions for reconciliation.

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So there's a whole analysis to be done about the links between peacebuilding and urbanisation.

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Peacebuilding also requires care, and I think this is a really important word that comes out of my research is that and again,

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I think this is in contrast to much of what we see in the agonistic literature.

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We have a huge amount to learn from social work and anthropology about how we

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conceptualise care and how it connects to reconciliation at all levels of society,

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and that includes care for individuals. This is why I think Alfred's presentation was also so important because it got us to

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think about how much peace and reconciliation is national community level group based.

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But it's also about individuals and their psychological and their material circumstances.

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And then finally looking beyond the Rwandan context. Reconciliation, I think, still has purchased in so many settings.

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This is a term. It's not a dirty term. It shouldn't be automatically dismissed as romantic and impractical.

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Now we have to admit, sometimes in the literature, we've talked about reconciliation in romantic, White said.

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People who have thought that it's an important context of sometimes been their own worst enemy here.

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But I think the Rwandan case shows that this is not a fanciful abstract term.

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It's got it's got real purchase, it's got real solidity to it.

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And at least amongst my respondents over the last 20 years, reconciliation is absolutely seen not as a choice, but as an imperative.

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Thanks very much.