I want to focus on the relevance of COVID 19 for our thinking about multilevel peace building and reconciliation,
because COVID really has challenged peace building efforts across the globe, it's exacerbated the drivers of conflict in many places.
It's disrupted peace endeavours in many locations. And so I think we need to think through the implications of COVID specifically,
but also the implications of all encompassing shocks, society wide shocks for our understanding of peacebuilding.
And shocks, of course, can come in many forms, and some shocks are more shocking than others.
I'm going to talk today, particularly about pandemics,
but this is hopefully an entry point into discussions about the relevance of environmental crisis,
economic collapse, political upheaval such as we've seen around Brexit in Northern Ireland.
As Brandon talked about today or the peace referendum in Colombia.
As Andre talked about, the shocks come in lots and lots of different forms,
and I think we need to think through the implications of this for for peace efforts.
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
hope have some relevance for other contexts I've been researching in Rwanda nearly every year.
For the last 20 years, I've been conducting longitudinal research in the same 12 communities since 2003.
And this includes doing fieldwork in Rwanda during COVID last year as part of a book that I'm working on at the moment.
So I'm going to draw very heavily on that recent period of fieldwork.
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.
This is a country that, as many will know, has gone through, I think,
a pretty remarkable transformation in that period and yet I think really has rocked the
society to its foundations in a way that all ways that I'll talk about in just a moment.
I'm going to very briefly focus on four issues in this presentation, and Gwen, I know,
is a justifiably very strict chair, so she's going to keep me to 20 minutes on this.
I firstly want to say something about how I think based on my research, every day, Rwandans interpret the concept of reconciliation.
Secondly, I want to look at how Rwanda has pursued reconciliation with, I would argue, considerable success.
Thirdly, I'll look at how COVID has challenged this.
And then fourthly, I want to point to some broader lessons from this experience for context around the world.
So full parts to this presentation.
Let let me begin by just briefly discussing how I think my respondents in Rwanda since 2003 have talked about reconciliation.
I think one of the things we have to recognise right at the outset is that
Rwanda is quite remarkable in the sense that I'm like all of its neighbours.
It has not experienced mass violence on its territory since the genocide in 1994.
That might seem like a very simple thing to point out,
but it's remarkable how often gets overlooked in the story of Rwanda's trajectory since the Genocide.
And I think it's particularly remarkable when you put it in the context of hundreds of thousands of
convicted genocide perpetrators now living side by side with genocide survivors on densely crowded hills.
Because that's the socioeconomic, that's the demographic reality of Rwanda today.
Now, of course, Rwanda has been embroiled in conflict elsewhere in the region,
and it's undoubtedly been a generator of conflict outside of its borders.
But I think it's important to begin with the reality of what has happened inside the country since '94.
One of the very strong refrains coming through my research since 2003 across the ethnic divide with actors at all levels of Rwandan society
and follow up interviews in the same communities over many years is a very strong desire for something much more than peaceful coexistence.
I was particularly struck by Brandon's comments about some scepticism about
peaceful coexistence as the ultimate endpoint in a place like Northern Ireland.
The concept of peaceful existence is treated with enormous suspicion in Rwanda,
mainly because between 1973 and 1994, many people would characterise that period as one of peaceful coexistence.
But of course, it was a period in which serious divisions and tensions in Rwandan society were left,
addressed and laid the seeds for the genocide in 1994, so that there's a real suspicion about peaceful coexistence.
Now this, I think, is important.
We see that reconciliation has real purchase in the Rwandan to write in a second, I'll talk about the specific components of that,
but I want to situate this debate about this peaceful coexistence and reconciliation in the literature at the moment,
because many of you will be familiar. And Andre and I have been talking about this for a very long time.
There's a very strong literature on what is now known as agonistic peacebuilding or agonistic reconciliation,
which basically says that the best fits post-conflict societies can hope for is to create spaces for non-violent dialogue,
and that most calls for reconciliation involve openly romantic,
overly optimistic attempts to fundamentally resolve past conflicts and past identities.
And so for that reason, there's this emphasis on basically people continuing the conflicts of the past,
but in a non-violent fashion and a very heavy emphasis on dialogue. Now, to simplify things in the Rwandan context,
most of my respondents would dismiss that argument out of hand and would say, that's not enough for us.
We need to aim for something more than that.
We do need to rebuild and reconceive relationships at all levels of society and in completely different ways.
And also, talk is not enough. The agonistic emphasis on dialogue alone is insufficient.
One of the things that runs through my research in Rwanda is a very strong emphasis that reconciliation involves action.
It involves cooperation. It involves engagement.
So we've got the agonistic literature, which I would argue we we should be sceptical of.
I think it's it's insufficiently robust. I think it's insufficiently optimistic.
It narrows the parameters of what certain societies may be able to achieve or belief is important.
More broadly, I would say in the literature or much of the literature, reconciliation is becoming a bit of a dirty word.
Some of you may have even seen recently a special issue in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
with a piece by Richard Wilson on the theme of Reconciliation.
The idea that that conflicts are often so intractable that reconciliation is simply fanciful.
And so I think the Rwandan experience, at least my respondents, I think, would challenge that kind of view as well.
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.
It's incredibly practical and I often ask my respondents What would reconciliation look like?
What are we looking for at different levels of society? And I emphasise very practical things.
We eat and drink together. We work together on each other's farms, very heavy emphasis on on cooperative agricultural activities.
We attend each other's weddings and funerals. We help each other during illness.
Now come back to that because that's particularly salient in the current context,
and we help each other during other crises that befall members of our community.
So these are not romantic. These are not abstract things.
These are very concrete day to day activities that many of my respondents believe signifies that reconciliation is starting to take place,
and it's something practically that that should be aimed for.
And in much of my work, I've argued that I think actually Rwanda has made substantial strides in achieving this kind of reconciliation.
So then secondly, how is one to going about this in a multilevel sense, because that's the emphasis of our conference today.
What are their mutually reinforcing processes at different levels, if for one society that have been important in pursuing reconciliation,
not in a very schematic way, want to suggest that there are three crucial processes, but but do different things at different levels?
One has been to get at Community Courts 12000 village trials between 2002 and 2012 that prosecuted 400000 genocide cases.
I think what's particularly important about this enormous, imperfect, unruly, unpredictable process of village justice for George Floyd,
for all of those ten years is that I firstly created a really important space for open
contestation and confrontation between community members about the past and about the future.
And also that it delivered punitive justice.
Now this is something we haven't talked about too much today, the importance of punishment that in the Rwandan case,
not just in the genocide survivor community, but even in some segments of the perpetrator community,
there is a sense that the perpetrators to go back and live peacefully on the hills with their neighbours,
that there needs to have been some sense of direct reckoning with the past and
some kind of punishment and the that used a very creative form of punishment,
particularly community service through get it to do so. I think that could such a process getting these trials out in the open,
generating a public debate and delivering a very tangible form of justice to genocide
perpetrators was incredibly important for the overall pursuit of reconciliation.
The second crucial process towards reconciliation, but Rwanda has embarked on is a really systematic welfare system.
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,
with all of its problems with all of its political conflicts, it's increasing.
I would say authoritarianism is that this very illiberal state has in fact delivered the
most systematic welfare programme in the region just once one small into one small.
One indicator of that is that in the space of 15 years,
Rwanda halved its child mortality rate because of massive investment in health care and health services.
So that, of course, reduces the fear of death in the context of childbirth,
a really important issue for well-being and people's ability to think about the future.
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,
especially in rural areas that but state welfare in health care,
education and other areas has drastically decreased socioeconomic inequality across the ethnic divides.
And I can't overstate the importance of this,
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,
many of my history respondents are very suspicious of that kind of dialogue.
Well, that kind of discourse, except when they see that there is some tangible reality in their day to day life,
their own socioeconomic uplift matches this rhetoric of a greater sense of abundance.
And it has numerous other problems, but at least in socioeconomic terms.
This, I think, has been absolutely essential to dealing with some of the the key drivers of the genocide in nineteen ninety four.
What's crucial here, too, is that in discussions about socio economic inequality after 1994,
people often point to Rwanda as very drastic Gini coefficient.
But but that I think shrouds are much more important reality that that is often a Gini coefficient generated by the
disjuncture between the social economic reality in Kigali and that socioeconomic reality out in the rural areas.
And undoubtedly, there is a massive gold. But that's not how the vast majority of rural respondents understand inequality.
They don't compare themselves with people living in Kigali because it might as well be another planet.
They compare themselves with their neighbours. And there we are, seeing a high degree of equality manifesting, especially in the last 20 years,
and many of my Hutu respondents told me very openly I never expected to be in the RPF to do this.
They expected that a minority Tutsi government would do what every previous Rwandan regime had done,
which was to fight about their own ethnic group, and they're pleasantly surprised by what they've experienced under the RPF.
Now they're fearful of the RPF in many other respects government surveillance, repression, the rest of it.
But on these really important socioeconomic terms, there has been, I think, some really important improvements there,
and I was going to give examples of and share a couple of anecdotes that I'm aware of of the time.
The third, I think, important process contributing to reconciliation in Rwanda is at the community level.
So we've got a chat show which was a state orchestrated, community based approach.
We got the welfare system, which is delivered by the state but below the purview of the state.
After a charter, we've seen a range of really important informal, locally driven processes with a key emphasis on dialogue.
There's this huge national patchwork of associations, student clubs, economic cooperatives, church groups, you name it.
You go to any community in Rwanda and there'll be 20 of these groups who who meet every week,
sometimes multiple times a week, to talk about current and historical problems.
And I've sat in on hundreds of these meetings and in many respects, they replicate much of the discourse of the church.
We're going to meet in open spaces and talk about the underlying problems in our community,
and we're going to seek some kind of collective solution to that.
These are quieter, less visible forms of reconciliation between individuals and groups,
and I think they crucially complement what we've seen at the national level
so that multiple processes at different levels are performing complementary.
Peace and reconciliation related dimensions.
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.
The third big theme of this lecture, then, is what is Kober done to all of this?
And I think that the crux here is that Tony Abbott has really challenged the
basis of reconciliation that was laid by those three really important processes.
The reasons for this are probably pretty self-evident in many respects.
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,
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.
I was locked down with my wife and three children. I have to start having COVID.
This week is not a patch on being locked down with my wife and three children aged under six.
Never. And we were. We were locked down into daily at two different junctures over five months.
I was in the countryside most of the time,
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.
I've never seen so much begging in Rwanda. In my 20 years of going there.
There is a real cultural opposition in Rwanda to begging, especially from foreigners.
There is a deep cultural discourse around self-reliance now.
Kovic push people to the edge because many people really were on the brink of starvation, especially in Kigali.
Now this, I think,
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,
particularly there was a big rural and urban divide.
One of the things that was really striking during my fieldwork in the countryside last year was the substantial resilience of rural communities,
both in a socioeconomic but in a relational sense during COVID, in contrast to what was going on in Kigali.
And I think that this wasn't only about COVID it.
I think it points to the fact that those three reconciliation contributing processes are met before perhaps it taken greater root in rural areas.
There had been much higher Kichcha turnouts in the countryside.
This tends to be a lot less government surveillance of people's everyday interactions in the countryside.
Maybe that's helped rural communities get further along the pathway towards reconciliation.
But crucially, during COVID,
one of the things that became so important was that rural communities could continue to grow food and they could continue to eat.
In contrast to urbanites, particularly in Kigali, who could do no such thing,
and one of the ways that this manifest was suddenly they were rural to urban remittances.
So many of my rural respondents were sending mobile money, and sometimes, even despite the lockdown restrictions,
smuggling food to their relatives in Kigali, one of my long term respondents is a convicted genocide perpetrator.
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.
And Nakatani, which is one of the other big towns that this guy is seriously clever,
and he has all sorts of connexions and networks, and he made them work to his advantage.
The U.N. food programme should sign Cypriots up immediately, but that was the kind of thing that was happening in many,
many rural communities, completely reversing the trend of remittances from rural to urban areas.
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.
I'm not just curious, but specifically urban youth,
because I think there's a big problem that COVID has created in the Rwandan context amongst youths living in Kigali.
These were an urban poor that was already poor before COVID in the midst of COVID.
There was massive land expropriation and housing destruction that was happening right across Kigali.
This is part of the rejuvenation of of Kigali to the Army's Vision 2030 50.
And so this was producing huge anger,
particularly amongst those living in Kigali and particularly amongst young people who had been promised that the economic growth and the
opportunities that many people had experienced since 1994 would continue ad infinitum and private absolutely put the brakes on that.
And it suddenly put the brakes on the Rwandan welfare system, which many people had relied on very heavily up until then.
To summarise, I think the major impact of COVID in terms of peace building and reconciliation in Rwanda was that it
created a huge amount of psychosocial trauma for people that put a huge stress on community relations.
A mantra in so many of my interviews, especially in Kigali, was that people had become selfish.
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.
Just this week, I was talking sorry. Last week I was talking to some colleagues of mine who worked on special therapy in Rwanda,
and they're saying that this has been the toughest year that I can remember around the commemoration period in April.
But because of COVID, they've they've seen a drastic increase in people's trauma and a real weakening of many community relations.
I think the reason for this is that COVID in many respects directly undermine the way that Rwanda had specifically gone about reconciliation.
So much of Rwanda's recovery has been based on an idea of proximity of people engaging directly with one another,
whether that was through the church, whether that was through community dialogues.
It wasn't agonistic. It wasn't. It wasn't about expecting that you couldn't.
You couldn't get to a more optimistic future. It was. It was much more in-your-face than that.
There was a high degree of engagement and also a sustained welfare programme had been really important in this respect.
Well, it is a challenge. Both of past lockdown meant that people couldn't visit one another.
People started muttering about each other and also many people were locked down in their homes.
Then there was drone surveillance in Kigali, and in some villages,
people would suddenly look up in the sky and there would be a government drone hovering over their house,
which was hugely shaming for them in the community because their neighbours started
muttering about what that family was doing to contravene the strictures of the lockdown.
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,
but because of it, I would say it's a country partly in flux. There's a serious process of reorientation going on.
I would say most acutely in Kigali, but it's there in the countryside as well.
And those 28 years of hard work on reconciliation are really being profoundly challenged.
In two minutes, Gwen, please forgive me. Why is this important beyond Rwanda?
I think it's crucial that we that I talk about Rwanda in detail because I think these things,
the impact of Target is so profoundly important for that society.
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.
The first one is we've got to be prepared for shocks. When we think about peacebuilding and reconciliation, expect the unexpected.
We have to build shocks more systematically into peacebuilding and reconciliation theory and practise.
As Tanya said earlier today, and I think it was such a crucial point.
Peace building is perpetual. It's never a one.
It's never a set peace process. It's ongoing, and I look forward to Cedric's presentation in a minute on adaptive peace.
Peace building has to be multifaceted and dynamic within the same society.
There are different actors at different levels who have different needs,
and those needs change over time, and peace building and reconciliation have to respond in that sense.
One of the things that comes through very strongly, I think in the Rwandan case is that we've got to focus on Kigali.
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.
So many people will. I think it's leaving people behind. COVID has exacerbated that, and that has huge repercussions for reconciliation.
So there's a whole analysis to be done about the links between peacebuilding and urbanisation.
Peacebuilding also requires care, and I think this is a really important word that comes out of my research is that and again,
I think this is in contrast to much of what we see in the agonistic literature.
We have a huge amount to learn from social work and anthropology about how we
conceptualise care and how it connects to reconciliation at all levels of society,
and that includes care for individuals. This is why I think Alfred's presentation was also so important because it got us to
think about how much peace and reconciliation is national community level group based.
But it's also about individuals and their psychological and their material circumstances.
And then finally looking beyond the Rwandan context. Reconciliation, I think, still has purchased in so many settings.
This is a term. It's not a dirty term. It shouldn't be automatically dismissed as romantic and impractical.
Now we have to admit, sometimes in the literature, we've talked about reconciliation in romantic, White said.
People who have thought that it's an important context of sometimes been their own worst enemy here.
But I think the Rwandan case shows that this is not a fanciful abstract term.
It's got it's got real purchase, it's got real solidity to it.
And at least amongst my respondents over the last 20 years, reconciliation is absolutely seen not as a choice, but as an imperative.
Thanks very much.