David Mwambari - Böcker

Navigating Cultural Memory examines how a master narrative of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi evolved into a hegemonic narrative both in Rwanda and globally. Identifying key actors who shaped and responded to the evolution and enforcement of the master narrative in the first two decades after the genocide and civil war ended, it engages with important questions about collective memory, trauma, and power following violent and divisive events. With chapters analyzing interviews the author collected, as well as other secondary sources, Mwambari charts how Rwandans from different backgrounds--who he identifies as Champions, Antagonists, and Fatalists of the master narrative--have responded to this event through language, physical symbols of memory, art, and traditional and new media. Mwambari argues that a relational approach to dignity can help transform polarizing narratives away from sources of competition, exclusion, and silence, and towards healing. Conversations about the politics around the master narrative and about the collective presentation of violent histories are not only important for contemporary politics but the key to Rwanda's present and future peace. By exploring these contradictions in memories between actors in Rwanda and abroad, Navigating Cultural Memory offers crucial insights into the complexities surrounding individual and collective memory in societies recovering from violent conflict, mass atrocities, and genocide.

Moving beyond a self-indulgent attitude about Africa’s historical victimhood, the book seeks to capture how African states individually and Africa’s collective institutions (the AU) are providing agency in Africa’s international relations. While African states have been trailblazers in such ideas as ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, as conceived in the African Union Constitutive Act (2001) which preceded the United Nations (UN) Secretary General’s report “In Larger Freedom” (2005) in which the UN adopted the concept, African agency in international relations has not always been captured proactively. This volume seeks to document Africa (and African states) in a state of proactivity as opposed to a reactionary mode of international relations which has long been the case due to the discipline’s heavy concentration on the West. The main themes explored are: African agency in international relations and commerce, agency in Africa’s balancing of big and regional powers, reshaping Africa-EU relations beyond the Cotonou Agreements, Africa and international human rights institutions, African efforts in elections and conflicts in Africa and relationship building among African leaders.