Susan Thomson – författare

For 100 days in 1994, genocide engulfed Rwanda. Since then, many in the international community have praised the country's post-genocide government for its efforts to foster national unity and reconciliation by downplaying ethnic differences and promoting ""one Rwanda for all Rwandans"". Examining how ordinary rural Rwandans experience and view these policies, Whispering Truth to Power challenges the conventional wisdom on post-genocide Rwanda.Susan Thomson finds that many of Rwanda's poorest citizens distrust the local officials charged with implementing the state programme and believe that it ignores the deepest problems of the countryside: lack of land, jobs, and a voice in policies that affect lives and livelihoods. Based on interviews with dozens of Rwandan peasants and government officials, this book reveals how the nation's disenfranchised poor have been engaging in everyday resistance, cautiously and carefully—""whispering"" their truth to the powers that be. This quiet opposition, Thomson argues, suggests that some of the nation's most celebrated post-genocide policies have failed to garner the grassroots support needed to sustain peace.

A sobering study of the troubled African nation, both pre- and post-genocide, and its uncertain futureThe brutal civil war between Hutu and Tutsi factions in Rwanda ended in 1994 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front came to power and embarked on an ambitious social, political, and economic project to remake the devastated central-east African nation. Susan Thomson, who witnessed the hostilities firsthand, has written a provocative modern history of the country, its rulers, and its people, covering the years prior to, during, and following the genocidal conflict. Thomson’s hard-hitting analysis explores the key political events that led to the ascendance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leader, President Paul Kagame. This important and controversial study examines the country’s transition from war to reconciliation from the perspective of ordinary Rwandan citizens, Tutsi and Hutu alike, and raises serious questions about the stability of the current peace, the methods and motivations of the ruling regime and its troubling ties to the past, and the likelihood of a genocide-free future.

An essential exploration of and guide to research ethics in the field.Researchers working in Africa are engaged in ethical, methodological, logistical, emotional and professional compromises. Juggling the demands of being a researcher and being human, scholars must balance the recording of data withthe emotional demands of listening, of analyzing and reporting personal, and often contradictory, narratives. This book recognizes these challenges and lays bare the underlying and important process by which the researcher grapples with emotions, and how 'feelings' inform and shape data collection, interpretation, write-up and dissemination. Based on widely researched on-the-ground work, the contributors reveal the ambiguities and inconsistences that emerge at all stages of fieldwork and how to tackle them. They examine the ethical quagmires that arise when doing research on sensitive topics in a researcher's own living environment, and suggest how to manage the complex interaction between the researcher's own identity and social relationships in the field, and navigate the role of researcher when activism risks access to the field.