*** Please help with the Big Catch Up! ***

From Never Again

As the final piece to our class discussion, Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, offers an unabashed indictment of the development industry that leaves little room to debate the relevancy of political anthropology on all systems and institutions.

Being in the International Educational Development program, my career path will likely bring contact with the ‘development enterprise,’ so it would be foolish of me to disassociate myself from the implications of this study. It would be foolish of me to be angry at this condemnation of the ‘development community,’ instead of using it as a tool to examine and modify it. Uvin’s text, by using various theoretical and pragmatic paradigms, made a strong argument that it would be impossible for the ‘development enterprise’ to make the assertion that it was not complicit to the genocide in Rwanda of 1994. His argument was that the ‘development enterprise’ did not exist in a vacuum and all the actions, and all the inactions, of the ‘development enterprise’—the aid system, local and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), bi- and multi-lateral institutions (like the UN, World Bank or Swiss Development Corporation)—are implicitly and explicitly linked to the social and political processes that contributed, produced and perpetrated the genocide that happened.

In order to understand this link, and the themes that Uvin uses to disseminate his argument, it is important to examine the framework by which he makes his argument. Uvin alludes to many texts we have examined in this course. I will pinpoint a few. First and foremost, Weber is omnipresent in the structure, layout and theoretical argument of this text. We see that when looking at the way Uvin elucidates his arguments in a pragmatic, practically numeric, approach. Much like Weber, Uvin has created an outline format and filled in nomenclature below the headings. Theoretically, Uvin has constructed an argument based around the legitimization of authority—in this case the legitimization of two undemocratic, authoritarian power structures: government and the ‘development enterprise’ (this will be discussed later).

Not to be overlooked are the frequent mentions of the ‘development game’ (Uvin, p. 153) in the text. These are explicit connections to Bailey in his analysis of politics as a game (Bailey, p. 1). Especially when Uvin is writing about similarities between the current (at the time) political and developmental character of Rwanda compared to that of colonial Rwanda, we see a game where all the characters change place but the rules of power obstinately stay the same. Lines are drawn, hierarchies are reproduced, and exclusion is systematically assured.

Other authors help create Uvin’s argument too. Briefly, they are: Anthony Marx and his use of ‘scapegoating’ as a link between the US, South Africa and Brazil (‘scapegoat,’ as defined by Marx [p. 181], refers to a race, group or ethnicity as being ‘expendable’ to the dominant culture in society); we see Barth in the dissection of the 'clientelism' in Rwandan elite society; while de Tocqueville is used to annunciate civil society responsibility (p. 167), Barth emanates in the structure of the five major civil society associations in Rwanda; Durkheim allows us to interpret the ‘process of radicalization’ (217): e.g. the human indignity, isolation and societal and personal powerlessness leading to the genocide vis-à-vis anomie—or the “breakdown of an individuals sense of attachment to society” (218). Also, supporting Uvin’s argument was James Ferguson’s work on the ‘development industry’ in Lesotho, which was critical of the ‘development enterprise,’ its myriad unsustainable, negative and failed projects and the tendency to be static and unself-critical.

Uvin’s argument, that the ‘development enterprise’ must be held accountable for its complicity in the Rwandan genocide, can be conceptualized in the aforementioned framework(s). In order to make this argument there are predominant themes that Uvin uses. First, he often discusses legitimacy and its pertinence to the authority in Rwanda of both the ‘development enterprise’ and the state/elites (or evolues [121]). The government, at various points between independence and the genocide used the ‘development enterprise’ and ‘ethnicity’ to assert its legitimacy. The ‘development enterprise’ was used to create external legitimacy in the international community. How else can one explain Rwanda as a ‘model-developing’ country, where ‘business can be conducted as usual,’ even in times of acute and obvious crisis? While obvious acts of impunity were conducted in Rwanda, aid continued to flow into Rwanda, often in the form of arms. The international community was playing the ‘game of development’ and legitimizing an authoritarian regime by calling it a model and providing aid that made it look like Rwanda was making ‘progress’ (but can a country receiving emergency aid really be a harbinger of ‘progress?’).

Internally, the government used ‘ethnicity’ (an imagined, historical social construction [p. 14]) to turn poor Hutu on poor Tutsi. This was done through virulent racism and ‘scapegoating.’ Using propaganda to incite fear and hatred of the ‘other,’ a process of legitimization took place in Rwanda. The racist rhetoric allowed the regime to make the small, equally repressed minority Tutsi ‘scapegoats’ for the various crises in Rwanda—be it the agricultural and coffee collapse, internal displacement or failed development projects.

Likewise, the ‘development enterprise’ was able to use the regime as a ‘scapegoat’ when their projects failed or when there were obvious connections made between the violent path to genocide and aid. It was easy for the ‘development community’ to skirt blame because of their claim to being apolitical, supposedly making them unwilling to manipulate or coerce the regime due to the sovereignty of states (which was hypocritical and deceptive). All these processes legitimized the authority of the state.

Another major theme in Uvin’s text was the processes of exclusion. The government and elites, the aid system and ‘development enterprise’ practiced inebriating exclusionary tactics. These tactics were intrinsic to every day life and in every sector of Rwandan society. The government and the ‘development enterprise’ were top-down, vertical, authoritarian institutions, Uvin successfully argues. By limiting access to power, controlling the (re) distribution of wealth and shutting down prospects for mobility or migration the government was able to exclude any part of society it deemed unworthy and not of the evolue persuasion. The ‘development enterprise,’ egregiously excluded those they sought to ‘help’ (i.e. the poor) by not taking responsibility or choosing not to be held accountable for actions using aid money and by ‘proclaiming’ ambivalence to their role within the state system. This excluded most of the population because most of the population had no say in how aid money was used and whom it went to even if, theoretically, it was meant for them!

A third major theme of Uvin’s text was the ‘development enterprises’ role in the structural violence that was so blatant in the state and aid system. Again, the aid system did not exist in a vacuum. By giving aid money to Rwanda, donors were directly contributing to the structural violence that existed in Rwanda because the money went to furthering the four core variables of structural violence: deprivation, poverty, repression and alienation of the majority of Rwandan people (p. 103). Being a predominately rural nation, ‘development’ allowed the money to stay in the hands of the few urban elite who already controlled most of the country and its wealth. Structural violence was also used to legitimize the regime. When things were going bad, to whom can the poor turn to? Only their government, and how was the government propped up? On foreign aid. Therefore, Uvin’s argument that the ‘development enterprise’ was tied to structural violence in Rwanda was an easy equation to complete.

The last major, important theme is that of the negligent approach that the ‘development enterprise’ took in aiding Rwanda. For example, by claiming to be non-political yet pushing for peace and democracy at the last minute in Arusha, the ‘development enterprise’ was being hypocritical. They should have been pushing a democratic agenda earlier, according to Uvin, but did not. As Rwanda was falling apart before their eyes, it was ‘business as usual’ in development, which equated to negligence as usual. The system of aid giving was never taken into consideration when evaluating development projects. The international communities inaction to stop the social and political processes that were fast approaching genocide, was the most emphatic action they took to promulgate genocide. The ‘development enterprise’ placed barely any external or internal constraints, monetarily or politically on those that were about to perpetrate genocide (p. 218). As Uvin put it “…all development aid constitutes a form of political intervention” (p. 232). Therefore it is disingenuous to separate those knowingly responsible for the genocide (the perpetrators) and those complicit to the genocide (the ‘development enterprise’). The ‘development enterprise’ did nothing to change their goals, missions or policies to prevent the genocidal outcome of 1994.

This analysis would not be complete without some criticism of Uvin’s work. Pragmatically, Uvin was preachy and repetitive, but that does not take away from his argument. In fact, it brought clarity to his points; still he could have accomplished what he did in less space. Philosophically, I would disagree with Uvin’s notion that ecological resource scarcity was not a causal link to the genocide (p. 201). He claims the links to be solely political and social in nature, but I think the ecological, agricultural, population density issues prevalent in Rwanda were important enough to help exacerbate the tensions underlying the social and political processes burning in Rwanda. Suffice it to say, I found it hard to disagree with Uvin’s argument. Uvin’s argument that the ‘development enterprise’ aided the violence in Rwanda is a powerful and accurate one. If the aid was not coming through; if aid was not contributing to the sudden proliferation of civil society by giving exorbitant amounts of money to the elite without recourse and if the ‘development enterprise’ had been more self-aware earlier in Rwandan independence, the regime could have been forced out earlier and the process to democracy, peace and equality could have been expedited.

At this point it would be appropriate to situate myself again. In a couple of weeks I will be heading to Rwanda as part of a ‘human rights delegation.’ While there we will be observing, working and conversing with local and international NGO’s, bi- and multilateral institutions, and looking at how human rights issues are dealt with today. I am under the cynical impression that present-day Rwanda is a lot like Rwanda just prior to genocide, when it was considered a ‘model developing country’ by some of these organizations. From afar it seems that there are a lot of underlying tensions and issues in Rwanda being ignored on a grand scale—the same tensions that have caused Uvin and Mahmood Mamdani to have pessimistic outlooks. Hopefully, I will be proved wrong. As it were, it would be interesting to put contemporary Rwanda under the scope that Uvin did leading up to the genocide.