“Peasants in Power: The Political Economy of Development and Genocide in Rwanda”
Why did tens of thousands of ordinary people massacre tens of thousands other ordinary people in Rwanda in 1994? What has agricultural policy and rural ideology to do with it? What was the role of the Akazu, the presidential clan around president Habyarimana? Did the civil war cause the genocide? And what insights can a political economy perspective offer ?
“Peasants in Power: The Political Economy of Development and Genocide in Rwanda” (Publisher: Springer; 2013 edition - June 4 2013) shows how Rwanda’s development model and the organisation of genocide are two sides of the same coin. In the absence of mineral resources, the elite organised and managed the labour of peasant producers as efficient as possible. In order to stay in power and benefit from it, the presidential clan chose a development model that would not change the political status quo. When the latter was threatened, the elite invoked the preservation of group welfare of the Hutu, called for Hutu unity and solidarity and relied on the great mass (rubanda nyamwinshi) for the execution of the genocide. A strategy as simple as it is horrific. The genocide can be regarded as the ultimate act of self-preservation through annihilation under the veil of self-defense.
Based on more than ten years of research, and engaging with competing and complementary arguments of authors such as Peter Uvin, Alison Des Forges, Scott Strauss, René Lemarchand, Filip Reyntjens, Mahmood Mamdani and André Guichaoua, the author blends economics, politics and agrarian studies to provide a new way of understanding the nexus between development and genocide in Rwanda. Students and practitioners of development as well as everyone interested in the causes of violent conflict and genocide in Africa and around the world will find this book compelling to read.
Biography
Philip Verwimp obtained his PhD in Economics from the Catholic University of Leuven in January 2003 with a dissertation on the political economy of development and genocide in Rwanda. He specialises in the economic causes and consequences of conflict at the micro-level. Philip has done quantitative work on the death toll of the genocide and on the demography of post-genocide Rwanda. Philip was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow at Yale University and worked for the World Bank as a Poverty Economist. He received the Jacques Rozenberg Award from the Auschwitz Foundation for his dissertation. Philip taught Development Economics at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and at the Universities of Antwerp, Leuven and Utrecht. Philip was a research fellow from the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders, Belgium) and visiting fellow at ECARES (2007-2009). He currently holds the Marie and Alain Philippson Chair in Sustainable Human Development at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Philip is currently engaged in longitudinal studies of health, schooling and nutrition in Burundi where he is the lead researcher in a partnership between his university and UNICEF-Burundi, involving a.o. impact evaluation.
