Panel Organizers: Norman Schräpel & Silke Oldenburg

Call for Papers
After having been subjected to a civil war (1990-1994) and genocide, the current political realm of Rwanda needed to cope with a number of immediate challenges in order to design a ‘new’ vision of the country’s development. The product of this is a hyper-modernist vision that rationalizes and orders society after an extreme period of disorder. Most of the current scholarly work on Rwanda concentrates on the close aftermath of the 1994 genocide – a period often coined as transitional justice.

However, this panel aims at sketching out the societal, political and economic shifts that happen after the transitional period comes to an end. We invite papers from different scholarly disciplines that concentrate on the ways the future is constructed and how new forms of dis/orders emerge by providing case studies from Rwanda but also from other contexts of collective violence in Africa.

Rwanda’s recent history is largely directed towards a new, modernistic, future. It is a moment where the rhetoric of optimism and modernity is a regular companion to many governmental and non-governmental endeavours. To put it even more boldly: it seems as if many parts of Rwandan society are concerned with rewriting their history by letting go of the past and thus ‘create a new and brighter future’ for themselves. Impact-driven development projects across different fields (e.g. economic growth, improving access to health and education, protection of the environment, questions of land distribution) become a major concern and seem to produce a new rationalization of society after a period of violence. To address these issues some of the following questions will be relevant to the panel:

- What kind of futures do these new orders re-construct?
- How do processes of modernization incorporate the past?
- In which ways is society reconfigured through visions of a ‘new’ future?

As the Rwandan genocide will be in its twentieth year of remembrance in 2014, the panel will particularly trace the political and economical transformations that have been underway since 1994 in Rwanda. However, we explicitly also invite papers from other contexts in Africa that deal with historical experiences of violent conflict whose remaking of society can be juxtaposed with the case of Rwanda.

Abstract submissions
Please submit your abstract [250 words] to the panel organisers by sending an email to Norman Schräpel (norman.schraepel@ethnologie.uni-halle.de) and Silke Oldenburg (silke.oldenburg@uni-bayreuth.de) not later than 17th of November 2013.

For more details visit the conference website on http://www.vad-ev.de/bayreuth2014/