In states where rebels have become rulers, and especially in cases where rulers hail from a victorious insurgent group, there is a heightened risk of an authoritarian shift and an impo- sition of de facto one-party states.1 In East Africa, the examples of Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Rwanda have all confirmed this assumption.2 There is also a growing literature related to the conditions that make the transformation from rebels to political parties, and ultimately rulers, possible, just as there is more knowledge on how historical trajectories influence former rebels’ governance style.3 Yet, up to date there are relatively few studies examining how the historical trajectory and the military legacy of the armed struggle have influenced, and in some cases shaped and militarised, the post-conflict state.4 In this article we develop and expand the rebel-to-ruler literature to go beyond ‘rebel transformations’, in order to examine the transformation and militarisation of the entire post-genocide society in Rwanda. In other words, we do not focus on rebels turned leaders on an individual or party/group level, but rather on how the rebel leaders’ governance has managed to militarise Rwandan society.
The famous Voltaire quote ‘Where some states have an army, the Prussian army has a state’could well apply to Rwanda. The military historian of the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) Brig. Gen. Frank Rusagara wrote that‘[i]t is the military that played the most central socio-po- litical role in what became of Rwanda (…) [T]he RDF today not only ensures security for all, but provides a model of national unity and integration that continues to inform Rwanda’s socio-political and economic development’.5 In short, the army is the core institution for the implementation of state policy, the key space for the socialisation of the elite and a link to the citizenry.6
While the military has considerable influence in many countries across the world, in par- ticular where former rebels have taken government positions, we argue that the army as an institution and military values are exceptionally pervasive in Rwanda. They penetrate the entire society, from top to bottom. A remarkable feature of this dominance is its historical depth. Precolonial Rwanda too rested on military organisation and warrior ethics. After a century long parenthesis under colonial rule (1895–1962) and the first two republics (1962– 1994), the winner of the civil war, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), picked up the thread again. The backward-looking‘invention of tradition’serves as a forward-looking social engi- neering project. The current period‘represents both a return to the (precolonial) period and the creation of something new’.7 Rwanda is then a uniquely well-positioned case to study militarisation of governance after conflict. FULL REPORT