Peaceful Homes: Family Promotion in Post-Genocide Rwanda

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13. Family Regimes, Demographic Anxiety, and Governance

Abstract

Scholars have demonstrated how states rely on marriage and family promotion policies to intervene in intimate life as form of governance that deploys individual responsibility for social problems. This article intervenes in this literature to show how this process unfolds in a post-conflict context where drastic demographic changes such as displacement, death, and mass reintegration of people convicted of genocide crimes continue to shape anxieties around maintaining peace. Using the case of post-genocide Rwanda, this article draws on in-depth interviews with participants of a marriage and family promotion program to show how lasting impacts from mass violence as well as contemporary anxieties around rising divorce rates shape governance and citizenship obligations. Through what I call peaceful governance, the state presents individual and family-level approaches as solutions to the “spread” of violence across communities and into the nation. I argue this is a gendered process that overburdens women with additional obligations to maintain relations in the home as well as broader community. Ultimately, governance through peace reaffirms structural violence and messaging of violence as contagious reveals how women must navigate the “sickness of patience” which results from enduring through structural inequalities.

Author

• Jacob Caponi, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor