A Matter of lies and death-Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda's Genocide

Abstract

This article explores Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics in conjunction with Avery Gordon’s figures of spectres and the haunting of ghosts. These concepts are applied to consider different acts of subversion and resistance, performed in the face of dominant discourses and practices in the realm of refugee governance, which work to silence certain experiences; and in the knowledge that breaking such silences can have deadly consequences. The article is constructed around a single case study, the story of a survivor of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and its aftermath. This story is contextualized historically to illuminate important continuities, from Rwanda’s colonization and colonial governance to contemporary refugee governance regimes. It also highlights some of the particular ways in which women were affected by this history. Against the deadly and silencing effects of contemporary discourses and practices discussed, the article contemplates, following Rosi Braidotti, more affirmative alternatives. These entail questioning the notion of individual identities and being guided by an ethos of engagement, operating in the awareness of the entanglement of space and time, of life and death, and seeking to overcome the binaries of us/them, truth/lie, fact/fiction, deserving/undeserving, perpetrator/victim, and genuine/bogus refugee that have traditionally shaped global refugee governance regimes.