Suchergebnisse

How can the salience of ethnicity in Rwandan and Burundian politics be overcome? How can this salience be approached analytically? And why, exactly, is it that it is potentially conflict-prone? This book gives answers to these questions on the basis of what Rwandan and Burundian interviewees expressed as taken for granted and real. In particular, it focuses on different political institutional models, and how they help to overcome an ethnic interpretation of political and social exclusion. Despite the diverging institutional approaches to dealing with ethnic cleavages, the qualitative analysis shows that political and social exclusion, in particular the distribution of power, are interpreted in ethnic terms in both countries. Focusing on notions taken for granted by Rwandan and Burundian interviewees, the book demonstrates, how deeply intertwined ethnicity and politics are in Rwanda and Burundi today.

"Following Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1991) this study focuses on taken-for-granted notions, i.e. knowledge (defining ethnicized politics as exclusion interpreted with reference to ethnic categories). This represents a departure from the conventional academic discussion of ethnicized politics, which focuses on exclusion inherent to the structures of political systems when seeking to explain violent conflict aligned along ethnic cleavages. The study compares two neighboring countries, Rwanda and Burundi, where different institutional models have been introduced to overcome ethnicized politics following comparable episodes of ethnic violence. Whereas the Rwandan system avoids political representation based on ethnic categories, the Burundian system prescribes ethnic quotas. Semi-standardized interviews with twenty-two Rwandans and twenty Burundians conducted between September 2007 and May 2008 investigated ethnicized politics as patterns of interpretation (i.e. knowledge). The study found that notwithstanding the different political institutional systems in Rwanda and Burundi (both aiming to overcome ethicized politics), exclusion in both systems is interpreted with reference to ethnic categories, i.e. politics are ethnicized in both countries. This result points to the importance of conceiving ethnicized politics as historically produced knowledge, i.e. patterns of interpretation." (author's abstract)