African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2008
African Affairs 2008 107(428):361-386; doi:10.1093/afraf/adn024
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Gender Balance and the Meanings of Women in Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Jennie E. Burnet (j.burnet{at}louisville.edu) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Louisville (USA). She has been conducting research on gender, ethnicity, and reconciliation in Rwanda since 1996. This article is a much-revised version of a paper presented in October 2006 at a conference on ‘Gender and democratization in societies at war’ at Colgate University. The author wishes to thank the participants in the conference, notably Maureen Hays-Mitchell and Jill Irvine, for their feedback and comments. In addition, the thoughtful and insightful feedback from the anonymous reviewers and editors of African Affairs has been indispensable in improving the article and honing the argument. The author would like to acknowledge financial support from the University of Louisville, the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the United States Institute for Peace, the United States Department of Education, and the Institute for the Study of World Politics of the Fund for Peace.
Across Africa, many countries have taken initiatives to increase the participation and representation of women in governance. Yet it is unclear what meaning these initiatives have in authoritarian, single-party states like Rwanda. Since seizing power in 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front has taken many steps to increase the participation of women in politics such as creating a Ministry of Gender, organizing women's councils at all levels of government, and instituting an electoral system with reserved seats for women in the national parliament. This article explores the dramatic increase in women's participation in public life and representation in governance and the increasing authoritarianism of the Rwandan state under the guise of ‘democratization’. The increased political participation of women in Rwanda represents a paradox in the short term: as their participation has increased, women's ability to influence policy making has decreased. In the long term, however, increased female representation in government could prepare the path for their meaningful participation in a genuine democracy because of a transformation in political subjectivity.