Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how kinship works in the aftermath of sexual violence in Rwanda. It questions how family and social relations of young people born from genocide rape are reconstituted, negotiated and understood. What can we learn about ethics and responsibility from “the generation after"?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how kinship works in the aftermath of violence, especially from the perspectives of young people born from rape during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. I conducted a year of fieldwork in Rwanda observing how kinship relations work and how family (however understood) is reconstituted and takes shape 25 years after a period of extreme sexual violence. This paper discusses questions such as: How are relationships that derive from violent circumstances brought into the everyday? What forms of relationships become possible, impossible, enabled or dismissed, and with what consequences for young people born of wartime rape and their families? This study illustrates broken, fractured as well as productive kinship relations and what these relations entail, curtail and make possible for “the generation after”. In examining the delicate construction of social relations, this paper gives significant insight into the lived experience of children born from sexual violence and how they are absorbed into post-violent societies. This leads to important conversations on the gendered consequences of violence, ethics and the politics of responsibility.