Paper Short Abstract:

The paper explores the two-faced nature of state care as exercised by the Rwandan state in its pursuit of maintaining national security by hunting ‘traitors’ living ‘freely as exiles abroad’. The central question in this study is how does pursuing exiles guarantee national security, if at all?

Paper Abstract:

The paper explores the experiences of former soldiers who served in, but deserted from the post-conflict Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) and went into exile. It seeks to understand the state – army deserter interactions and the affective relations they engender. In South Africa, Rwandan army deserters contend with multiple struggles for survival. An important reason is that they are under surveillance by the Rwandan state which perceives them as a threat to Rwanda’s national security. In protecting Rwandan migrants from harm that is sanctioned by their government, the South African government has, on several occasions, fallen out with the Rwandan government for deploying agents who hide behind the camouflage of South African violent subcultures to perpetrate violence against Rwandan exiles. I argue that as the Rwandan state ‘exercises care’ for national security, it constructs fear, instability and uncertainty for its army deserters in self-imposed exile in South Africa. An ethnography conducted in Cape Town and Johannesburg over a period of eighteen months reveals that the military to post military transition of Rwandan army deserters is complicated because these former soldiers believe that they are being ‘hunted’ by their government and cannot plan for the future. I use Vigh’s (2010) notion of ‘social navigation’ as a lens to analyse my empirical study in showing the interactivity between the care for national security and the social forces present in the spaces in the army deserters live.

Key words: paradox, state, care, army deserter, exile