Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the contemporaneous transformations of the RPF from rebel group into state and the FDLR from state to rebel group, questioning the significance of state-centric models of conflict to understanding the dynamics of intractable political violence in the region.

Paper long abstract:

In 1994, in Rwanda, a rebel group became a government, and a government became a rebel group. Before, and after, both resemble nothing so much as networks of overlapping politico-military and commercial elites embedded within broader networks of security and primitive accumulation in the region. For both the RPF and the FDLR, being rebels or being a state was less significant than these networks, and the resources they could tap through them. Nonetheless, 1994 reveals - for both groups - what was and was not significant about their 'state-ness', and their experience shows us what is and is not significant about the legal-rational edifice of the African state. The survival and flourishing of the RPF, and the FDLR's contemporaneous degeneration into irrelevance reveals many underlying dynamics to political violence and intractable conflict in the region. In particular, the analytic lens of these two groups highlights that what is significant is (a) who is networked to whom, regardless of formal borders, (b) the manipulation of historical memory and discourses of indigeneity undergird or subvert such networks, and (c) the resources which flow through those networks as a result. State-centric models of conflict are thus unhelpful and misleading.