Creating Liminal Spaces for Centering Voices in Post-genocide Rwanda: Cow for Peace
Institutional Affiliation
University of Manitoba
Start Date
17-1-2025 2:30 PM
End Date
17-1-2025 4:00 PM
Proposal Type
Presentation
Proposal Format
Virtual
Proposal Description
In post-genocide Rwanda, the government-led, top-down reconciliation approach offered a quick remedy for national insecurity and the fear of genocidal recurrence in the aftermath of mass atrocities of 1994. The government’s notion of around 95% Rwandan population being reconciled often obscures the fact that interpersonal fear, hatred, and anxiety have been prevalent in the rural communities, given the return of former perpetrators who had completed sentences in prisons after 10 to 20 years. To address the drivers of violence embedded in the legacy of mass atrocities, an indigenous peacebuilding approach that incorporates rituals, symbols and cultural practices is conducive to the holistic transformation of the affected communities.
Cow for Peace is a local-led peacebuilding intervention which is community-informed and culturally adapted. It demonstrates how the decolonization and reconstitution of culturally embedded symbols, which are often overlooked in the scholarship of peace studies, help to transform the worldviews, identities and relationships of the genocide perpetrators and the survivors living side by side in rural areas. This paper looks into the cultural, religious, and socio-economic elements of the Cow for Peace program by examining how liminal spaces for peacebuilding are constructed that allow creative incubation of transformed relationships, where voices of the adversaries are recognized and validated in communities. What makes Cow for Peace unique is that the liminal spaces are not entirely separated from the daily social settings. The activity where the adversaries share responsibility for raising a cow in the survivor’s home blends into the daily lives of rural communities.
Creating Liminal Spaces for Centering Voices in Post-genocide Rwanda: Cow for Peace
In post-genocide Rwanda, the government-led, top-down reconciliation approach offered a quick remedy for national insecurity and the fear of genocidal recurrence in the aftermath of mass atrocities of 1994. The government’s notion of around 95% Rwandan population being reconciled often obscures the fact that interpersonal fear, hatred, and anxiety have been prevalent in the rural communities, given the return of former perpetrators who had completed sentences in prisons after 10 to 20 years. To address the drivers of violence embedded in the legacy of mass atrocities, an indigenous peacebuilding approach that incorporates rituals, symbols and cultural practices is conducive to the holistic transformation of the affected communities.
Cow for Peace is a local-led peacebuilding intervention which is community-informed and culturally adapted. It demonstrates how the decolonization and reconstitution of culturally embedded symbols, which are often overlooked in the scholarship of peace studies, help to transform the worldviews, identities and relationships of the genocide perpetrators and the survivors living side by side in rural areas. This paper looks into the cultural, religious, and socio-economic elements of the Cow for Peace program by examining how liminal spaces for peacebuilding are constructed that allow creative incubation of transformed relationships, where voices of the adversaries are recognized and validated in communities. What makes Cow for Peace unique is that the liminal spaces are not entirely separated from the daily social settings. The activity where the adversaries share responsibility for raising a cow in the survivor’s home blends into the daily lives of rural communities.