Book Reviews

Book reviews: Kumar, Amitava, Passport Photos (reviewed by Mohini Chandra); Farmer, Sarah, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (reviewed by Nigel Saint); Wailoo, Keith, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (reviewed by Andrew M. Kaye); Gerlach, Wolfgang, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (reviewed by Andrew Chandler); Langewiesche, Dieter, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (reviewed by Mark Hewitson); Driver, C. J., Patrick Duncan, South Africa and Pan-African (reviewed by Franklin Hugh Adler); Todorov, Tzvetan (ed.), Voices from the Gulag. Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (reviewed by Florin Lobont)     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Multiculturalism and Britishness BERNARD CRICK Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain, by Tariq Modood No Rock ‘n’ Roll for Joschka Fischer Arne Hofmann Die Rückkehr der Geschichte: Die Welt nach dem 11. September und die Erneuerung des Westens (The Return of History: The World after September 11 and the Reconstruction of the West), by Joschka Fischer Russia and the Kosovo Crisis Vassilis Fouskas Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo, by John Norris with a Foreword by Strobe Talbott Patten's Progress Mark Garnett Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs, by Chris Patten Civil Society: The Historian's View Matthew Grant Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions, edited by Jose Harris Not Quite Lawless Pavlos Eleftheriadis Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules, by Philippe Sands The Meanings of Genocide Lars Fischer The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus Midlarsky The Meaning of Genocide (Genocide in the Age of the Nation State I), by Mark Levene. I. B. Tauris The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (Genocide in the Age of the Nation State IT), by Mark Levene. I. B. Lauris Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, edited by Johannes‐Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber‐Newth Down with Political Parties? Paul Webb The Party's Over: Blueprint for a Very English Revolution, by Keith Sutherland What To Do with the USA? Richard Briand Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy, by Stephen M. Walt. Norton Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, by Carl Boggs The 2005 Election Reassessed Richard S. Grayson The British General Election of 2005, by Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler Britain Votes 2005, edited by Pippa Norris and Christopher Wlezien Neither Left nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate, by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse The Importance of the Opponent Yannis Stavrakakis On the Political, by Chantal Mouffe     

Book Reviews

Book reviews: Barkan, Peter, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historcal Injustices (reviewed by Matthew Dodd); Tokar, Brian (ed.), Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (reviewed by John Dupré); Powell, Lawrence N., Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Dukes's Louisiana (reviewed by Clive Webb); Pinto, António Costa, The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascists and the New State (reviewed by Alexander G. Nesterov); Kershen, Anne J. (ed.), Language, Labour and Migration (reviewed by Mike Cole); Holt, Thomas C., The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (reviewed by Andrew M. Kaye); Kline, Wendy, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (reviewed by Dan Stone)     

The Limits of Tolerance: Nation–State Building and What It Means for Minority Groups

Abstract

When we think of the most egregious forms of intolerance directed against minority communities we tend to associate them with particularly despicable regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where racism, ideology or some special route to development is often held to blame, or where ultra-nationalism swamps positive tendencies towards democracy and a civil society. In this essay Levene proposes a partial corrective to this view with reference to the supposedly ‘good’ nation–state derived from the western liberal model. He considers the behaviour of two such states at their inception, Poland and Israel, with regard to two minorities, Jews and Arabs, with the Jews providing linkage between the two state trajectories. Levene charts their respective rejections of bi-national or multinational development, and suggests that the fact that both states today maintain a modicum of tolerance towards their residual Jewish and Arab minorities is more the result of (paradoxical) good luck than of conscious, benevolent design. In conclusion Levene proposes that the very nature of the modern nation–state militates against genuine pluralistic tolerance, a goal that requires a massive structural re-ordering of contemporary society away from global economies to a sustainability of human scale.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue. The Real Story of the Romanian ‘Revolution’
SILVIA MARTON 1989 à l'est de l'Europe: une mémoire controversée, edited by Jérôme Heurtaux and Cédric Pellen. La mort des Ceau?escu: la vérité sur un coup d'Etat communiste, by Catherine Durandin and Guy Hoedts. A hedgehog approach to capitalism
Paul Auerbach 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by Ha‐Joon Chang. A Scottish Salmond in a sea of banalities?
Tom Gallagher Salmond Against the Odds, by David Torrance. Israel: the politics of brute force
Geoffrey Bindman The Punishment of Gaza, by Gideon Levy. Heath: no need to be loved
Mark Garnett Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography, by Philip Ziegler. The politics of rebellious music
Nico Pizzolato Reds, Whites and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music and Race in the United States, by William G. Roy. Lloyd George's wrong choices
Dick Leonard David Lloyd George: The Great Outsider, by Roy Hattersley. The constraints on American caesars
Richard Briand American Caesars: Lives of the American Presidents, from Franklyn D. Roosevelt to George Bush, by Nigel Hamilton. Faltering Habermas
Gianfranco Pasquino Europe: The Faltering Project, by Jürgen Habermas. Some light on the Prince of Darkness
Andrew Blick The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, by Peter Mandelson. Trio: Inside the Blair, Brown, Mandelson Project, by Giles Radice.     

‘Fraternity in diversity’ or ‘feudal fanatics’? Representations of ethnicity in Rwandan presidential rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Between independence in 1962 and the genocide in 1994, only two presidents ruled Rwanda. In addition to the enormous economic and developmental challenges that faced Presidents Grégoire Kayibanda (1962–73) and Juvénal Habyarimana (1973–94), each had to manage the ethnic divisions that plagued the country. In this paper Mayersen explores how each president discussed the issue of ethnicity in presidential speeches, interviews and key policy documents. Ostensibly, Presidents Kayibanda and Habyarimana both promoted national unity and advocated allegiance to a unified Rwandan identity rather than a focus on ethnicity. President Kayibanda called for ‘tolerance and understanding between the ethnicities’, while Habyarimana entreated Rwandans to ‘love your countrymen without distinction of ethnic or regional origin’. Yet in the allusive and indirect communication style typical of Rwandan discourse, underneath the presidential promotion of unity was a more complex message. Mayersen argues that the way each president addressed the issue served to maintain a high level of consciousness regarding ethnicity, and contributed to ongoing ethnic disharmony.     

Writing about Rwanda since the Genocide: Knowledge,Power and ‘Truth’

This debate article reflects upon four articles recently published in this journal as part of a special Forum on Rwanda (Volume 8, Issue 4, 2014)—released to coincide with the 20-year commemoration of the 1994 genocide. In doing so it highlights what this author considers to be a crisis in contemporary ‘Rwanda studies’. This crisis—referenced and reproduced to some extent in all four articles—combines methodological (‘how can we write about Rwanda?’) and epistemological (‘how should we write about Rwanda?’) uncertainty against a backdrop of highly polarized, partisan and sometimes personalized research agendas. In exploring this phenomenon, the study explores not only the role of academics (mainly European and Rwandan) but also of the Rwandan government itself, highlighting the rise of ‘activist polities’ such as that in contemporary Kigali. These regimes consider knowledge production to be an aspect of their own sovereignty and this poses fundamental challenges, as yet largely unacknowledged, to parts of Western Africanist scholarship.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Mark Baldassare, When Government Fails: The Orange Country Bankruptcy Bruce A. Walllin, From Revenue Sharing to Deficit Sharing: General Revenue Sharing and Cities     

Are the gatekeepers of memory awake?

Book reviews: Cole, Tim, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged and Sold (reviewed by Samuel Huston Goodfellow); Finkelstein, Norman G., The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (reviewed by Samuel Huston Goodfellow); Novick, Peter, The Holocaust in American Life (reviewed by Samuel Huston Goodfellow); Sniderman, Paul M. and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching beyond Race (reviewed by John A. Kirk); Barbieri, William A. Jr, Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (reviewed by Gregg Kvistad)     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Governance Stories Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes Administering Welfare Reform: International Transformations in Welfare Governance Paul Henman and Menno Fenger (eds) Health Policy and Politics: Networks, Ideas and Power Jenny Lewis The Longest Decade George Megalogenis Globalisation, Policy Transfer and Policy Research Institutes Stella Ladi     

The chameleon of mens rea and the shifting guises of culture-specific genocidal intent in international criminal proceedings

This article examines the significance of the mens rea-related evidence present in the specific language and discourse identified in the records of the International Military Tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The author argues that international proceedings have seen the emergence of a new type of evidence: a cognitive, linguistic, culturally determined plural of genocidal mens rea. As a result, the mental element of genocidal intent can neither be interpreted nor understood without an advanced forensic approach to the language used by the network of génocidaires. Based on a combination of cognitive and social science research with the humanities, the article applies a hybrid method of analysis to some of the genocide cases in international criminal justice and demonstrates how and why this approach ought to be introduced into the process of identification of the guilty minds of the architects of genocide.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Sarah, Nelen and Annie, Hondeghem Equality Oriented Personnel Policy in the Public Sector Simon, Marginson and Mark, Considine The Enterprise University – Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia     

Book Reviews

Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Ross McKibbin) Richard Hoggart
London Conference on Nazi Gold: Lancaster House, 2–4 December 1997 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office); Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War: Interim Report (Independent Commission of Experts on Switzerland in the Second World War); Nazi Gold: The British and Allied Attempts to Deal with Loot from the Second World War and the Implications for the Tripartite Gold Commission (Holocaust Education Trust); Ex-Enemy Jews: The Fate of the Assets in Britain of the Holocaust Victims and Survivors (Holocaust Education Trust); Nazi Gold: Information from the British Archives ; Nazi Gold: Information from the British Archives, Part II ; British Policy towards Enemy Property during and after the Second World War (Foreign and Commonwealth Office); Hitler's Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide (Adam Lebor); Blood Money: The Swiss, the Nazis and the Looted Billions (Tom Bower); The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead: How Swiss Bankers Financed the Nazi War Machine (Jean Ziegler, trans. John Brownjohn); The Rape of Europa (Lynn Nicholas); The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Seize the World's Greatest Works of Art (Hector Feliciano); Treasure Hoard: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard (William H. Honan) Donald Cameron Watt
The Politics of Risk Society (edited by Jane Franklin); Social Policy and Social Justice (edited by Jane Franklin) Leonard Tivey
The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (Tom Paulin) Mark Garnett
The Open Cage: The Ordeal of the Irian Jaya Hostages (Daniel Start) Donald Cameron Watt
The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Stefan Berger) Joyce Crick     

Reviews

Book reviews: Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged and Sold (reviewed by Samuel Huston Goodfellow); Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (reviewed by Samuel Huston Goodfellow); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (reviewed by Samuel Huston Goodfellow)     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy
Anthony Forster, Euroscepticism in Contemporary British Politics: Opposition to Europe in the British Conservative and Labour Parties since 1945
Martin Holmes (ed.), The Eurosceptic Reader
Dick Leonard and Mark Leonard (eds.), The Pro–European Reader
Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao, Governing London
Jean L. Cohen, Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm
Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left
Kate Berridge, Vigor Mortis: The End of the Death Taboo
Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps
Tom Bentley and Daniel Stedman Jones (eds.), The Moral Universe
Richard Lindley, Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride and Paranoia
Gøsta Esping–Andersen with Duncan Gallie, Anton Hemerijck and John Myles, Why We Need a New Welfare State
Reinhard Heinisch, Populism, Proporz, Pariah: Austria Turns to the Right. Austrian Political Change, its Causes and Repercussions     

Book Reviews

Jennie Lee: A Life (Patricia Hollis); Gordon Brown (Paul Routledge); Callaghan: A Life (Kenneth A. Morgan), Eric Shaw Whatever Happened to the Tories? The Conservative Party since 1945 (Ian Gilmour and Mark Garnett); Major: A Political Life (Anthony Seldon), Patrick Seyd Memoir of a Fascist Childhood (Trevor Grundy), Anne Poole The Revival of Right-wing Extremism in the Nineties (edited by Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg), Herman Lebovics Liberty before Liberalism (Quentin Skinner), Bernard Crick Parliament under Pressure (Peter Riddell); Parliament and the People (Philip Laundy), John Griffith Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Eamonn Callan); Citizenship in Modern Britain (Keith Faulks); Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Ruth Lister), Derek Heater The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Michael Powell), Rudolf Klein Cities for a Small Planet (Richard Rogers); Planning for Urban Quality (Richard Parfect and Gordon Power), Anja Amsel Holistic Government (Perri 6), Roger Levett     

Studying Agaciro: Moving Beyond Wilsonian Interventionist Knowledge Production on Rwanda

Twenty years after the end of the Rwandan genocide, knowledge production on the small country of a thousand hills remains a clamorous battle ground of post- and decolonial power and influence. This essay critically engages with the knowledge production on Rwanda in the West by conceptualizing it as a Wilsonian intervention in the post-colony: paternalistically well-intended at the service of the peace, democracy and free trade liberal triad, while at the same time silencing, self-contradictory and potentially counterproductive. The Wilsonian interventionist form of knowledge production is coated in a language of critical engagement and care. At the same time it is and allows for a continuous external engagement in view of this Wilsonian triad—a highly particularist view on the good life, cast in universal terms. As a former journalist and a researcher from the Belgian Rwandan diaspora and building on a decolonial research strategy, in this essay I reflect on potentially different avenues to produce and consume knowledge on the country. I do this by discussing the challenges and creative opportunities of a recently started research project on Agaciro (self-worth): a philosophy and public policy in post-genocide Rwanda rooted in its precolonial past, centred on the ideals of self-determination, dignity and self-reliance. Rather than inscribing itself firmly into the canon that aims at informing on Rwanda, this research project seeks to contribute to a different mode of imagining, studying and enacting sovereignty in today's academic and political world, both permeated by the hegemonic principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P).     

The Dual Use of an Historical Event: ‘Rwanda 1994’, the Justification and Critique of Liberal Interventionism

This essay places the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in the context of the academic and political rise of liberal interventionism since 1990. It argues that this historical event is important for the debate about ‘humanitarian interventions’ in two different ways: on the one hand, as a signifier, ‘Rwanda 1994’ has been used (or, for that matter, misused) in order to justify an almost unlimited international agenda of liberal interventionism and social engineering; on the other, the genocide that could arguably have been prevented represents the exceptional case where military intervention can indeed be justified—but precisely because it is not in need of a specifically liberal justification. What would have made a military-based prevention of genocide justifiable in this particular case is precisely the aim to prevent something that is universally agreed to be unacceptable (genocide). The liberal twist in the justification narrative, in contrast, tends to emphasize the difference between the (liberal) ‘us’ and the non-liberal ‘them’, consequently claiming the legitimate right for the ‘us’ to decide about the use of force exclusively, that is, without the ‘them’. The continuation of the narrative into answering the post-intervention question ‘what now?’ then leads consequently into the necessity of imposing one's own system of rule as a general norm without due attention to the specifics of the situation ‘on the ground’. The exceptional features of ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the empirical event) thus point in a critical way to all those cases where ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the signifier) has been used to make the case for an ever-expanding agenda of liberal (‘just’) war.     

Change and Decay

Books reviewed:
Tivey, Leonard (edited by Robert Hazell). Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years
Seyd, Ben (edited by Robert Blackburn and Raymond Plant). The Politics of the British Constitution; Constitutional Reform: The Labour Government's Constitutional Reform Agenda
Klein, Rudolf (Bill Jordan). The New Politics of Welfare
O'Brien, David (edited by Dick Leonard). Crosland and New Labour
Parker, Noel (Maurice Keens-Soper). Europe in the World: The Persistence of Power Politics
Arnsel, Anja (Peter Gay). My German Question
Archard, David (edited by Richard Bellamy and Martin Hollis). Pluralism and Liberal Neutrality
Vosper, Susan Saunders (Robert Service). A History of Twentieth-century Russia
Garnett, Mark (Luisa Passerini). Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars
Jenkinson, Sally L (Bruce Hoffman). Inside Terrorism     

A Case of Moral Heroism: Sympathy,Personal Identification,and Mortality in Rwanda

What sort of person chooses to remain in a place like Rwanda when an easy exit is offered, when leaving seems the only safe or sane option, and when one is not directly connected to the would-be victims? And how does this person come to develop a circle of care that is expansive enough to include those who are radically Other? In what follows, I consider these questions through a detailed examination of the recent example of Paul Rusesabagina, the Hutu hotel manager in Kigali, Rwanda, who sheltered more than a thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees during the hundred-day genocide. I argue that Rusesabagina was primarily motivated by an awareness of his own mortality, his personal history, a desire to distance himself from the negative behavior of Hutu like himself, and a strong identification with the Tutsi refugees under his protection.