Peasants in Power : The political economy of development and genocide in Rwanda
本书从1970年代中期起分析卢旺达发展模式的结构性缺陷，揭示亲农民言论如何未转化为政策，以及经济危机如何导致1994年种族灭绝，适合研究政治经济、农业政策和种族冲突的学者。
This book embarks on an ambitious mission to provide new insights into the origins and logic of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. There are many books on this topic, and many more are likely to follow. But the added value of this book is considerable. A first merit lies in its adoption of a longer-term historical perspective by analysing the Rwandan development model from the mid-1970s onwards, and pointing to structural shortcomings that eventually contributed to the horrific events in 1994. The analysis blends theoretical perspectives from economics, political science, and agrarian studies, and applies them to the pre-1994 reality, which is a second merit of the volume. After an introductory chapter, the book introduces the underlying logic of the Habyarimana ideology by drawing on an unconventional source of information: a discourse analysis of Habyarimana's official speeches. Verwimp sketches the image of a President who glorified the peasantry. But the next chapters convincingly illustrate how this pro-peasant rhetoric did not translate into pro-peasant developmental policies. The third chapter unveils how – despite an initial economic growth path in the 1970s – the Rwandan economy was confronted with structural shortcomings: huge demographic pressure, rising inequality and regional disparities, a tax policy unfavourable to poorer (peasant) sections of the population, an unequal distribution of public goods, and the overreliance of government income upon coffee exports. Chapter 4 analyses how the coffee economy was an important tax base but, more importantly, an instrument of political control to ensure the loyalty and exploit peasants' dependency (through a system of controlled producer prices). When coffee prices on the world market collapsed by the end of the 1980s, the regime chose to consolidate power through repression and ethnic mobilization. Blaming Tutsi became an important instrument to sustain loyalty from the Hutu majority and hide the regime's own failures. The fifth chapter lays its finger on another painful episode of agricultural policy failure: the 1989 Ruriganiza famine in southern Rwanda. A malfunctioning food marketing system and complete lack of response to acute food shortages when production fell short in 1989 led to a prolonged agricultural crisis in the southern region that was deliberately kept off the national and international radar.