This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Gretchen Baldwin, a policy analyst in the Women, Peace, and Security program at the International Peace Institute. Her debut article in the Journal of Modern African Studies examines changes in ethnic and national identities in Rwanda since the country’s 1994 genocide through the lens of Kwibuka, Rwanda’s annual 100-day commemoration of the genocide.

There were a lot of difficulties associated with the Kwibuka project because of its political sensitivity and the concerns necessarily affiliated with research questions around ethnic violence, trauma and nationalism in a "post-ethnicity" state like Rwanda. How does a post-genocide government and its populace deal with the collective memory of mass atrocity at the national level? How does nationalism build and rebuild in a post-genocide state? In Rwanda, Kwibuka is the primary process through which collective memory of the genocide is publicly expressed, but it exists alongside national-level policies against "genocide denial and ideology." These policies have been criticized as intentionally vague and repressive; one component is that naming ethnicity is now considered criminally divisive, which makes researching past ethnic violence quite challenging. Instead, a new nationalism has emerged that declares, "We are all Rwandan," which serves to double down on the erasure of ethnic identity.

Ethically and methodologically, how to consider and account for my own positionality as a researcher was also a challenge. I am acutely aware that my identity — white American with an elite education — plays a role in the types of data I can and can't access, how people interact with me, how I move through a city like Kigali. This can be an advantage, but seeing it as advantageous can quickly become exploitative. Researchers in any discipline or subject run a serious risk of interviewees saying what they think that researchers might want to hear; in a surveillance state like Rwanda, discerning what is and is not "true" becomes even more difficult.

Studying LeAnn Fujii's work has been critical for my research. She wrote on the importance of "meta-data," which refers to that which is unspoken by interviewed informants. Some examples of this are silence, evasions, rumors and invented stories, all of which I considered invaluable and used to build on and adjust my research design as I carried out the project. Attending to “meta-data” is especially useful when assessing how current social and political realities may influence people's articulation of the genocide and its aftermath, given the sensitivities, discomfort, risk and traumas that can accompany recalling experiences of political violence. It can also indicate a person's level of comfort with a researcher and can shed light on response bias, meaning respondents' instinct to respond to questions in a way they believe the interviewer would want them to.

For my work in Rwanda, observation —  both of large, public spaces and activities and of the nuance in individual conversations that I was or was not a part of —  helped me to identify how new national identities have emerged in light of discussion of ethnicity being ostensibly outlawed. For example, I never used the words Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa to refer to ethnicities during interviews. Instead I paid attention to coded language I heard in speeches and conversations and then adjusted my own language accordingly. What I noticed was that interviewees were very comfortable identifying themselves as Tutsi without my ever using the word or asking about ethnic identity, but that the word Hutu and Twa were rarely —  almost never —  said in any context. Likewise, those who self-identified as Tutsi had a very strong sense of community around their Tutsi identity, which was coded in public discourse as "survivor." Ultimately, my research demonstrates that ethnic identity lives on in Rwanda, even in younger generations (folks who were not alive during the genocide), and that is exacerbating existing social tensions around those identities.