School of Social and Political Science

Description

Please join us for the first lecture of the Politics in Contested Time Lecture series where Associate Professor Marie-Eve Desrosiers joins us from the Graduate School in Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa for a talk titled, "Rwanda Before the Genocide The Ordinary and Bottom-Up Building and Unravelling of Authoritarian Regimes".

She will be joined in discussion by Dr Rebecca Tapscott, Lecturer in Politics at the University of York.

Marie-Eve Desrosiers, Graduate School in Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

Events such as the brutal targeting of opponents and groups considered undesirable in Russia and China, and the recent coups in West Africa have come as stark reminders of both the most repressive manifestations of authoritarianism, and its boldest moments.

They also comfort the common tendency to associate authoritarianism with some of its more extreme expressions, such as overt oppression, state violence, and the most glaring forms of corruption, and to focus on its more dramatic moments, such as coups and the dramatic breakdown of regimes.

In this presentation, Marie-Eve Desrosiers argues that this leads us to neglect the more ordinary moments of authoritarian politics, as well as some the more basic relationships authoritarianism builds or falls on, such as its relationship with citizens.

These realities and experiences are, however, just as important to authoritarian trajectories, including to the making and breaking of authoritarianism.

Drawing on her book, Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control before the Genocide, she looks at the governments of Rwanda’s first two post-independence Republics (1962-1990) to demonstrates that the building and unravelling we focus on to understand authoritarianism are never solely born of critical junctures, but are also the result of regimes’ unsuccessful management of regular political confrontations and contradictions that in turn foster deeper and new confrontations and contradictions.

Marie-Eve Desrosiers (@DesrosiersME) holds the Research Chair in International Francophonie on political aspirations and movements in Francophone Africa and is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa.

She specialises in governance and security issues. She studies political crises and conflicts, authoritarianism, political mobilisation, and the relationship between state and society in the Great Lakes and Francophone Africa.

She is the author of Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her research has also been published in journals such as African Affairs, Comparative Politics, and the Journal of International Relations and Development Studies.