An Ansoms

• Catholic University of Louvain

Since February 2020, we have witnessed COVID-19 profoundly disturb ongoing research dynamics – including research collaborations between the Global North and the Global South. Reduced international and regional mobility obliged research collaborations to reinvent their modalities. The role of field-based researchers (those physically ‘there’) has n...

Recent literature recognizes struggles for access to natural resources as inherent to societal transformation processes. Sources also emphasize a trend towards the depoliticization of these struggles, which pushes various population groups to the periphery of the debates: indigenous peoples, women, youth, and fishermen. By aiming to alleviate human...

The last two decades, a variety of-mostly donor-led-initiatives have aimed at 'localizing' land tenure registration , specifically in conflict-affected settings, making the registration of land rights more accessible to rural smallholders. In such settings, land registration is seen not just as instrumental to tenure security and economic developme...

Originaire des États-Unis du XIXe siècle, les idéologies écologistes sont devenues une nouvelle forme de gestion des ressources naturelles. Basées sur l’approche préservationniste qui préconise le modèle de protection intégrale, ces idéologies ont conduit à la création des parcs nationaux où l’entrée humaine est interdite. Elles se sont répandues e...

Ces trois dernières décennies, plusieurs analyses sont menées sur la relation entre la conservation de la nature et la population locale et peuples autochtones. Cette relation est analysée en termes de tension et conduit aux organisations de conservation de la nature à chercher les stratégies d’intégration durable des communautés à la conservation...

En 2012, le Gouvernement congolais lève l’option de l’implantation des Zones économiques spéciales (ZES) sur le territoire national, particulièrement à travers les axes nord-sud-centre-est-ouest. Ces ZES sont un ensemble d’espaces géographiques dans lesquels un certain nombre d’activités sont encouragées par des mesures de politique économique q...

The article links policy adaptation in Rwanda to the wider phenomenon of authoritarian persistence. We analyse political decision-making and implementation in a variety of policy domains (agriculture, energy, and education) to argue that the reality of governance in Rwanda requires more nuance than what is commonly portrayed in the literature. Hove...

La présente recherche requestionne le débat des pressions foncières dans l’Est de la RDC en sortant d’une explication devenue classique sur l’origine des conflits fonciers autour des variables « terre - pouvoir - identité ». Elle met en exergue la variable « démographie » et son corollaire de la « rareté de la terre » comme donne inéluctable de la...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Government of Rwanda’s aesthetics of space and the formation of the post-2000 Rwandan state. We reflect upon the importance of aesthetics - ‘how things should look’ - in Rwandan development policy discourses and practices. First, we show how the Government of Rwanda’s aesthetic preferences are materi...

In the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, land-use rights underwent profound changes following processes of colonization, commodification and conflict, leading to an increased individualization and privatization of tenure. Despite these evolutions, customary tenure continues to be described as a common-property system managed through a strong hi...

During the COVID-19 crisis in Africa, several contradictory discourses have tried to predict how the continent will experience the pandemic. Based on a qualitative approach, this article goes beyond generalized and arbitrary predictions and analyzes how three countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa have managed the pandemic. We first analyze...

An essential exploration of and guide to research ethics in the field.

An essential exploration of and guide to research ethics in the field.

Literature on transformations to sustainability increasingly recognizes transformation as inherently political, but the field still struggles to study these politics. Our research project ‘Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace?’ on efforts to localize land registration in conflict-affected settings, both illustrates and contributes to understanding th...

Our world today is experimenting a time of great power but also of tremendous resistances. Everywhere, people are brought together by similar burdens and frustration and creatively think about how to counter the forms of domination they are ascribed to. In academia as well there is an awakening among scholars to further investigate these multiple f...

Elles et ils sont universitaires, qualifiés, expérimentés, motivés. Inlassablement, ils collectent sur le terrain d'inestimables données, dans des conditions jamais faciles et parfois très risquées, par exemple dans des zones de conflit armé. Et pourtant, leurs voix sont inaudibles, leurs visages invisibles, leurs noms inexistants dans les publicat...

Since the early 2000s, Rwanda has implemented a comprehensive agrarian reform that makes large areas of land available to local cooperatives and foreign enterprises for investment. This article presents a case of land grabbing by the state and local elites. First, it describes the process through which Rwanda has arrived at an agricultural agenda w...

In sub-Saharan Africa claims over access to land are often studied from the perspective of legal pluralism. This approach allows us to comprehend how, in pluralistic and post-colonial contexts, access to land is governed by interacting and competing normative frameworks, and by power relations legitimising some of those frameworks over others. But...

Rwanda has embarked on an ambitious policy package to modernise and professionalise the agrarian and land sector. Its reform fits into a broader call – supported by major international donors – to implement a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. After 10 years of implementation, there is increased production output and value-addition in commerci...

Since the end of civil war and genocide in 1994, the Rwandan government has embarked on an ambitious plan to reshape the rural setting. Through a strategy of agrarian modernization, the Rwandan government is reorganizing rural space and production in order to foster economic growth. This article looks at how this spatial and productive reconfigurat...

Recent statistics indicate that poverty in Rwanda decreased impressively between 2006 and 2014. This seems to confirm Rwanda's developmental progress. This paper however argues for a more cautious interpretation of household survey data. We contrast macro-level statistical analysis with in-depth field research on livelihood conditions. Macroeconomi...

Since the end of civil war and genocide in 1994, the Rwandan government has embarked on an ambitious plan to reshape the rural setting. Through a strategy of agrarian modernization, the Rwandan government is reorganizing rural space and production in order to foster economic growth. This article looks at how this spatial and productive reconfigurat...

Over the past decade, African agriculture sectors have been the object of numerous initiatives advancing a ‘new’ Green Revolution for the continent. The low productivity of African smallholders is attributed to the low use of modern, improved agricultural inputs. In short, African countries are expected to catch up with the Green Revolution in othe...

LAND RUSH is a board game that allows participants to critically assess the ways in which different social classes face both opportunities and constraints in securing land rights and in managing the acquired land sustainably in an extremely competitive environment. The game illustrates three characteristics of contemporary land dynamics in an alter...

Thomson Susan. Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. xxvii + 258 pp. List of illustrations. List of abbreviations. Note on Kinyarwanda language. Glossary. Index. $27.95. Paper. - Volume 58 Issue 1 - An Ansoms

Introduction Population growth, environmental degradation, slow rates of economic development and land grabbing have all contributed to the transformation of Africa from a continent of land abundance into a continent characterized by increasing land scarcity and competition over land (Berry, 2002). However, the contemporary struggles over land vary...

Introduction: land grabbing and ‘real governance’ in Burundi Since the 1960s, Burundi has known several cycles of conflict – partly motivated by ethnic cleavages – with particularly violent escalations in 1968, 1972, 1973, 1988 and 1993 (Buyoya, 2011). These events lay at the base of massive refugee fluxes, with farmers leaving their place of origi...

Any attempt to completely plan a village, a city, or, for that matter, a language is certain to run afoul of the same social reality. A village, city, or language is the jointly created, partly unintended product of many, many hands. To the degree that authorities insist on replacing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and regu...

Contemporary contestations in the land arena in Africa’s Great Lakes Region are often embedded in long-term historical trajectories in which struggles over land are closely associated with strife and violence. Indeed, the region has for decades been torn by local and regional conflict, war and instability. Today’s peace in central Africa is brittle...

The various contributions to this book demonstrate quite clearly how dispossession of land rights and loss of access to, or control over, land are common phenomena affecting large numbers of women and men in the Great Lakes Region. Land alienation is occurring on a daily basis, be it through the denial of rights, by stealth, by means of expropriati...

Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialization of its space. Whereas attention mainly goes to macro-scale land grabs, land contestation and grabbing at the micro scale are largely ignored. This paper analyses how local actors instrumentalize the renegotiation over African wetland rights to call into question the prevailing social orde...

In its 2008 World Development Report, the World Bank pleaded for a ‘Green Revolution’ for sub-Saharan Africa, pointing particularly to the importance of including smallholder farmers. This article focuses on the banana cropping system in Rwanda, and on the agricultural innovations introduced within this system. We first consider macro-level innovat...

In a context of globalization and liberalization, Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialization of its space. Various large-scale actors, including international private investors, investor states, and local entrepreneurs, are constantly seeking to expand their land holdings for the production of food crops or biofuels. This article...

This article examines Rwanda's gender equality policies with the intention of contributing to the ongoing debate in the literature on the meaning of gender equality initiatives in authoritarian states. The article evaluates the transformative potential of Rwanda's gender equality policies with reference to deep‐rooted societal norms and practices w...

NEGOTIATING ON POVERTY is a collective game that allows participants to discover the concrete difficulties in assessing the multiple dimensions of poverty Participants are divided into groups of seven to simulate a participatory poverty assessment (a social wealth-ranking exercise) that takes place in an imaginary small village in some developing c...

Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ‘story behind the findings’, meaning the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls that you, the researcher, are confronted with before, during and after the field experience. These quagmires have a potentially profound impact upon both the research process and its findings. They deserve proper att...

This article considers how the simulation game of DEVELOPMENT MONOPOLY provides insight into poverty and inequality dynamics in a development context. It first discusses how the game is rooted in theoretical and conceptual frameworks on poverty and inequality. Subsequently, it reflects on selected playing experiences, with special focus on the aspe...

DEVELOPMENT MONOPOLY is a simulation game that allows players to experience how power relations influence the agency of different socioeconomic groups, and how this can induce poverty and inequality. Players alter the original rules of the MONOPOLY board game so that they more accurately reflect social stratification and inequalities in the context...

BUILDING TIES IN A STRATIFIED SOCIETY is a collective action game that allows participants to experience how different social classes face both opportunities and constraints in securing their livelihoods through the construction of social networks. Participants receive a knot with six strands (length depends on their social stratum) and connect the...

This paper considers the progress made in the implementation of Rwanda's Vision 2020 programme since its launch in 2000. At the halfway point, the overall picture is quite encouraging. Rwanda's economy is thriving and reported growth figures have been impressive. The country is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals in the fields of educ...

In contrast to many other African states, Rwanda has a clear vision of how it wants to achieve economic progress and poverty reduction (MINECOFIN 2000, 2002, 2007). The overall aim of the current political elite is to transform Rwanda from a "low human development" to a "medium human development" country, as defined by the United Nations Developmen...

At the dawn of the new millennium, the international community placed the fight against poverty as the top priority on the development agenda. The emergence of this new development paradigm did not erase the international community’s belief in the necessity of economic growth as a trigger for development; as Bhalla states, ‘Growth is the core of ec...

In a context of globalisation and liberalisation, Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialisation of its space. Various so-called large-scale actors — international private investors, ‘investor’ states, and local entrepreneurs — are searching for large quantities of land for the production of food crops or biofuels (Zoomers, 2010). At...

Ituri is a district of the Oriental Province, located in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It is composed of the territories of Irumu, Djugu, Mahagi, Aru and Mambasa that are in turn subdivided into 45 collectivities and five cités.1 The population is diverse. The largest group is the Alur, representing around 27 per cen...

There is an extensive body of literature that analyses the link between natural resources and conflict, whether referring to internal conflicts (see e.g. Collier, 2007; Ross, 2004; Lujala, 2009) or to conflicts at the international level (see e.g. Klare, 2001). In the context of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the role of mineral resources...

The paper applies a quantitative methodology to study poverty and livelihood profiles on the basis of a large set of variables. It takes the context of post-conflict rural Rwanda for a case study. By means of exploratory tools (i.e. principal component and cluster analysis), it combines variables that capture natural, physical, human, financial and...

By using a recent and comprehensive household survey on the DRC, this article attempts to centralize the very scarce information written on the contemporary socio-economic situation of South Kivu. In the first part, we analyse the socio-economic performance of South Kivu in a comparative perspective, identifying it as one of the poorest provinces i...

This article focuses on the Rwandan peasantry to confirm how "views from below" can contribute to a better understanding of the "pro-poor" growth challenge. Based on micro-level evidence gathered in 2007, it examines local peasants' perceptions of the characteristics and degree of poverty for different socioeconomic categories (i.e., peasant groups...

This article analyses the Rwandan elite's visions and ambitions for a wide-ranging re-engineering of rural society. The post-1994 political elite has few links to rural society and the peasant way of life, and sees little room for small-scale peasant agriculture in Rwanda's economic future. The article shows how current Rwandan policy makers aim to...

Résumé Cet article étudie le cas de Kabuye Sugar Works (KSW), la première entreprise publique qui a été privatisée au Rwanda, après la guerre de 1990-1994. En achetant le seul producteur de sucre dans le pays, le groupe 'Mahdivani business' a reçu une concession de l'État rwandais sur à peu près 3000 hectares de marais dans la vallée de la Nyabaron...

Introduction After a long process of drafting and negotiations, the government of Rwanda recently adopted a new land policy and a related land law that seek to formalize land rights through official titling. The stated overall objectives of the land law, ‘sustainable economic development’ and ‘social welfare’ (see article 3 of the land law), are to...

What Remains to be Done? With this book we have tried to offer a nuanced picture of how the issues of privatization, gender relations and land rights are currently interacting in Eastern Africa as a contribution to the debate on how women's rights can best be secured in the overarching context of the increasing ‘privatization’ of land tenure. The d...

Equity is complementary to the pursuit of long-term prosperity. Greater equity is doubly good for poverty reduction. It tends to favour sustained overall development, and it delivers increased opportunities to the poorest groups in a society. (François Bourguignon, speech at the launching of the World Development Report , 2006) This paper studies t...

The Rwandan government has recently adopted new agricultural and land policies that strive to increase productivity in the agricultural sector though land consolidation and concentration, and through the promotion of regional crop specialisation and monocropping. This paper, however, identifies the strong inverse relationship between farm size and...

The World Development Report 2008 highlights the need for a green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reflects upon the visions and ambitions of Rwandan policy makers to make this happen. It first analyses the political economy of Rwanda in a historical perspective. It outlines how political evolutions and events – with special reference t...

The paper aims to identify the different livelihood profiles that prevail in post-conflict rural Rwanda. By means of exploratory tools such as principal component and cluster analysis, it combines variables that capture natural, physical, human, financial and social resources in combination with environmental factors to identify household groups wi...

This paper looks at the developmental consequences of aid flows on the Great Lakes region in Africa. Our main hypothesis is that political considerations and donor coordination problems still play an important role in directing aid and is much less dependent on objective criteria such as the need for aid or good governance. The region of the Great...

This paper critically analyses the challenges and priorities for Rwanda’s rural sector policies in the fight against poverty. The lessons drawn are important, as this sector will be at the forefront of Rwanda’s new Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS or PRSP-2). The paper first looks at the dangers of the purely growth-led de...

This paper focuses on the case of Rwanda to illustrate the importance of looking beyond 'robust' cross-country averages examining the link between growth, poverty, redistribution and conflict. It argues how policy making in Rwanda - as formulated by the Poverty Reduction Strategy - could provide more efficient pathways towards poverty reduction by...

In September 1999, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund launched a new programme named the ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy’. It was presented as a new financial framework with the primary purpose of ‘fighting poverty’. With over 32 countries at the implementation phase of the PRSP,1 this new strategy has become an important conditionality...

Rwanda is confronted today with a considerable percentage of poor, as two thirds are deprived of their basic needs, combined with a profoundly embedded inequality. Within the framework of the Poverty Reduction Strategy, the fight against this poverty has been launched. Different surveys and research, preparing the elaboration of the PRSP document,...

The reshuffling of international relations after the end of the cold war has dramatically changed the exogenous influence of external actors on the agency of local and regional actors in the developing world. After 1989, the motivation behind aid flows has profoundly changed with the collapse of the east-west competition, which has considerably alt...