*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Rwanda is perhaps the one state in Africa that is internationally recognised for its success in building resilience, moving from the horrors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis to becoming one of the most successful and unified states in the region. In fact, resilience as an approach to governance has been central to the post-genocide regime of President Paul Kagame. Illustrative of this, last year, the country launched a massive community-based participatory framework for the assessment of resilience led by the Ministry of National Unity and Civic Engagement (MINUBUMWE), in collaboration with the Swedish NGO Interpeace. The University of Rwanda, in Kigali, was therefore an important venue for our third workshop on Decolonising Resilience (an AHRC-funded networking project) bringing together academics and policy experts from Ghana and South Sudan to discuss Rwanda’s project of state reconstruction through building new mechanisms of resilience governance.

Resilience as a mode of governance may be a new concept to some E-IR readers, perhaps more familiar with resilience as an approach to psychology and engineering (‘bouncing back’ or coping with stresses) or perhaps with ecosystem resilience (the capacity for adaptation and change). Resilience as a mode of governance is processual, aspiring to operate beyond or outside of the liberal modernist binary conceptions of politics. In fine, politics is less likely to be conceived as a separate formal sphere, limited to elections every five years and operating separately from the private or social and economic sphere. Resilience governance is less broken up by distinct policy measures with a beginning and end and less likely to have discrete goals. Instead, resilience governance is likely to involve rolling processes of iterative and adaptive policy making and ongoing processes of consultation and public engagement.

For some commentators, resilience as a cohering framework is due to the ongoing trauma of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, for others, it’s a cover for a repressive regime, which has been criticised for a lack of human rights and civil liberties and for stoking ongoing conflict in the DRC. This paper suggests that a key........

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