Staging the Rwandan Diaspora: The Politics of Performance

This article explores how the Rwandan state ‘stages’ its diaspora as agents of change. I argue that‘staging’ – in the sense of creating a specific, positive image – is an important aspect of the presentgovernment’s effort to create a new Rwanda of national unity and reconciliation. Although the diasporamostly is articulated in policy documents in positive terms, there is also a strong acknowledgementof the so-called ‘negative forces’ of the diaspora. Staging the diaspora as agents of change istherefore a means to deal with this ambiguous perception of the diaspora and cultivate only its positivesides, and becomes part of a larger state-building project that is about ‘staging’ or ‘performing’national unity and asserting state sovereignty. I argue that the Rwandan state performs its sovereigntyand governs its hostile diaspora through processes of categorising the diaspora andthrough processes of inclusion and exclusion of certain categories