811030

book-review2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918811030Feminist Reviewbook review

book review

Feminist Review

Rwandan women rising

Issue 121, 96­–97
© 2019 The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0141778918811030
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918811030
www.feministreview.com

Swanee Hunt, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2017, 448pp., ISBN: 978-0-8223-6257-9, £29.99 (Hbk)

Women and girls are the most vulnerable groups during times of conflict. As such, the existing literature has explored
deeply the nexus between women’s political inclusion and peacemaking at the local and global level. Rwandan Women
Rising presents Rwanda as a model from which other countries can learn about women’s roles in working towards
sustainable peace and global security. A former US ambassador to Austria, Swanee Hunt draws on her experience of
working with women leaders for over two decades, offering numerous poignant yet hopeful personal narratives of
women in nation-building, peace maintenance and reconciliation from precolonial times to the present in Rwanda.

Built on interviews with almost ninety Rwandan women and men over a 16-year period, this book provides us with
assorted voices of local Rwandans across age, religion, profession and family background who describe their
experiences in Rwanda’s rebuilding. Divided into five parts in chronological order, the author examines why and how
women in Rwanda came to influential positions and what contribution they have made to various aspects of society,
with a particular focus on peace promotion and economic development.

The most important contribution of this book is to the literature of transnational feminism in respect of transversal
practice-sharing. At the heart of the text are narratives about sharing experience and learning from one another
across Rwanda, Africa and the world. Two female politicians in the book mention that they would like the ‘good work
being done by Rwandan women’ to be documented in order to ‘offer something to [their] sisters in Burundi and Congo’
(p. 2). In Part II, Hunt lists ten basic elements supporting women’s advancement in Rwanda with the hope of developing
a model for promoting women’s leadership globally. Meanwhile, Rwanda’s ‘good work’ cannot be seen in isolation from
the influence and emulation of other countries, such as Ivory Coast, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa (pp. 40, 141).
Globally, despite the oft-cited influence of the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women, Hunt gives prominence to the
Rwandan and Bosnian women at the conference who urged the UN to criminalise the use of rape as a weapon of war (p.
370)—a premise which was enshrined in the Security Council Resolution 1820 thirteen years later. Most notably, based
on her own positionality as a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Hunt suggests that US congresswomen
learn from their counterparts in Rwanda by encouraging women from their home districts to participate directly in the
electoral process and ‘make a difference’ (p. 360). Even though the author rightly acknowledges that Rwanda’s
success is not prescriptive, for Hunt the experience of Rwandan women remains nonetheless a vital example in the
pursuit of global security.

Another strength of this book is the author’s recognition that women’s leadership predates the genocide, for example
with the Queen Mother in the nineteenth century and the women’s movements of the 1980s. One participant in the book
recalled from her personal experience that the value of women’s political participation was in fact learnt from Ivory
Coast and Senegal in the 1980s (p. 40). This resonates with the author’s attempts to dismantle the common
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misunderstanding that women rose to power because men were killed or fled in the aftermath of the genocide against
the Tutsi (p. 13), which is the starting point for many outsiders’ conceptions of Rwanda. As such, this encourages
scholars of Rwanda to extend their research scope beyond the genocide against the Tutsi, which should be seen partly
as a legacy of colonialism.

Admittedly, women’s coming into leadership positions led the country’s redemption from despair and pessimism to
persistence and hope. Yet, considering the overarching theme of the book—women’s leadership and security—it fails
to include a discussion of the political settlement in Rwanda, a topic of paramount importance for Rwanda’s security
and peace and one that is subject to much academic debate. Moreover, a chance is missed to fill the gap on the
inclusion of women in Rwandan politics by investigating the marginalised groups of women who do not have access to
power, allowing us to understand better the effectiveness of gender policies. Despite these weaknesses, through well-
narrated local voices situated in Rwanda, this book is able to provide readers with detailed and fresh insights into how
Rwandan women participate in politics and influence policies aimed at peace promotion and nation reconstruction,
in turn encouraging us to advance further women’s leadership for the sake of global security.
Xianan Jin
SOAS, University of London