Land dispossession as continuum of violence: women’s political agency in post-genocide Rwanda

Abstract

The article investigates how gender and class shape women’s political empowerment in post-genocide Rwanda, where access to land creates gendered networks for women to exercise their political agency in the community, market, and state. It argues, based on interviews with Rwandan women, that after the genocide elite women with access to land obtained opportunities to participate in collective political activities that were denied to landless women who were more preoccupied with their daily struggles to survive. It calls for an intersectional examination of class within the continuum of violence against women in the aftermath of conflicts.