PCON invites you to an event to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.Marie-Eve Desrosiers will give a lecture titled, "Authoritarian Strategies and Prospects: Lessons from Pre-Genocide Rwanda." Rwanda is associated with one of the worst episodes of mass state violence in the last century: the genocide that swept it in 1994. It is also associated with images of extensive state control and citizen compliance before and during the genocide. As a result, and especially because of the rare scale of violence it experienced, Rwanda is often portrayed as an exceptional case, and so are the authoritarian governments at its helm prior to 1994. Yet, the authoritarian strategies they developed and employed are part of a known authoritarian playbook. In this presentation based on her new book, Marie-Eve Desrosiers explores the political trends of the First and Second Rwandan Republics to show how, contrary to assumptions about control and compliance, pre-genocide Rwandan authorities never achieved authoritarian control. It is, however, their imperfect strategies to achieve it that led them to harsher authoritarianism, and ultimately towards the extreme state violence that the country experienced. What a focus on pre-genocide Rwanda shows is that, over the course of their time in power, authoritarian governments often end up creating more challenges than they succeed in managing, which can lead them to adapt, but also to decay.Marie-Eve Desrosiers holds the Research Chair in International Francophonie on political aspirations and movements in Francophone Africa. She is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA). She specialises in security and governance issues. More specifically, she studies political crises and conflicts, authoritarianism, political mobilization, and the relationship between state and society in the Great Lakes and Francophone Africa. She is also interested in foreign policy and international aid. She is the author of Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press). Her research has also been published in journals such as African Affairs, Comparative Politics, Ethnopolitics, and the Journal of International Relations and Development Studies.Cosponsored by Africana & Latin American Studies program, Core Communities, International Relations program, and the University Studies Division.