Training for model citizenship: An ethnography of civic education and state-making in Rwanda

Abstract

This book provides an ethnography of a state-run civic education program based in a local neighborhood in Rwanda. In 2007, the Rwandan government launched a nationwide program, called Itorero, to teach all inhabitants about its vision of the model Rwandan citizen. Today, this ideal is pursued through remote training camps, village assemblies, and everyday forms of government. Based on ethnographic research of the life and workings of Itorero camps and the daily government of a local neighborhood in Kigali, this book asks how such a pursuit has come to affect Rwandans’ relation to the state and what it may tell us about modern forms of authoritarian rule.