Peaceful Selves

<ul> <li> With its focus on personhood and self-making it investigates gaps in understanding left behind by dominant frameworks for analyzing life in post-conflict societies such as reconciliation justice and commemoration politics</li> <li> The argument is built around fundamental tensions in Rwandan configurations of personhood which provides a novel entry point for thinking about how violent pasts make themselves felt in the present</li> <li> It focuses on urban dwellers outside the Rwandan capital – a largely unstudied population – to build analysis of how state-society relations are never just a matter of domination-resistance or domination-compliance but rather how both state projects and ordinary people are caught in irresolvable tensions around what modern selves and modern nationhood ought to look like.</li> <li> It is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade</li></ul>