Different Pitches, Different Possibilities: Football and Peacebuilding in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Different Pitches, Different Possibilities: Football and Peacebuilding in Post-Genocide Rwanda Kigali, Rwanda - Male and female players discuss women‟s rights after a Football Amahoro match at Esperance Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford Candidate Number: 293856 Word Count: 14,954 June 5, 2015 0 Table of Contents Introduction 4 I. Background 6 1.1 Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Settings 6 1.1.a Hybrid Approaches to Peacebuilding: A return to tradition? 8 1.2 Sport for Peace in Post-Conflict Settings 10 1.2.a Football for Social Change in Post-Conflict Settings 11 1.2.b FIFA and Football for Hope 13 1.3 Why Rwanda 13 II. Methodologies and Ethics 17 2.1 Methodologies 17 2.2 Ethics 19 III. Football as a Method for Peacebuilding 20 3.1 The Values of Football: from the pitch to the household 22 3.2 The Football Pitch as an Open Setting 25 IV. Football and Unity: the case of Esperance 30 4.1 “We are all Rwandans” – on the pitch, too 31 4.1.a The Government 32 4.1.b ‘Football for Social Change’ Organizations 35 4.2. Esperance in 1996: promoting unity in the face of trauma 39 V. Gender Transformation through Football 42 5.1 “Women Are Not Supposed to Play Football” 44 1 5.1.a The Government 45 5.1.b ‘Football for Social Change’ Organizations 47 5.1.c Felicite and AKWOS 48 5.2 Which Spaces Actually Produce Female Empowerment? 49 VI. Conclusion 53 2 Acronyms AKWOS: Association of Kigali Women in Sports DTA: Dream Team Academy FERWAFA: Fédération Rwandaise de Football Association FIFA: Fédération Intérnationale de Football Association FSCOs: Football for Social Change Organizations NGO: Non-governmental Organization NURC: National Unity and Reconciliation Commission OTI: Office of Transition Initiatives PfH: Play for Hope RPF: Rwandan Patriotic Front SDP: Sport for Development and Peace SSF: Saracens Sport Foundation UN: United Nations USAID: United States Agency for International Development 3 “Just after the genocide against the Tutsi, people were hidden. We didn‟t know where our loved ones were. But when we had the first football game in Amahoro Stadium, the people came running. In those seats, people came out of hiding and realized who was still alive, who had passed away. It was very difficult, but we were there to watch a football game – 25,000 people together cheering for the national team. In that moment, we couldn‟t say „this is who, this is who, this is who‟. That is the power of football. Football creates unity.” - Jean, Ministry of Sports & Culture, 3/26/15 Introduction Since the turn of the century, sport for development and peace (SDP) initiatives have exploded onto the peacebuilding stage. International institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), major corporations, and many famous professional sportspersons have championed SDP as a mechanism for collaboration and cooperation amongst divided groups in post-conflict settings. Indeed, hundreds of new SDP initiatives have surfaced over the past 15 years, and in 2001, the United Nations (UN) created the UN Office of Sport for Development and Peace. SDP has been invested with great expectation and power, not only through its growth in numbers but also the rhetoric that accompanies it. Framed as a way to inspire communities and change lives, SDP has developed an almost mystical aura, one fueled by Nelson Mandela‟s famous declaration: “Sport has the power to change the world…it has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair” (Mandela, 2000). While SDP has grown at an unprecedented rate and subsequently become a major component of peacebuilding, little has been done to critically evaluate the new programs. The scholarship that supports SDP posits that sport bridges differences and promotes interaction in 4 a way that little else does. But these propositions are weakly conceptualized, and they fuel a lofty, romanticized discourse that characterizes the SDP community. In this dissertation, I seek to complicate and nuance these surface-level analyses. Instead of accepting the general statement that sport positively affects young people‟s lives, I aim to theorize how sport might actually influence one‟s sensibilities in a post-conflict setting, and observe whether this indeed takes place on the ground. My investigation into the power of sport concentrates on football, the most popular sport in the world. Specifically, it examines football‟s role in Rwanda‟s peacebuilding process, paying special attention to a Rwandan „football for social change‟ organization called Esperance. In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government „illegalized‟ ethnicity and created a number of events, conferences, and transitional justice institutions to promote peace. A few years later, football-based initiatives were developed as alternatives to institutional peacebuilding methods. This dissertation examines how those football initiatives have affected Rwanda‟s peacebuilding process, focusing on two key components of peacebuilding: unity1 and gender equality2. The SDP community has conceptualized football as one activity that positively influences young people‟s lives. But there are different types of football – specifically, different types of pitches – and only certain ones have the potential to promote peace. Based on 22 interviews, a collection of oral histories, and participant observation, I have theorized two causal pathways through which football can influence one‟s sensibilities – the values of 1 Both „unity‟ and „gender equality‟ are used ambiguously in the literature. Unity is conceptualized here as the state of forming a complete and harmonious whole (Rigby, 2012; El-Battahani 2008, 1; Oxford English Dictionary, 2015). The promotion of unity entails creating a space for interaction so that barriers can be broken down between divided factions. 2 Gender equality is conceptualized as the state in which access to rights or opportunities is unaffected by gender (Ni Aolain et. al. 2011, 11; Bastick, 2008; Oxford English Dictionary, 2015). On the football pitch, this means women and men have the same access to the pitch, women and men can play together, and women can aspire to professional and national levels in the same way as men (English 1978, 270). 5 football and the football pitch as an open setting. When the values of football are reinforced through post-match discussion, and when the football pitch is used to create an open setting for debate about sensitive issues, football has the potential to promote peace. The key takeaway, then, is that the type of space in which football is played determines whether the sport can contribute to peacebuilding in Rwanda and post-conflict settings more generally. 1. Background The key question that has motivated this dissertation is whether football can serve as an alternative to institutional peacebuilding methods in post-genocide Rwanda. This research speaks to a growing academic literature that investigates the effect of football on peacebuilding in post-conflict African states. In this section, I review some of the seminal contributions to this research program and the central debates that have emerged. The section is divided into three parts. First, I provide a brief overview of the peacebuilding literature, describing how peacebuilding has evolved from institutional approaches to hybrid methods. Second, I explain how sport has become a major component of peacebuilding in post-conflict settings. Specifically, I show how the rise of „football for social change‟ initiatives has developed out of the SDP movement. Third, I explain why Rwanda provides the ideal location to address questions about the „football for social change‟ movement‟s impact on peacebuilding in post-conflict settings. 1.1 Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Settings Peacebuilding became an official part of the development apparatus‟s discourse in 1992 (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). Since then, it has generally been understood as an attempt to “promote sustainable peace by addressing the root causes of violent conflict and supporting indigenous capacities for peace management and conflict resolution” (UN, 2015a). Over the 6 past 20 years, key players in development have created new offices to promote peacebuilding in post-conflict states. These offices, such as USAID‟s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), have focused primarily on institutional barriers to peace and reconciliation3, providing funding for “key political transition and stabilization needs” such as “security, economic recovery, good governance, and infrastructure” (OTI, 2014; McCandless 2008, 1). This funding has produced a proliferation of peacebuilding projects aimed at supporting local civil societies. Stabilization mechanisms such as „disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration‟ projects, peacekeeping forces, and power-sharing agreements have been accompanied by transitional justice mechanisms such as truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal tribunals (Hanson, 2007; McCandless 2008, 4; Akhavan, 1996; Mukherjee, 2006). Despite their widespread use, these peacebuilding initiatives have had mixed results, mostly because there has been a “chronic inability of international actors to adapt their assistance to the political dynamics of war-torn societies” (Tshirgi 2004, 1; Pouligny, 2005; Success in Peacekeeping, 2015; Boyce, 2004). Ultimately, most scholars

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