1. I would like to thank Dan Stone for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. By and large, the arguments in this essay are drawn, in part, from S. Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
2. For other, first-rate reviews on recent Rwandan historiography or the historiography of the region, see T. Longman, ‘Placing Genocide in Context: Research Priorities for the Rwandan Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 1 (2004), 29–45.
3. C. Young, ‘The Heart of the African Conflict Zone: Democratization, Ethnicity, Civil Conflict, and the Great Lakes Crisis’, Annual Review of Political Science, 9 (2006), 301–28.
4. There are many examples of this. For one typical and telling example, see the exchange quoted in S. Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 355–6.
5. For examples of scholars and commentators citing state ‘collapse’ or ‘failure’, see E. Sciolino, ‘For West, Rwanda Is Not Worth the Political Candle’, The New York Times (15 April 1994)