A few reflections on Michael Fairbanks' review of The Political Economy of Rwanda's Rise book

I felt compelled to write after reading Michael Fairbank’s thoughtful review of The Political Economy of Rwanda's Rise. First, thank you. It is one of the few reviews I have read that tries to understand Rwanda before rushing to explain it. That alone deserves recognition. I should also begin with two caveats. First, I am not a political economist. My training is in law, and I would not pretend otherwise. I have, however, spent enough time reading African political thought and working around public institutions to appreciate some of the debates surrounding state-building, development and governance. Second, I have not yet read Behuria's book itself. That puts me in no position to appraise the book directly, but rather I have reflected on Michael’s review of it. There are four observations I wish to make. 1. Rwanda's economic choices should not be read as political or ideological choices. One of Michael’s strongest observations is that economic decisions need not always conceal political intentions. I think this deserves even greater emphasis. There is a tendency in African political economy to assume that every economic decision is merely politics wearing economic clothes. That may sometimes be true. But sometimes a government simply makes the most practical decision available. Rwanda is a country with limited natural resources, scarce land and a still-growing domestic market. Under those conditions, choosing services over manufacturing, is less an ideological commitment than a response to structural realities. That is simply how small states survive. In fact, I struggle to see ideology as the organising principle of Rwanda's economy because Rwanda has spent years draining ideology from spaces where ideology would ordinarily be expected to flourish. Whether one looks at political representation, political organisation or public administration, the country's instinct has largely been to replace ideological mobilisation with practical statecraft. Rwanda increasingly behaves like a logical state before it behaves like an ideological one. If that has been true in the architecture of the state itself, it is difficult to believe that the economy—the most pragmatic domain of all—has somehow remained the last sanctuary of ideology. I am not even convinced that services over manufacturing accurately describes Rwanda's trajectory. Manufacturing has never been abandoned as though it were an ideological casualty. Rwanda has invested in it, experimented with it, revised its approach, attracted investors and continued trying to expand it. The same can be said of technology, industrialisation, value addition and other productive sectors. Some have moved faster than others, some have produced better results than others, but that is precisely what one would expect from a state constantly searching for what works. It is less a story of choosing one economic path over another than of testing several paths at once and allowing reality to decide which ones mature. 2. The search for an independent bourgeoisie imports a history that may not belong here. This is where I became less persuaded. From Michael’s review, Behuria appears to suggest that Rwanda is uneasy with the emergence of an independent bourgeoisie, fearing that economic autonomy would eventually translate into political autonomy and, ultimately, into a rival centre of power. I find that assumption analytically misplaced for Rwanda. Not because Rwanda lacks entrepreneurs or private capital, but because the argument appears to import a particular history of state–capital relations into a context that has neither necessarily inherited it nor shown signs of reproducing it. The image of a bourgeoisie developing independently of the state, gradually consolidating economic power before confronting political authority, belongs to a particular historical formation. It is largely a European story, later projected onto other societies as though it were the natural evolution of all capitalist economies. Mamdani cautions precisely against this habit of judging African societies by analogy rather than by their own historical formation. Sometimes theories travel further than the histories that produced them. More fundamentally, I am not persuaded that a developmental state should be presumed to fear the success of its own entrepreneurial class. That proposition itself deserves demonstration, not assumption. Why should the emergence of successful domestic capital necessarily be read as a political threat? Why is cooperation between state and capital treated as the exception, while antagonism is treated as the rule? Rwanda's economy, in any event, hardly lends itself to that classical picture. It remains remarkably fluid. Markets expand. Firms emerge faster. Domestic entrepreneurs grow alongside foreign investment, regional capital, state-linked enterprises and an increasingly vibrant start-up ecosystem. Capital is constantly changing hands, sectors evolve, new actors enter while others fade. The economic terrain is still being formed rather than inherited. Under those conditions, it is difficult to imagine the emergence of a settled and traditionalised bourgeoisie in the classical sense, let alone a state capable of identifying it as a coherent political adversary. The very fluidity of Rwanda's economy resists that kind of crystallisation. Its centres of capital are neither fixed nor socially consolidated; they are constantly being reshaped by new investment, new enterprises and new opportunities. The object that theory expects the state to fear never quite settles long enough to become that object. I therefore struggle to see why the state would organise its economic choices around the anticipation of a future class conflict. That seems less like an observation about Rwanda and more like the projection of a historical experience developed elsewhere. Perhaps the better question is not why Rwanda would fear an independent bourgeoisie. Perhaps it is whether we have become too comfortable assuming that every developing state must eventually relive the European history of class formation. 3. Loyalty is not the opposite of markets. The discussion of distrust, ethnicity and loyalists struck me as the weakest part of the framework. Markets function because people trust one another. Governments function because institutions trust those entrusted with implementing policy. Political organisations survive because members remain loyal to shared objectives. There is nothing uniquely Rwandan about this. To suggest that trust within political or economic institutions necessarily reflects fear of rival coalitions seems to stretch ordinary institutional behaviour into an unnecessarily elaborate political explanation. Ali Mazrui often criticised Africa's dependence on imported conceptual frameworks. Sometimes African states are described using vocabulary developed elsewhere while their own historical experiences receive little analytical weight. Rwanda cannot be understood without appreciating what happened in 1994. A state emerging from genocide will naturally place extraordinary emphasis on cohesion, institutional discipline and national trust. That should not surprise us. The more interesting question is whether these choices have produced stability, growth and capable institutions, not simply whether they resemble Western political expectations. 4. Rwanda deserves to be analysed on its own historical terms. Perhaps this is the larger point. Frantz Fanon warned us about judging newly independent African states solely by whether they reproduced European political forms. The deeper question was always whether they transformed the material conditions of their people. Likewise, Mamdani reminds us that African states possess distinct historical trajectories that deserve independent analysis rather than comparison by default. That is why I found Michael’s concluding observation the most compelling: “What shaped Rwanda's path was calculation under hard constraints rather than ideological or ethnic preference.” I would go one step further. The greatest challenge for scholarship on Rwanda is not whether it praises or criticises the country. Serious criticism is healthy and necessary. The challenge is resisting the temptation to explain every policy through a single organising narrative. Rwanda has become many things at once: a post-genocide state, a developmental state, a security-conscious state, a small state with limited natural resources, an ambitious state and, at times, an experimental state. None of these alone explains Rwanda. Together, they begin to. Perhaps the real lesson is that Rwanda is no longer merely testing existing theories of African political economy. It may be testing whether those theories themselves require revision. The writer is the Chief Technical Advisor at the Ministry of Justice.

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A few reflections on Michael Fairbanks' review of The Political Economy of Rwanda's Rise book