The Credibility Of Fieldwork In Scholarly Literature

As this section illustrates, the scholarly material on Rwanda is divisive and challenging for new researchers. A constant theme during the research for this dissertation was being reflective in comprehending my own positionality within fieldwork as well as in the scholarly debate. My own perceptions of the credibility of the academic material held two central beliefs: the importance of respecting other scholarly materially that constructively progressed the debate and of fieldwork generated data. The first was a relatively comprehensive respect for others who have written on Rwanda. Whether I agreed with their conclusion was not important in my mind, but rather what was important was what new questions or insights that their materials introduced

This stemmed from my belief on the importance of fieldwork. There appears to be a deficit of detailed fieldwork by some well-known scholars and researchers in their discussion on Rwanda’s political development. An example of this challenge is the previously mentioned discussion of Reyntjens’ lack of fieldwork in his book on Rwanda’s governance and political development since the 1994 genocide. This is seen by myself as problematic as research is done from afar or with minimal fieldwork experience. Thus, it is more likely that research will begin not from experiences and data generated by the research site, but building upon pre-established conclusions and assumptions. With the current polarised environment of Rwandan studies, this is especially problematic as it can be easier to agree with established notions without the proper fieldwork data to support them. This appears to follow closely with General Nzabamwita and other informants’ critique about foreign-based

It was not my desire to make political assessments and conclusions of Rwandan foreign policy as the research focuses on perceptions and beliefs held by actors responsible for the state’s foreign policy. Rather, I wished for the informants to comment and say what they believed as I found this largely absent within the current body of literature on Rwandan foreign policy. This chapter discusses of how I was able to connect with informants through multiple means with an emphasis on snowballing method. This level of access was only possible as I spent multiple months in Rwanda on repeat visits. These visits provided me access to my informants to ask them questions of changing realities. For instance in Chapter Four, discusses the strategic security threat that Tanzania posed to Rwandan officials in 2013-2014. However, tensions between the two countries cooled with greater diplomatic and peaceful relations thriving. The repeat visits benefited my research on this topic as I was able to ask many of the same informants in 2016, whom I interviewed in 2014, on the new relationship with Tanzania. While I did use theoretical tools to examine prior and current relations, I adamantly focused my research on providing a conduit for Rwandan elites within the government, military and greater society to voice their opinions and