Abstract
Compared to other forms of encampment, contemporary re-education camps do not draw much comparative work in sociology and politics. Even less is known about the governance of such camps, and the ways in which unique spatial aspects of encampment are meant to facilitate the intended social and ideological transformation which is their hallmark. Taking post-genocide Rwanda’s uniquely widespread system of ingando “solidarity” camps as its case study, this article argues that three aspects of spatial governance in particular—separation, (hyper)structure, and staging—are central to the modus operandi of re-education camp as a technology of transformative power. The ingando system was born amid a crisis of citizenship in the wake of mass atrocity and shaped by a rebel-turned-ruler elite aiming to reconstruct citizenship sifted through the lens of glorified militarism. The ingando camps are not only about learning together, but their remoteness is meant to unsettle, their structure is meant to foster discipline, and their staging and experiential aspects are meant to simulate values of unity as cohesion and submission to a broader goal.
Introduction
While scholarship on refugee camps and Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps has expanded profoundly in the past decades, re-education camps do not draw much comparative work in sociology and politics. Even less is known about the governance of such camps, and the ways in which unique spatial aspects of encampment are meant to facilitate the intended social and ideological transformation which is the hallmark of these camps. Is the space–time of encampment governing similarly or differently from other types of camps such as refugee camps? The article argues that indeed re-education camps are unique as a spatial governance form, in the ways in which they purposefully deploy spatial aspects of encampment in harnessing the attempted social transformation in their participants. This article will argue and show how three aspects of spatial governance in particular—separation, hyperstructure, and staging—are central to the modus operandi of re-education camp as a technology of transformative power. Separation means not only remoteness and physical distance, but really the removal from the ordinary and thus the creation of a space of liminality and simulation of a rite of passage—one is taken away, only to be returned a different person. The prefix hyper- in structure is meant to highlight the minute ordering of space and time within the camps—as such, it is a heightened state of structure, which itself is meant to govern the being in the camp and its intended transformations. Finally, the re-education camp is not only a space of gathering and concentration but it is fundamentally a stage—a space of rehearsing alternative socio-political orders through simulation and role-play. Altogether, and in contrast to refugee or transit camps, re-education camps harness separation, concentration, and structuring of time–space for an intense process of particular inclusion into the new socio-political order, in the case of Rwanda a post-genocide order focused on national and state reconstruction sifted through ideals of glorified militarism.
The language of re-education and rehabilitation has a long history, with origins in imperial projects, civilizing missions and imperatives of control in colonies (Aresin and Gerund, 2024) and later associated with post-war pacification, occupation, and unifications projects, both by the victors of the World War II and later regimes on both sides of the Cold War. As a term, it has been deeply politicized, and cannot be taken at face value—it is a “language of both obfuscation and legitimation” (Carruthers, 2024: 271). It is important to note here that the remit of this study is camps where re-education is the core element of the camp, even if other activities such as military training are present. This contrasts with camps “performatively named” (Nguyễn, 2021: 357) and often euphemistically labeled as re-education camps, which in fact are labor camps or internment camps first and foremost, such as the trại học tập cải tạo camps in Vietnam after the war (Nguyễn, 2021). Even if the privations of internment and harshness of hard labor are intended as ways of indoctrination, we must recognize the differences in the nature and hence governance modalities of these camps. The ingando camps discussed here are intended first and foremost a pedagogical and socialization project, not a punitive dispositive. In contrast, Soviet, Vietnamese, and Chinese camps, among others, have combined hard labor, punitive measures, and punishment as a key aspect of the camps and hence where neat distinctions between mental and physical “remaking” of subjects breaks down (Carruthers, 2024).
Rwanda presents a unique contemporary case study of the political education camp and its governance. Re-education camps as attempts to “‘remake’ subject peoples” (Carruthers, 2024) have been deployed intensely over the course of the past century from post-war occupied Germany (Carruthers, 2024; Fay, 2008; Hilger, 2005) to USSR (Hardy, 2016), China (Leibold, 2022; Raza, 2019; Zenz, 2019), Vietnam (Nguyễn, 2021), as well as a number of African countries including British-ruled Kenya (Anderson, 2005; Elkins, 2005), post-independence Mozambique (Machava, 2018), and Uganda (Reuss, 2020). Nonetheless, arguably post-genocide Rwanda stands out as a particularly intense case of post-Cold War re-education, where we see intense and mass use of camping in the wake of devastating violence of genocide in an attempt aiming at pacification, state reconstruction, and nation-building. Rwanda’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) party has taken inspiration from both its wartime deployment of political education and from its exile experience as a rebel group formed in neighboring Uganda. The RPF was inspired by Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), which used political education first to mobilize populations during its own armed struggle and then during peacetime for political alignment (Purdekova, 2015). Uganda’s Mchaka Mchaka military and civic education camps were thus a direct predecessor and a model for ingando and do resemble them in terms of structure and aims (see Purdekova, 2015; Reuss, 2020). In both contexts of wartime and peacetime camp use, however, the scale has been far smaller than in the post-genocide period in Rwanda (1994–present).
The ingando project has to be seen against the broader unity-building project commenced by the RPF elite in the wake of the genocide—an ambitious and radical transformation meant as a rupture from prior organization of society along ethnic lines (Ansoms, 2009; Author, 2015; Straus and Waldorf, 2011). The aim was to establish a New Rwanda and a New Rwandan citizen (see Desrosiers and Thomson, 2011)—an “exemplary citizen” (Ansoms and Cioffo, 2017), a “perfect developmental subject” (Purdekova, 2012) aligned with the political, social, and developmental vision of the RPF-led government. The program of camp-based “civic education” was thus firmly set within this agenda of reshaping the Rwandan citizen and their mindset. The ingando was meant as a laboratory of the ideal citizen (Purdekova, 2011, 2012, 2015), as “training for model citizenship” (Sundberg, 2016). Within this broader context, two key dynamics gave shape to both the unity-building project and the camps—glorified militarism as an inspiration for the subjectification of unity, and rejection of “divisionist” ideologies.
First, the RPF have been victors in the civil war and ended the genocide of the Tutsi in July 1994, self-styling their take-over as liberation. They captured power and quickly came to dominate political space. The rebels-turned-rulers also embarked on a massive transformation of society, seeped in glorified militarism, drawing not only on romanticized memory of their own struggle but also longer historical memories of the Nyiginya kingdom and its own militaristic character. What resulted was a deep militarization of society (Author et al., 2018) whereby military ethos and values came to be applied to the social transformation agenda, including to the needs of reintegration, re-orientation of minds (away from the continuing threat of genocide ideology and “divisionism”) and the nation-building agenda. The ingando political education camps came too to be inspired by and, as we will see, permeated by this glorified militarism.
The second reason for the extent of camp use was the unprecedented task at hand—the nature of the devastating atrocity committed in Rwanda and its equally devastating aftermath. The genocide did not only result in mass civilian casualties, but also involved mass participation of ordinary citizens in the violence (see Kimonyo, 2008; Straus, 2006 [2004]). As a result, the new government saw as its key task the removal of “genocide ideologies” (Burnet, 2023; Longman, 2017; Thomson, 2018) and building of a unified Rwandan nation (see Purdekova, 2008, 2015). More broadly, the task was to fundamentally change the Rwandan “mindset.” To match the staggering challenges of post-genocide transition—a society powerfully divided by the genocide, mass return migrations into the country, and a new political elite struggling to establish hegemony among a population it distrusted and it was distrusted by—the government decided for a scaled-up, long-term program of camps-based education.
The government tailored ingando camps to a variety of groups, from returnees, demobilized soldiers, university entrants, teachers, civil servants, but also street children, or simply rural youth. In terms of targeting, the government focused mainly on two core social groups: First, it targeted those it perceived as in need of re-integration and reorientation, such as returnees, former combatants and prisoners, but also street children or sex workers (the latter two perceived as in need of “resocialisation”). Second, it focused on current and future elites, including university entrants, public servants, and teachers. Dozens of ingando camps have been established around the country in the 1990s and remain a feature of Rwanda’s educational landscape to this day.
In 2009, the camps were accompanied by another, parallel program of itorero ry’igihugu (itorero in short), with similar content but now decentralized in local communities, at village (imidugudu) level (Sundberg, 2016). Just like ingando, itorero training is classed as “civic education” and includes military and physical training, and cultural activities meant to imbue a sense of “Rwandanicity,” unity and patriotism. It claims to be inspired in pre-colonial monarchic court traditions, but the content is very focused on RPF policies and vision of the country and students wear military uniforms, again indexing the RPF rebel past.
But how is the intended socio-political transformation governed in the ingando camps? The article follows the key insight that camps are not just a collection of actors, institutions, and activities; they are also a mode of organizing space and time that governs activity and being in the camp. In the strategic liminalities of Rwanda’s ingando re-education camps (Author, 2015), space and time are intentionally deployed to structure experience and simulation of new political roles in the wake of mass atrocity. In this article, I am not looking at the tangle of actors that make up camp governance but rather at aspects of space―time— separation and the liminal space created when one is taken out of the flow of the ordinary, structure and the hierarchies that govern the camps, and finally staging and simulation as the performance of particular roles and worldviews in the camps— that together govern the desired “learning” in the re-education camp. The organizers thus harness “being in the camp” through regimenting time and space in particular ways, using encampment as such through the dynamics of rite of passage, role-play and hyper-structuring that it offers. All in all, ingando camps represent temporary heterotopias of transition, collective rites of passage to an idealized post-genocide order.
The article draws on a variety of primary and secondary sources, including visits to ingando camps. Getting research access to sensitive spaces in Rwanda has always been difficult and is increasingly so. In the past 5 to 10 years, nonetheless, it has become virtually impossible to gain access for researchers to the space of these camps, and many have desisted from trying in the first place because of the risk involved and perceived low approval rate of sensitive research projects by the state.
Between 2008 and 2009, I have been granted access to six different ingando camps, some of which I visited repeatedly. Most of my observations relate to the following camps: The Nkumba ingando camp for high school leavers in the Northern province, which I visited 4 times and which features as one of the case studies here, an ingando camp for street children in Rwamagana that also features in this analysis, two camps for ex-combatants in Mutobo and Lake Muhazi, the latter of which also features in the analysis, a TIG labor camp for former prisoners, and an ingando for Adventist youth organized by the church in the Eastern province. Here, it is worth noting that TIG—Travaux d’Interet General are in fact “public work” camps where former genocidaires spend time doing manual labor as part of their criminal sentence. These are makeshift camps set up in areas where work needs to be undertaken. While they do also include civic education lessons and share other characteristics with ingando, they are certainly an outlier as the other camps are first and foremost about civic education and reintegration.
Besides visits to camps, I have also gathered primary materials relating to the camps such as timetables, gray literature and reports, photos and video footage. I have also closely observed the work of Rwanda’s National Reconciliation and Unity Commission (NURC) for more than 4 months—a key institution that coordinated all civic education and the ingando camps program. Furthermore, I have conducted more than 150 interviews in Rwanda with a variety of actors, from ingando participants to organizers, policy-makers, nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers, and ordinary Rwandans. I have also learned through informal interactions, immersion in daily life and observation, as well as through structured surveys that I have conducted in the camps and outside of them. Most of my data gathering happened in English or French. I had conversational ability in Kinyarwanda but needed help of translators for interviews. As discussed elsewhere, Rwanda is an authoritarian state where one needs to be attuned to the political context and make sure they are both assuring safety of informants and not inadvertently reproducing official discourse (Purdekova, 2015). To achieve this, I opted for long-term field research, focusing on developing understanding of context, local norms and building relationships and trust; I have also deployed more informal data gathering techniques, which often put informants more at ease and allow for less surveilled interaction.
Though I have discussed ingando camps in previous publications (Purdekova, 2015; Purdekova et al, 2018 Purdekova 2012), the focus has been on their role within the broader political project and nation-building aspirations of Rwanda. In other words, my political ethnography was focused on understanding the role of the camps in the post-genocide social and political project. The same can be said of other published literature on the ingando camps, which similarly focuses on the role of the camps in crafting Rwanda’s authoritarian governance and governmentality (see Mgbako, 2005; Thomson, 2011; Turner, 2014)—in short, indoctrination as a form of social control. The present paper is the first time when these camps’ significance is brought out more widely and beyond their immediate context, when they are theorized through the spatial governance lens and situated within broader theoretical and comparative literature on camps and encampment and specifically their spatial character. Our understanding of camp as a spatial form is still dominated by refugee and transit camps—here I tease out the parallels, but more importantly, the differences, whereby political education camps offer another glance on space of the camp as a technology of governance.
Camps in war–peace transitions: political education as state-building
The vast expansion of educational provision in Rwanda, especially the mass re-education project, must be seen against the context of conflict and mass violence and the nature of political transition. The project is a form of state-building and an attempt by elites to construct a new socio-political order where the old one becomes unviable and delegitimized through mass violence. In a recent article titled “Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Sys tems in an Era of State-Building,” Paglayan (2022) argues that “internal conflict is . . . an important and understudied driver of educational expansion.” Paglayan shows how autocrats expand public schooling after violence for the masses “not to appease them through redistribution, but to instill values of obedience and respect for the state’s authority.” While mass education has been studied through the lens of nation-building, Paglayan argues that it becomes a key aspect of state-building after violence.
Rwanda is no exception here in terms of both formal and informal schooling (Purdekova, 2015; Lovgren and Turner, 2018; Ndushabandi, 2015; Nzahabwanayo, 2018; Sundberg, 2016; Turner, 2014). Formal education has featured prominently in post-genocide transformation plans of the RPF-led government (King, 2014; Russell and Carter, 2019; Williams, 2017). In line with this, both school construction and enrollment have surged since 1994, though this has not translated into equal improvements in completion and educational quality (Williams, 2017). Researchers have shown how official schooling is key in reproducing official/dominant and government-sponsored narratives—on history (Bentrovato, 2016a, 2016b), and more broadly. As Bentrovato (2016b) writes, “Schools in post-genocide Rwanda have been a major vehicle of the official discourse” (p. 227). Through the lens of the history curriculum, she finds that “the aim of history teaching in Rwanda seems to be to promote young people’s uncritical assimilation of state-approved truth and the norms and values underlying it” (Bentrovato, 2016: 228). Russell and Carter (2019) find that citizenship discussion permeates the curricula with “focus on the importance of a patriotic and loyal citizen.”
In the wake of the 1994 genocide, the winning RPF regime has also embarked on a mass informal re-education campaign through ingando and later the itorero camps (Purdekova, 2015; Sundberg, 2016). Nation-building as “unity” of all Rwandans and re-learning of the history, culture, and customs was presented officially as the key goal of the camps but was in fact subsumed under the primary goal of state-building—political alignment first, and nation-building in line with and under the dominant interpretation. In fact, we can argue that informal “civic” education in ingando re-education camps became a pressing state-building tool, focused squarely on inscription of a new form of belonging and duties of membership in the post-genocide authoritarian state.
As mentioned earlier, in the wake of the genocide the Rwanda ruling elite saw rapid and mass “reorientation” of minds—away from genocide ideology and divisionism and toward unity—as a priority and established a large network of camps for this purpose. Since the inception, the impetus has been to erase “genocide ideology” and to harness RPF accent on unity as Rwandanicity and the abandonment of ethnicity (Purdekova and Mwambari 2022, Purdekova 2015). The importance of this has been seen, for example, in the accent on re-educating teachers amid what was seen as the lingering effects of “genocide ideology” in schools. Re-educating the educators has been a priority. Political alignment was key for stability, policy alignment for the effectiveness of the ambitious socio-economic transformation.
Though ingando organizers made appeals to the institution’s ancient, pre-colonial pedigree and hence a form of nation-building as return to pre-colonial “unity”—the time before colonizers divided and racialized the Rwandan society—the re-education camps had in fact no precedent in Rwanda and, as highlighted earlier, must be traced to leftist rebel groups’ use of political education (Machava, 2018; Reuss, 2020). It was the pressure of establishing a new order rather than purely nation-building as a “return” to precolonial unity that led the new Rwandan government to quickly repurpose wartime political education inspired by left-wing Maoist ideas and practiced by guerrilla movements in Eastern Africa to peacetime (Purdekova, 2015). Pressured by an unprecedented task at hand, the Rwandan elite had similarly deployed camps to an unprecedented degree, as part of its wider ambitious social transformation agenda after the genocide (Straus and Waldorf, 2011).
Recent research on these post-conflict education systems set within an authoritarian regime reveals that ingando camps are indeed squarely about cultivation of political consent for the regime and its polities, and cultivation of character, virtues, and ethic aligned with this broader political goal. My own research describes this with regards to ingando, where I argue camps are additional platforms for reproduction of political power (Purdekova, 2015). Nzahabwanayo (2018) concurs with this and in reference to itorero argues that values education as practiced in Rwanda tends toward “cultivation of supportive behaviour towards the government in office. Its content focuses on understanding what the government wants and the crafting of dispositions required for the implementation of defined policies.”
These are the broader settings of governance within which ingando operates and for which it is a conduit. While we know the overall motivations and disposition of authoritarian-style learning about citizenship, we are yet to better understand the use of the camp itself. What is it about mass camping that is meant to harness learning and transformation, and how? In fact, as I will show, the ingando’s spatial aspects are key to governing the learning that happens in the camp and animating the types of roles that are meant to assure broader political order and alignment. In the present paper then, I want to look more closely on camp space itself and the way three core elements of encampment—those of separation, structure and simulation—govern the experience and formation of the desired learning via unsettling, discipline, and role simulation. The way in which camps have been used as unique spaces to facilitate alternative forms of learning—in this case how to be an ideal citizen in the “New Rwanda”—have been overlooked. In what follows, I will first present a theory of how space “governs” in a camp setting before then applying this to the Rwandan case.
Camps as spatial governance: how does space govern re-education?
Camps are quintessentially a “spatial practice” (Turner, 2016:141). At its heart, camp is a “modern spatial political technology” (Martin et al., 2020) of separating, segregating, and managing particular populations that first emerged in European colonies, then in Europe, before finally proliferating in the postcolony and across the world (Martin et al., 2020). The notion that governance of camps is crucially about the administration of both space (Ramadan, 2012) and time (Papoutsi, 2021) is well explored in the literature, but mostly in the context of refugee camps and transit centers, less so in terms of re-education camps. Martin et al.’s (2020) recent genealogical tracing of camp as a technology of power completely omits political/civic education, re-education, and reintegration camp as a unique form of encampment. As a result, the way in which re-education camps are a unique spatial technology—using common spatial aspects of encampment in very particular ways—remains under-theorized.
Separation and segregation can work to govern in very different ways. Encampment enables effective control over people and their mobility and thus governs to contain refugees, even if not completely successfully, with different levels of permeability in camps in evidence. Re-education camps, in contrast, are not first and foremost about containment of those “who do not belong” and threaten the national order of things (Malkki, 1995). Instead, they are about molding citizens, those who are members, so that they “belong better” and align with the needs and visions of the ruling elite. The spatial aspects of the camp used most intensely in governing this desired transformation are separation, concentration (as both being with others, and focus), hyperstructure, and role simulation.
A key lens of analysis has been that of a camp as a space of political abandonment (Agamben, 1998), exclusion from the polity, stuckness or lingering, with key references being refugee camps, detention camps, and extermination camps. This interpretation has drawn critique (Iazzolino, 2020; Oesch, 2017; Ramadan, 2012) as refugees and migrants more broadly found ways out of the camp and managed to foster varied forms of politics within and beyond the camp. Nonetheless, we could say that the institution of the camp was an attempt at a crude form of governance via control, concentration, and separation of populations, with different forms of pushback. The key aim has not been education and ideological goals, but rather management of bare life—whether its preservation and fostering as in the case of refugee camps, or its annihilation in the case of extermination camps.
In contrast, re-education camps are not a priori about political exclusion and bare life; their subjects are not construed as recipients of material, life-sustaining aid and assistance but quite the opposite—these camps are about intense political application and tending to ideological aspects of life. For example, the camps that serve as direct inspiration for Rwanda’s ingando—Chaka Mchaka political education courses in Uganda—promote partisan political ideology of the dominant party in power, the NRM, promote official history and patriotism infused with notions of NRM allegiance, historical materialism, alongside military training and demystification of the gun. The “re-education” camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China combine hard physical exercises with hours-long education classes on sanitized versions of Chinese history, communist ideology, Mandarin, and on how to be proper Chinese citizens (Raza, 2019). The camps includes oral and written tests, pledges of loyalty, pressured confessions, denouncing of former “beliefs,” culture, and “self-criticism.”
Regimes in power justify this intense application and enforced transformation-through-separation by pointing to fundamental security threats that need diffusing. They frame re-education camps as prevention of future violence . In Xinjiang, the official narrative is the need for “de-extremification” wrapped in the language of fight against terrorism and separatism. In Rwanda, official discourse points to the need of dismantling divisionism and genocide ideology, a project which is itself presented as a peacebuilding strategy and a requirement for non-recurrence of violence.
Re-education camps aim at purposeful experimentation with separation and passage, the structuring of time, and staging of identities on the inside of the state. Where refugee camps are extraterritorial and often represent a tangle of sovereign actors and hybrid governance (Ramadan, 2012), re-education camps are firmly on the territory and under the jurisdictional control of state actors. Such camps are the opposite of political abandonment and political exclusion inasmuch as they represent an intense application of focus and energy from the state. Rather than political exclusion then, these camps are about particular forms of political incorporation through an experiential learning of the desired citizen role (Purdekova, 2015; Sundberg, 2016). Rather than producing denizens and non-citizens (Minca, 2005), these camps are laboratories of particular forms of citizenship.
Hence, we see that similar aspects of separation, concentration, and the liminal are nonetheless put to work for different sets of objectives, producing different ways of “governing” the camp. The aspects of a camp that perform governance thus depend on the aims of the camp, and the contexts of its creation. Despite the differences between refugee and re-education camps, they do also share an overarching preoccupation with socio-political order and ordering—wherein refugees are seen as threats to the national order of things (Malkki, 1995), those in re-education camps are presented as potential threats to the national political order and as those that need to be aligned to uphold it. We will see this clearly in the case of Rwanda where different cohorts in camps play different roles as those potentially most threatening to the political order (for example, former genocidaires) or else those most important to reproduce the new political order (for example, entrants to universities as the future “elite”).
But this commonality extends very much to labor and internment camps labeled as re-education. In these camps too, the alignment with the dominant order is key. As mentioned above, in the network of Uyghur internment and re-education camps in China, the intended aim is also a transformation, self-critique, and production of “loyal Chinese subjects” (Raza, 2019) who disavow “terrorism” and “extreme ideologies” (Raza, 2019; Zenz, 2019). The aim is to “‘cleanse’ Xinjiang of the ‘three evil forces’ of terrorism, separatism and extremism” (Leibold, 2022). In Vietnam, “my father’s accounts of re-education camps,” writes Nguyễn (2021), “reveal how the deployment of forced confessions and hard labour were used as technologies of post-war indoctrination to alter the ‘thoughts and feelings’ of those imprisoned about the communist regime, to force a ‘one-ness with the new nation’ in this state of suspension between the old and new regime.” Inmates of camps had to first formally accept being “criminals” before becoming full citizens of the new state (Nguyễn, 2021). The problematique of belonging is thus central to both forms of camp—the space of the refugee camp is meant to govern non-belonging as in to maintain it, the re-education camp is too meant to govern non-belonging—potential and actual misalignments with the dominant ideology of the state—as in to transform it, via a variety of means.
Whereas refugee camps as spaces of non-belonging maintain and replicate a particular international socio-political order (Haddad, 2003), re-education camps are purposefully meant to transform the national socio-political order, to annihilate undesirable non-belonging whether in terms of ideology, identity or experience, and to align one and make them fit within a new order. This is certainly key to the re-education camps in Rwanda—in the wake of mass atrocity and upheaval, ingando camps are firmly set on political re-orientation and social transformation, to make thier participants a better fit with the “New Rwanda.”
Naturally, of this is not to say that political education camps necessarily succeed in their transofrmation and re-alignment goals. In socialist Mozambique, a vast network of re-education camps was established after the war and acts as an important predecessor to Rwanda’s ingando. The campos de reeducacao in socialist Mozambique too formed a widespread archipelago and revolved around an ideological accent on transforming its participants into “the new man and woman,” an “ambition to remold the people of Mozambique according to new moral aesthetics” (Machava, 2018: 8). But rather than focusing on nation-building, the camps focused on re-educating the “anti-social” elements or “pernicious elements of society” (Machava, 2018) such as sex workers. Despite the widespread deployment of such camps, Machava has argued that “while the leaders of a newly independent state in southern African envisioned the camps as sites of disciplinary pedagogy for the making of the new man and the new woman, in fact the camps were spaces of social abandonment” (Machava, 2018: 6). Machava does not attribute this failure to lack of intention or importance that the camps held in Mozambique, but rather “material constraints in which the camps operated. . . Without material and human resources to run the program, state officials compelled detainees to build their own detention facilities; to grow their own food; to carry out political education on their own; and in many ways, to watch over their own carceral regime” (Machava, 2018: 7). Machava thus ultimately reads the Mozambican camps along the lines of exclusion and abandonment, rather than inclusion.
As we will see, Rwanda has deployed political camping intensively with far more application, verve, and oversight and thus forms a unique point of comparison with other forms of encampment. The ingando are not solely focused on re-socializing, like in the case of Mozambique, but rather take a broad cross-section of society with the aim of re-learning how to relate to each other and the state. The camps are on the whole limited to weeks or months, with participants released back to normal life after.
Whereas the crude form of control and distribution through separation and concentration is what defines a refugee, IDP or transit camp, the political education camps in Rwanda experiment with temporal-spatial aspects of the camp in a more refined way. Here, the framework of “strategic liminalities” and purposeful “states of suspension” is useful. Liminality as a dynamic concept has been rediscovered in social sciences only recently (see Neumann, 2012). Camps are a liminal space par excellence—a space of “in-between,” a rite of passage from one state to another (Neumann, 2012; Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960). But the camps we look at here are unique in their strategic uses of liminal space. “As a threshold situation, liminality is also a vital moment of creativity, a potential platform for renewing the societal make-up” (Malksoo, 2012). Indeed, as we will see, ingando camps are both spaces of social experimentation and where space itself governs transformation. The ingando camps are interesting as they purposefully use liminality as separation from the mundane, an experimental social destructuring where all enter a new hyper-structured environment different from their daily life with time and space organized in new but firm and intricate ways. Importantly, whereas liminality too is a defining characteristic of refugee camps, and people therein are also placed in new forms of organization of space–time and can be asked to play new roles, these are by-products of the main raison d-etre of the camps, which is control over movement. Ingando, in contrast, are stylized collective rites of passage, where liminalities are strategically constructed to govern a desired social transformation.
But the participants in ingando are not only placed in a liminal space aimed at harnessing transformation. They also partake in simulation whereby new roles are being staged and experienced. The closest concept capturing this form of spatial governance is Foucault’s (1967) concept of heterotopia as described in his text “Les Espaces Autres’/Of Other Spaces.” Ingando camps try to model and simulate ideal(ized) places on the outside—the citizenship in the “New Rwanda.” Ingando are stylized social worlds outside of the social world that are nonetheless meant as necessary rites of transition into the latter (and in this sense somewhat in parallel to other heterotopias, such as prisons, or boarding schools). In Rwanda, the camps are also meant to be reflections and enactions of another world/life that is possible. Just like the mirror is a non-place of verisimilitude—reflecting ourselves perfectly, the way we are—ingando camps are more complex and contrasting heterotopias of a real place reflecting us as we “could be” and importantly, “should be”—in the eyes of the organizers, and more broadly, in the eyes of the government that oversees the program.
Ingando camps in post-genocide Rwanda come close to the very original meaning of camp, from Latin campus, meaning “‘open field, level space’ . . . originally associated with open spaces for military exercise, defined spatially as a field that is set apart from other space.” The RPF guerrilla encampments on which some of these camps were modeled were too separations from the prior everyday life, and a struggle to attain a new form of order through military confrontation with the previous regime. Indeed, ingando are imbued with the military ethos of a training camp, from physical exercise to the military hierarchy, and strict form of address, behavior, and uniform/ity. They draw on both deeper pre-colonial history of monarchical military regiments of itorero and their own training and model behavior codes (intore) and more recent history, in the form of the RPF guerrilla struggle, venerated by its members as a time of purpose and unity, a model of self-sacrifice around which to model post-genocide citizenship. The three spatial dynamics become key when the military model is sifted into political education—separation as a necessity to get away to reflect and change; hyper-structure resembling highly-venerated military values of hierarchy, order, and discipline; and stylized simulations of desired roles and orders such as simulating a military encampment to experience particular forms of collectivity and “unity”—whether unity as membership of a larger social whole, or unity as alignment with broader political goals.
Camp as a separation: liminality, passage, and transition
In the post-genocide transition period, the Rwandan government has embarked on an ambitious project of social transformation—aiming to build a unified Rwandan nation in the wake of a devastating and divisive genocide. The mass use of camping has to be seen against this backdrop—as a technology of separation from the mundane, immersion in a liminal space of unfamiliar routines, and hence an attempted collective rite of passage, a catalyst of desired change. How does this form of transitory spatiality govern? It is meant to govern through separation and unsettling, the sharpening of focus, and through the resultant catalysis of desired transformation.
The Iwawa island ingando camp might be the extreme example of separation (Lovgren and Turner, 2018)—a camp set on an island in the middle of lake Kivu for youth the government labels “delinquent.” Just as in other ingando camps, “Iwawa attempts to transform young men in the margins of Rwandan society into disciplined, patriotic citizens” (Lovgren and Turner, 2018: 28). One of the participants conceptualizes being in the camp not as Agambenian abandonment, but rather a form of intense application—a “disciplining practice” (Lovgren and Turner, 2018: 28). The separation is not only enhanced through the body of water surrounding the island, but also the wilderness that surrounds the camp. Though Turner and Lovgren do not focus on spatiality itself, it is clear from their ethnographic descriptions that this extreme form of separation is what is meant to govern the being in the camp.
It is indeed the remoteness that creates separation, rather than fences or barbed wire. In socialist Mozambique’s experimentation with re-education camps, a similar dynamics could be observed: Re-education camps had no fence, no watch tower, and few armed guards. Authorities assumed that the remote location of the camps— often in the middle of the forest to which inmates were transported in the dark cover of the night—was enough to curb escapes. (Machava, 2018:15)
The same holds for many of the ingando camps that I visited and observed—these were invariably located far from the participant’s own homes and typically in remote locations.
The Adventist makeshift ingando camp in eastern Rwanda was put together in sparsely inhabited Akagera area, among gently rolling hills, close to the border with Tanzania. The government-organized Nkumba camp for high school leavers is located in a remote area of Northern Rwanda, and surrounded by lake on one side, and foothills of mountains and sprawling palm plantations on the other. The Lake Muhazi ingando camp for child ex-combatants is miles away from the main road and located at the shores of the lake. Few camps I visited had any fences or barbed wire surrounding them. It was the distance and remoteness that worked to separate, confine, and govern being in the camp. As one camp organizer explained, the remoteness is used to “avoid distraction . . . to settle their mind.” 1 In this sense, ingando contrasted with the materiality of refugee camps, which, though permeable, typically include the physical architecture of perimeter confinement.
But remoteness—physical and experiential—and, by extension, concentration was also achieved through the break of contact with the outside. In the ingando camp for high school leavers in Nkumba, the kos (form of collective address referring to the sum of the participants) had their cell phones collected at entry, preventing “connection” with home and with the familiar. Highly symbolic acts were another way to establish a sense of break and separation. In an ingando for street children in Rwamagana, an organizer confided that they have a bonfire where they symbolically burn the kids’ old clothes, before giving them new ones: “When they come, we burn all their old tattered clothes, you know there are even animals that live in the clothes and bite them.” 2 This act is meant to symbolize a new start, their “re-orientation” and the beginning of resocialization: “They were no one and now they can be someone,” the camp organizer explains. 3
The Nkumba ingando for “elite” youth might not destroy the vestiges of old life in the form of their clothes, but it does oblige students to undress and change into khaki military uniforms at their arrival. In this manner, it both effectuates separation and transition into a new form of immersive experience—enaction of military worldview with accent on uniformity, discipline, and hierarchies, as explored further in the sections below.
Besides remoteness, lack of contact, and symbolic acts of change, separation is also attempted through unsettling—the immersion in the unfamiliar. The nature of ingando experience is meant to contrast starkly with the structure of ordinary experience back “home.” The aim is to create an unfamiliar space to contend with but also a starkly different space. Depending on the group targeted, the “unfamiliar” can of course look very different. Whereas students and civil servants were taken to remote camps to experience the “hardships” of soldierly life, mimicking strict discipline, physical exercise, and simple living standards of a liberation movement/rebel group, the ingando for street children was shaped very differently. The two hundred or so street children were housed in the city of Rwamagana, within a conference and guest-house complex set-up and run by the women of the AVEGA association with parallel events happening still at the sidelines of the ingando itself. The experience of living at the housing complex was—purposefully—worlds away from the hardship of street life. This was a life of luxury in comparison, and as such, it was an instrumentalized showcase of a “different life” that is possible upon resocialization, an inducement into the transformation attempted. While teachers, civil servants, and university entrants as the current and future elite of Rwanda were eating rice and beans on a daily basis in Nkumba ingando, the street children in Rwamagana were eating buffet lunches and sipping on Fanta in their own ingando camp. In these contrasting examples, we can see just how purposefully the space of the camp was shaped and manicured in order for it to govern appropriately—carefully crafting “unfamiliarities” and experiencing dislocations for each particular group in an attempt to harness the intended transformation. In both cases, space was crafted and governed to be instructive, here through separation.
Camp as a structure: discipline and organization of space–time
Besides separation—itself achieved through numerous spatial strategies as seen above- the governance of and through space includes hyper-structuring—careful, minute organization of space, time, and role hierarchy. These spatial strategies fit within a broader disciplinary form of governance (Foucault, 1977). In contrast to refugee camps and migrant transit centers, re-education camps are not about lingering and uncertainty of duration—the time horizon is clearly delimited and the flow of time is tightly structured. The day is composed of clearly identified routines that follow one another in quick succession. The space of the camp is clearly divided and tightly surveilled. Social roles and hierarchies are intricate and carefully elaborated, even against the backdrop of accent on “unity” and the sameness of a group experience.
The overall worldview that inspires and animates the structure of space–time in many ingando camps is the military worldview and the romanticized notion of “unity” (umoja in Swahili, the language used by the military) that the RPF soldiers felt during their struggle in the 1990s (Purdekova, 2015; Lovgren and Turner, 2018). Strict discipline, minute organization of being and behaving, and collective tasks are all meant to govern not only the bodies but also mindsets and to transform the ingando participants into the desired Rwandan citizens. Some aspects of the militarized simulation are emphasized or de-emphasized according to need. Military training is part of many ingando, but not those for demobilized rebel soldiers repatriated from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as this aspect is sought to be de-accentuated. The hardships of military life are de-accentuated in the street children ingando, for reasons already explored above. But while instrumentalized de-emphasis might be present in some contexts, the broader impetus and worldview still animate the structure of and being in the camp.
In their organization of time, most ingando camps are more akin to total institutions rather than refugee camps, but even here they surpass these through the minute and detailed structure of time from dawn to the night. In the ingando camp for demobilized child soldiers near Lake Muhazi, the camp organizer shared the detailed timetable with me (reproduced below). The day starts at 5:30 am with physical exercise and most of the day is then spent in civic education, which includes 24 different topics including history, patriotism, the role of youth in the development of the country, the national unity and reconciliation program, the role of police and community policing, among many more. The camp organizer explains the need for a packed schedule and his description really reproduces the key tenets of camp-based re-education: [The aim is] to give them a clear picture of their country, they were away for a long time, they know the picture of Congo more than Rwanda . . . now [they need] reintegration into society whereby they have a method of knowing the economic, social situation, history, so that they can also contribute to the society . . . because they are young they are the nation of tomorrow, so they have to be equipped with the knowledge that is necessary.
4
This being a demobilization center, the participants also receive medical assistance, family tracing support, and vocational training (see Table 1 for a detailed timetable).
Timetable, RDRC child ex-combatants rehabilitation center, Lake Muhazi.
An even more elaborate schedule is in place in the Nkumba ingando for university entrants, where military exercises are added on to morning physical exercise and a long procession of lessons, which can last up to 8 hours every day. The evenings are structured too, with compulsory cultural activities, where kos are singing patriotic songs and learning how to dance traditional Rwandan dances. This is meant to be a core aspect of civic education, whereby young people from across the social divides rediscover their common “Rwandanness.”
Similarly, space of the camp and the intore group is carefully structured. The camps are divided into clearly identified administrative quarters, living quarters, exercise spaces, and a central school structure. To reflect the centrality of learning, a spacious amphitheater in Nkumba is located in the very center of the premises and is shaped like, and called, a “Pentagon.” 5 Whereas the Nkumba school is a permanent brick structure, the TIG labor camp’s “Pentagon” is a staggering makeshift structure completely composed of wood, to reflect the camp’s long-term but still temporally limited nature. 6 Even in the most temporary of tented ingando camps such as the Adventist campground in the midst of the Akagera landscape, space is structured carefully. A wooden revolving door gives way to the administrative area (called “political headquarters”) with the main tent called the “White House.” A central, open-space lecture theater with a stage is again centrally located. 7
Social hierarchies also offer structure and in some ingando camps can be extremely elaborate. Social role relates to spatial governance inasmuch as it denotes a position in an order and the running of that order; it animates its very functionality and daily operation. In the Lake Muhazi camp for child ex-combatants, the organizer has devised an intricate system of indirect control over his charges, which he described to me in minute detail.
8
At the core was an invented system of governance delegated to the participants themselves, but with checks and balances that assured the organizer’s own overall control. I reproduce an abridged version here: “They have leadership amongst themselves, it is actually a very complicated system which I have developed. There is a leader, like a prefect, he is in charge of all children in the camp, overall management of all this group. The prefect keeps changing, so that everyone can get a chance to be a leader, get experience with managing own behaviour and helping others. Under the prefect, there is a person responsible for discipline, but discipline of all, including the prefect, so the leader is not a dictator, has no immunity, so if there is a mistake, it is countered. . . Under these, there is a person in charge of logistics. His role is to follow-up on how the food has been prepared [for example], if preparation is unsatisfactory, then it is reported to me. That way I can know if even the cooks are not doing their work, if there is little salt for example, then I go talk to the cook. . . Also, there is a person in charge of sports. . . So you see, this is like a government cabinet. This is the network of information that I have created, very complicated. Every day, whether I am here or not, I need to know what happens. They are not divided in military way [like in some other ingandos], but they are divided into sectors, to divide the responsibilities, those who will sweep today, etc. . . Then I created gacaca [courts]. . . it is better if they can do it themselves [judging, apportioning punishment, disciplining each other] . . . to see the change, if we do it for them, we cannot really see the change. . . I find it important to have the “community courts” amongst themselves . . . If a boy bullies, incites, tries to go outside roaming around . . . the prefect will identify you, those in charge of discipline will identify you and report to the prefect. . . “He has been outside for three hours,” they will inform about the “mistakes that have been done.” The prefect does not deal with this but delegates to the chairman of the gacaca court, the prosecutor and the judges. The leader delegates to chairman “I have a case here, can you follow-up and give me a report?” [he smiles] The gacaca will then call you, will call everyone together, because judgment is done in front of everyone, to avoid “sentiments,” let it be open, they sit together, tell you “stand there.” After they have investigated, the judges in charge of investigation before the case is handed over to the prosecutor, collect all evidence, all evidence—so and so quarrelled with this and this, Mr B talked like this, at this time. . . Every evidence is collected, then handed over to the prosecutor, Mr B and Mr C stand here before us, members of administration are also there, also watching [minute description of the process continues]. . . The gacaca happens on any day, whenever a mistake is done, it must be finished and forgotten. If something is done today, finish it today and forget it. If the accused says “I confess, I made a mistake, I will not repeat it again,” because he confessed, he gets three days [of sweeping only]. This is to install unity, reconciliation. . . It is a very complicated system that helps to work. . . Everybody has an eye on his fellow, even the leader is looking gacaca, gacaca is watching the leader, everyone is watching his fellow. . .”
9
If camp Muhazi is an extreme among the ingando in its construction of a simulated form of governance and responsibilization, most other ingando also operate via hierarchical organization. In line with the glorified militarism that animates the ingando camp system as such, participants in Nkumba but also in TIG work camps are organized according to military hierarchy, divided into companies, platoons, and sections, with leaders known as kapita.
How does structuring of space and time then govern? The intricate regimentation of time, space, and position in the order is meant to produce focus and discipline. In fact, discipline was a key theme among the different camps I visited and was repeatedly highlighted. In the remote, ad hoc, and makeshift ingando camp for Adventist youth from all over Rwanda, located in the Akagera park in the rolling hills of Eastern Rwanda, Oliver—a camp organizer—pointed to the mass of young people in front of the makeshift stadium where all the participants were assembled for the visit of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commissioner: “Discipline is key for us,” he said to me, “see, all of them have numbers and they cannot move from the spot unless allowed.” The NURC Commissioner—Director of Civic Education—also mentioned discipline in her speech, highlighting how genocide happened in part due to lack of discipline. The hyperstructured time and space thus must be understood against the wider civic ideal promoted by the dominant RPF ideology—one of “discipline” for both the bodies and minds of the kos (the collective body of the participants).
The regimenting of time–space in the name of discipline produces intense surveillance. We have seen this most profoundly perhaps in the case study of the Muhazi ingando for ex-combatants where the organizer described a multiplicity of “eyes and ears” working for him via his devolved forms of governance. But surveillance in a re-education camp is not always successful. Mozambique again proves a useful counterpoint: Given the shortage of personnel, the bureaucratic and policing apparatus of Mozambique’s camps was very shallow. Consequently, the camps were not strictly regimented and detainees were not subject to permanent surveillance or a totalitarian panopticon. There was no separation and individualisation of bodies; no pedantic annotation of individualised observations; and no classification of inmates. This kind of meticulous surveillance requires a bureaucratic machines and material resources that the Frelimo government lacked. (Machava, 2018: 15–16)
Rwanda’s case could not be more contrasting. Order, regimentation, and surveillance were certainly achieved, but perhaps not through the individualized techniques emphasized by Machava and the dominant paradigm of the panopticon. Instead, there was focus on groups, hierarchies, but also uniformity across the student body—the key term was participants (kos), not participant (wanakosi). The attempt was embedding surveillance in the camp body through careful structuring of position, role, and even disciplining techniques.
Camp as a stage: immersion, enaction, and simulation
Besides the aspects of separation and structure, spatial governance in ingando also operates through the staging that the camp enables. This is governance through simulation, through immersion in alternative roles, and through lived experience in socio-spatial alterity. Simulation permeates all the different instances of ingando, aiming to produce a space of heterotopia or desired alterity of a new socio-spatial order. One of the ingando organizers expressed the idea of heterotopia perfectly: “[In ingando] everyone sees himself in the mirror of the country . . . if the mirror is placed on that wall—he gestures to the wall behind me- and you see yourself there, that is the essence [of ingando].” 10
This modeling aspect to simulation is there to different degrees in all ingando camps that I observed. In the Lake Muhazi camp for child ex-combatants, the young men are asked to simulate a complex social world fitted with household chores and multiple governance roles. They are being equipped with skills and socialized into multiple roles at once, none of which they experienced—to the world of civilian life, to post-genocide Rwanda, and to family membership with its own obligations.
In the Rwamagana ingando for street children, as we have seen above, the participants again are shown another life that is possible, in this case that they can be “somebody,” that they too can fit the “new order.” Even in the TIG labor camps for prisoners serving commuted sentences where the link to re-education might be most tenuous, there is the attempt to simulate hard labor as “redemption” and hence re-acquiring of the place in the new post-genocide order of a dutiful and disciplined Rwandan citizen. This is achieved via the interpretation of the labor as “rebuilding of the country you helped to destroy.” 11 The important thread connecting the disparate ingando camps is that simulation as ideology-in-practice is accompanied by structured lessons where that ideology and expectation is spelled out.
In the Nkumba camp for university entrants and other “elites,” simulation is the most salient. The governance of transformation operates through the simulations of RPF life during its guerrilla struggle, heralded as a time of discipline, simplicity, vision and purpose, the striving for a greater goal, and, crucially, the time of unity. This again reflects and fits within the context of broader militarization of society and is in line with the broader RPF-led government approach. The Nkumba camp is then about learning unity (across social divides) via the simulation of the guerrilla struggle. During their time in ingando, the kos are being prepared as intore in the itorero of old. This is a military-styled camp, following outlines of the exalted pre-colonial army, which was seen as “unifying,” though this is a historical revision.
At Nkumba, the unifying experience is meant to be the product of various military worldview–inspired dimensions and experiences of uniformity, sameness, and group coordination. The experience starts with participants changing in into the same khaki uniforms and being addressed uniformly as kos. The participants in ingando dress the same, eat the same, learn the same lessons, and follow the same set of rules. They themselves make the explicit connections between the structure of experience and its intended outcomes: “We woke up at the same time, we ran together, our beds were made the same way, we wore the same clothes, we clapped the same way and we marched together, we were umoja [unity].” 12
Ingando also incorporates various activities strengthening the sense of coherence, of being one part of a broader whole. The group physical exercises and military drills are one example, where the kos are asked to march and run in unison. Coordination is meant to use the physical sense of one-ness in an attempt to approximate the intangible sense of commonality. Another example here is the rallying call, with each type of ingando having its own call-and-reply. The Nkumba call “Kos!” by the organizers or teachers is followed by a group reply “umoja!” meaning “unity.” This is a great example of attempts at unity simulation because not only participants shout out the word “unity,” but they are also expected to respond in the same way and to do so in unison.
Naturally, the ingando are not only stages; they are also meant as a threshold and a transition. Again, these ideas reverberate across all ingando. At Lake Muhazi, the organizer explains to me with regard to the logic of all ingando: It becomes easier for many people to know many things in the same place, what the country requires and what the people require from the country, together [they] can formulate what needs to be done to move from the tragedy that befell our citizens. (Emphasis added)
13
With regard to the released prisoners that go through ingando, I was told that “the prisoners, they cannot go from the prison to the community, they have to go to ingando as a transition, so that they are prepared before they enter the system” (emphasis added). 14 As such, ingando camps double as both rites of separation and rites of transition where the “initiands” are prepared and identify with their new “role”—becoming full citizens of the “new Rwanda.” They need to be both unified—and thus separated from the divisions and genocide of the past—and aligned with the broader political and economic transformation agendas of the state—and hence assuming their full place in the new post-genocide socio-political order.
Conclusion
The article hopes to contribute to our understanding of uses of camps as spatial technologies of social transformation in conflict-affected settings. As such, it hopes to contribute to both the comparative sociology of encampment and to conceptions of spatial governance that reach beyond well-explored frameworks such as Goffman’s total institution or Foucault’s explorations of space and governmentality. The article instead invites us to take a more dynamic perspective on space of encampment through the lens of strategic liminality, rites of passage, and heterotopias. Camps are not only about containment, but about suspension of order, re-structuring, and re-ordering. They are not only defined by lessons but by experiential learning through role-play, hierarchies and ordering, and simulation.
Through the lens of the Rwanda case, we learn that experiments in mass social transformation deploy unique spatial features of encampment in catalysis of intended “learning.” Understanding the governance of re-education requires us to look beyond the content of the lessons and the desired ideologies reproduced in the spaces of these camps. Camp re-education is not only about what is being learned, but where and how this learning takes place. It is the uniqueness of camp space that is put to work and that governs transformation, from the aspects of separation and unsettling, to disciplining via organization, hierarchy, and responsibilization, to the staging of new roles, identities, and intangible yet particular senses of collectivity and groupness.
The intense application of the state in crafting Rwanda’s “civic education” camps and the careful engineering of space therein does not of course assure completely smooth running or mean that participants show no resistance. There are multiple forms that resistance takes, from subtle to more overt. Some participants produce or invent reasons to not participate, while others critique the camps on the outside (if not on the inside of camps due to surveillance). Open contestation can also happen during lessons, as I witnessed during a Nkumba ingando class where the teacher accentuated “materialism” and attacked the idea of God, trying to purposefully unsettle his young audience, the majority of whom were Christian believers. The students murmured in disagreement and stood up, starting to chant religious songs in protest.
Overall though and despite these forms of push-back, Rwanda’s ingando are starkly different from some of its predecessors such as the camps in Mozambique due to the sheer level of oversight and crafting that goes into their production and running. It is the central role that ingando take in the transformation agenda of the post-genocide Rwanda that make them such a unique window into re-education camps as a form of spatial governance. The rebel-turner-ruler governing party has actively used camp spaces as a way to enact and simulate ideal citizenship sifted through its glorified militaristic worldview.
