Academic literature on the topic 'Violence – Sociologie – Burundi'

There is a remarkable discrepancy between the political representation of the Batwa ethnic minority group in Burundi compared to in Rwanda. Whereas Rwanda's focus on citizenship prevents the Batwa from claiming recognition as a politically salient societal segment, Burundi's governance model, characterized by ethnic, consociational power-sharing, guarantees the political representation of the Batwa in the legislative assemblies. The difference is mainly due to the various modalities of political transition that both countries have experienced. While in Rwanda, regime change came about through a military victory, Burundi's transition from conflict to peace involved a long and complex peace-negotiations process, with international mediators viewing the armed conflict and its resolution in explicitly ethnic terms. The Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement was a foundational moment for the recognition of the political participation rights of the Batwa in Burundi, despite the fact that they were not actively involved in Burundi's armed conflict, or in the peace negotiations. The comparative analysis in this paper offers insights into the potential of peace processes with respect to improved minority-rights protection following violent conflict.

For the past twenty years, Burundi has experimented with power-sharing as an instrument of political liberalisation, democratisation and conflict resolution. This contribution analyses the different meanings the concept of power-sharing has had throughout Burundi's recent and extremely violent political transition, in particular during the lengthy peace process. It shows how national and international actors have found inspiration in the toolbox of consociationalism to negotiate and design the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi signed in August 2000 and its post-transition Constitution. Power-sharing has been instrumental in achieving the – short-term – objective of war termination. It has also de-ethnicised political competition and reduced the (potentially) destabilising effect of elections. Measured against more ambitious state-building objectives (democracy, rule of law, accountable and effective governance), power-sharing has (so far) not been able to make a difference. Several factors and developments threaten the “survival” of the power-sharing model in Burundi.

This article argues that constitutional engineering along consociational lines in Burundi – explicitly accommodating ethnicity rather than attempting to suppress it – was instrumental in reducing the political role of ethnicity, but that other endogenous and exogenous factors also played a role. After surveying developments since 1988, this article focuses on the 2005 polls. The outcome of the parliamentary elections suggests that the “disappearance of the ethnic factor,” extolled by many at the time, was achieved by constitutional constraints rather than by social or political dynamics. Nevertheless, with regard to the country's most important and lethal historical problem, the ethnic divide, constitutional engineering has proved hugely effective. Burundi's main cleavage is now between (and within) parties rather than ethnic groups, and when violence occurs it is political rather than ethnic. Burundi's current crisis is therefore not a failure of consociationalism but of democracy.

Over the past two decades, I have done ethnographic fieldwork amongst Burundians in Burundi and in exile, exploring the different ways they deal with the violence that the country has witnessed over the decades. In this article I follow my tracks back and forth and in and out of the country, reflecting on the advantages and challenges of long-term engagement. At a conceptual level, I propose that while violence is indeed lodged in a social context, violent events create a momentary temporal rupture, thereby dislodging meaning from its local context of understanding. My methodological contribution is to explore how long-term engagements, revisits, and diachronic comparisons in ethnography may help us understand violence and violent events. I explore how violent events have affected the past, the present, and the future, causing those who experience it to reorient their understanding not only of their pasts but also of their anticipations for the future.

Conflict between returning refugees and nonmigrant populations is a pervasive yet frequently overlooked security issue in post-conflict societies. Although scholars have demonstrated how out-migration can regionalize, prolong, and intensify civil war, the security consequences of return migration are undertheorized. An analysis of refugee return to Burundi after the country's 1993–2005 civil war corroborates a new theory of return migration and conflict: return migration creates new identity divisions based on whether and where individuals were displaced during wartime. These cleavages become new sources of conflict in the countries of origin when local institutions, such as land codes, citizenship regimes, or language laws, yield differential outcomes for individuals based on where they lived during the war. Ethnographic evidence gathered in Burundi and Tanzania from 2014 to 2016 shows how the return of refugees created violent rivalries between returnees and nonmigrants. Consequently, when Burundi faced a national-level political crisis in 2015, prior experiences of return shaped both the character and timing of out-migration from Burundi. Illuminating the role of reverse population movements in shaping future conflict extends theories of political violence and demonstrates why breaking the cycle of return and repeat displacement is essential to the prevention of conflict.

Against the backdrop of Africa's recent transitions to multi-party democracy, two countries stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of success and failure that ranges from the apocalyptic to the nearly miraculous. At one extreme, South Africa, the site of what has been described as ‘one of the most extraordinary political transformations of the twentieth century’, where the people ‘have defied the logic of their past, and broken all the rules of social theory, to forge a powerful spirit of unity from a shattered nation’. At the other end of the scale, Rwanda, a synonym for abyssal violence — a name that will go down in history as the epitome of an African Holocaust. Burundi, though spared the agonies of her neighbour, has not fared much better. There a remarkably successful transition was abruptly brought to a halt by an attempted military take-over, setting off an explosion of ethnic violence on a scale consonant with her reputation as a leading candidate for the title of genocidal state.

Mobilisée par tous les acteurs politiques, la violence politique se subdivise en deux grandes typologies à savoir la violence d’Etat et la violence contre-étatique. Chaque typologie se caractérise par ses propres formes mais elles s’influencent réciproquement. La violence est utilisée parce que les acteurs étatiques et contestataires la considèrent comme une ressource efficace. Cette thèse a montré que les différentes formes de violence poursuivaient des buts précis véhiculés par les idéologies ethnopolitiques subjectives. L’instrumentalisation de la violence permet parfois l’obtention des gains politico-économiques qui, jusque-là, étaient refusés. L’analyse de cette violence a mobilisé une approche montrant que les acteurs politiques donnent des sens à leurs actions violentes. C’est pourquoi, la méthode compréhensive a été utilisée car elle reconnaît que les sens dépendent des intérêts et des contextes d’énonciation précis. Cela signifie que les arguments de la violence sont construits à partir des interactions stratégiques et dynamiques régissant leurs rapports de face-à-face. Dans ce cadre, les supports des actions humaines sont tirés dans la longue durée politique. L’explication de la violence a investi alors le passé afin d’éclairer le présent. Ainsi la sociologie historique complète alors cette méthode de la construction du sens de la violence ou plutôt elle lui donne ses outils de travail
Mobilized by all political actors, political violence is subdivided in two great typologies with knowing violence of the state and against official violence. Each typology is characterized by its own forms but they are influenced reciprocally. Violenceis used because the official actors and protestors regard it as a profitable resource. This thesis showed the various forms of violence worked towards precise ends conveyed by the subjective ethnopolitic ideologies. The instrumentalization of violence allows sometimes obtaining the politico-economic profits which, up to that point, we refused. The analysis of political violence mobilized an approach showing that political actors give the meanings to their violent actions. This is why the understanding sociology method was used because it recognizes that the meanings depend on the interests and the contexts of precise starting. That says that arguments of violence are built starting from the strategic and dynamics interactions governing their reports of face-to-face discussion. Within this framework the supports of the human actions are drawn in the long political duration. Therefore violence explanation invested the past in order to understand the present. Historical sociology then supplements this method of the construction of the meanings of violence or rather it gives its working tools

En Afrique sub-saharienne, la récurrence de violences et de crises ethniques a fini par dévaloriser l’intérêt d’une étude approfondie des partis politiques, qui sont souvent réduits à l’expression d’identités communautaires ou à un instrument des élites pour la prédation de l’État. Ce travail souhaite remettre à l’honneur l’étude des formations partisanes, et analyse l’articulation entre mobilisation partisane, mobilisation armée et revendications ethniques au Burundi. Il montre que l’ethnicité et la violence ne sont pas des caractéristiques intrinsèques des réalités socio-politiques burundaises, mais font partie du processus de formation du pluralisme. En adoptant une approche antagoniste du politique, qui remet en question les théories libérales, cette thèse analyse la formation du multipartisme comme un processus conflictuel de différenciation politique dont l’ethnicité représente une forme d’expression qui est contingente. Par conséquent, en fonction des configurations du pouvoir politique, nous mettons en lumière les processus d’ethnicisation et de désethnicisation de la vie politique, et nous pouvons ainsi dévoiler les véritables dynamiques de mobilisation partisane qui se cachent derrière l’appel ethnique. Ce faisant, nous montrons que non seulement tout processus social peut devenir politique, mais l’inverse peut se produire : le politique peut structurer le social. L’approche agonistique nous permet également de comprendre la guerre civile de 1993 comme la conséquence de la radicalisation de la confrontation partisane. Nous pouvons ainsi décloisonner l’étude des mouvements partisans et armés et intégrer la violence dans l’analyse des modalités d’action partisane
In sub-Saharan Africa, the reiteration of multiple cycles of violence and ethnic crises has ultimately led to a lack of interest in a profound study of political parties, that have most often been reduced either to the expression of ethnic identities or to an instrument of elite’s State predation. Against these assumptions, this research contributes to the study of partisan structures in the African continent though an analysis of the articulation between partisan mobilization, armed mobilization and ethnic struggles in Burundi. Our research demonstrates that ethnicity and violence are not intrinsic characteristics of Burundian social political realities but rather a part of the process of political pluralism. Based on the antagonistic approach to politics, this thesis analyses the formation of multiparty system as a conflictual process of political differentiation in with ethnicity plays a contingent and precarious role. We highlight the processes of ethnicity and de-ethnicity of Burundian political life that takes place following the redefinition of political power configurations. In doing so, we unveil the fundamental dynamics that shape partisan mobilization that are most often hidden behind the ethnic appeal. We demonstrate that not only social processes are likely to become political, but also, that politics structure social processes. The agonistic approach also allows us to understand the 1993 civil war as a consequence of the radicalization of partisan confrontation. This opens up to a new approach on the study of political parties and armed movements highlighting the importance of integrating the use of violence in the analysis of partisan action