Future-Minded Cultural Transformation in Post-Genocide Rwanda: Freedom, Enterprise, and Competitiveness

This project is a journalistic investigation of Rwanda's cultural transformation since the 1994 genocide into one of the world's most rapidly modernizing and developing countries, and of what this unparalleled reversal of fate can teach us all. The project's main activities are the reporting, research, writing and publicizing of the project's main output: a book (to be trade-published in the US, UK and at least 6 foreign languages) in the vein of my best-selling account of the genocide. A supporting website will host documentation and discussion of the findings. The project has urgent importance as our conventional models for nation-building and cultural transformation fall short, while Rwanda from near total physical, social, economic and spiritual destruction to stand, against all expectations and odds, as an exemplary model. When the World Bank declared it a 'non-viable' country, its new leaders reacted with defiant optimism and took its near-obliteration as an opportunity to replace backward-looking, impoverished and polarizing 'old mentalities' with a future-oriented, liberation ethos of self-reliance and enterprise. Prosperity and reconciliation were conceived as inextricable; the goal was to be a middle-income country by the year 2020, and progress, though fragile, has been astonishing. Big questions arise: In building a state what should come first, prosperity or liberty? Can economic development prevent future conflict? Can restricting freedoms in the short term bring greater, more effective freedoms in the future? What is the relationship of individual freedom and competitiveness within a society to that society's freedom and competitiveness in the international order? And can a marketplace for spiritual competitiveness contribute to freedom and enterprise? This project has every potential and every ambition to inform, inspire and transform public debate in many fields and to influence the thinking and future action of opinion-and policy-making elites.