Twa in Rwanda: Situating Global Discourses of Indigeneity, Conservationism and Development in Daily Life

This book is a contribution to the growing field of global legal ethnography. Through engagement with the global discourses of indigeneity, conservation and development, this empirical study shows how power and legal normativity are enacted and experienced in the everyday life of the Batwa in Rwanda. By exploring how Twa negotiate their position within society, the regulatory power of these global jurisdictional encounters to construct (subjects, communities, normative frameworks), to reframe and to discipline comes into sharper focus. Focusing on agency instead of resistance, on a desire for inclusion rather than difference, this book provides a critical contribution to the scholarship on counter-hegemonic narratives of globalisation. Rwandan Twa are positioning themselves within national and global narratives to demand progress and belonging – not as part of a political movement based on their ethnic distinctness or indigeneity but as Rwandans.