The Noise of Silence: How Suppression of Free Expression Threatens the Fragile Peace in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Rwandans commemorate the 20 th anniversary of the 1994 genocide, the world's attention has been focused on how the country has managed to recover from that traumatic episode.But this thesis argues that the restrictions on free speech and press freedom is a symptom of a serious malaise in Rwanda's political system; the malaise of authoritarianism, borne out of the flawed transition after the genocide.These transitional flaws made it possible for the post-genocide regime to impose its will on the country with little or no public deliberation, creating an enforced peace under which Rwanda's two main ethnic groups look upon each other with as much suspicion as they did before the genocide.This is the very authoritarian and sectarian malaise that culminated in the genocide in 1994.The argument is made here that Rwanda faces the serious risk of another violent conflict if the flaws of the transition are not corrected to bring about a toleration of dissent and criticism on the part of government.It also entails the removal of the country's media instruments from the control and manipulation of the state.Correcting the flaws of the transitional process should begin with the international community shedding the guilt of its failure to prevent the genocide, demanding the regime's commitment to greater respect for fundamental civil and political rights (including freedom of expression and press freedom) in return for economic support.It also requires an end to the rather condescending notion that Rwandan's deserve nothing better than an authoritarian government which secures peace and keeps the economy on the right footing by use of, among other things, draconian laws against the media and free expression.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".