Who Must Die in Rwanda's Genocide?: The State of Exception Realized is a 2015 non-fiction book by American politician Kyrsten Sinema. Published by Lexington Books, the book is a qualitative study on the history of human rights violations in Rwanda, culminating with the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The book's text is derived from Sinema's 2012 doctoral thesis, Who Must Die: The State of Exception in Rwanda's Genocide, presented to fulfill her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in justice studies from Arizona State University.
Sinema researched and prepared the text in 2010 and 2011, when she was an elected member of the Arizona State Legislature—first as a state representative, then as a state senator. She traveled to Rwanda, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom while researching her thesis. Her analysis draws from the concept of the state of exception, as developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, as well as Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe's work on necropolitics. After defending her thesis, Sinema was elected to the federal House of Representatives (in 2012) and later the Senate (in 2018). Her study of the genocide made a significant impression on her political views, and she has cited it as an influence on her generally interventionist positions in some areas related to American foreign policy.
Background
At the time of the Rwandan genocide, which took place in 1994, Sinema was an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Amid the Rwandan Civil War, Hutu-led armed militias slaughtered members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group. As she would later write, the genocide is "notable for its swiftness, brutality, and intense efficiency. Nearly one million people were killed in less than 100 days." Her memory of the event inspired her later involvement with the Save Darfur Coalition and the broader movement to raise awareness of, and respond to, the Darfur genocide and the War in Darfur. In her first book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last (2009), she wrote: "I remembered the Rwandan genocide—which occurred in the blip of a news cycle while I was in college—and I remembered how I felt then, like I had no power to stop what was happening. I did not want a repeat of 1994. This time, I was going to be part of a solution."
Sinema traveled "extensively" during the process of writing her dissertation. In 2010 and 2011, she visited Rwanda and Arusha, Tanzania, where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was established, meeting with prosecutors for the international court, archivists, and historians. She obtained copies of documentary evidence from the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), headed by Hassan Bubacar Jallow. While in the Rwandan capital city Kigali, she witnessed the sentencing of Augustin Bizimungu, Augustin Ndindiliyimana, François-Xavier Nzuwonemeye, and Innocent Sagahutu, all of whom participated in the genocide as part of the Rwandan Armed Forces. While in Rwanda, she met the British investigative journalist Linda Melvern, who invited her to review her personal archive in London; afterward, Sinema also reviewed the Linda Melvern Rwanda Archive at Aberystwyth University in Wales. In the preface to her thesis, Sinema noted: "While I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been granted access to documents in Rwanda, Tanzania, London and Wales, my position as an Arizona State Representative in 2010 and Arizona State Senator in 2011 likely allowed me to gain access to people and places that I would have struggled to access as a private citizen."
Publication
Sinema resigned from her position in the Arizona Senate in January 2012 to prepare a run for the United States House of Representatives. That April, she submitted her thesis to Arizona State University in April 2012; it was published the following month. Her PhD in justice studies became her third graduate degree, having already obtained a Master of Social Work (MSW) and Juris Doctor (JD). In November, she won the US House election for Arizona's 9th congressional district. In 2015, Sinema's thesis was published in a hardback edition by Lexington Books.
