Over the past two decades since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, its government has emerged as an important player asserting its agency at the United Nations and other international organizations. In analyzing Rwanda’s international relations, this chapter shows that Rwandan political elites understand the state as the foremost agent of political power and “the ultimate point of reference in contemporary foreign policy”(Morgenthau 1967, 13). Rwandan diplomats have used “the dictates of their own conscience”(Morgenthau 1967, 66) to assert Rwanda’s agency in international relations. Through an analysis of speeches published in newspapers and online forums, this chapter argues that Rwandan diplomats have used the official genocide memory to grow Rwanda’s influence within multilateral international agencies and to gain a seat at the “table d’honneurs,” especially in discussions of peace and security.

This chapter invokes two sets of scholarship, namely literature on the postgenocide Rwandan government’s agency and more broadly on African state agency in international relations (IR). Although there is significant literature produced since the genocide, most of it ignores Rwanda’s agency in IR. For the few who have studied Rwanda’s past, the focus has mainly been on Rwanda’s politics of memory in shaping its national reconstruction agenda or its self-determination through Agaciro and other homegrown reconciliation projects (Longman 2017; Jessee 2017; Rutazibwa 2014; Purdekova 2018), or Rwanda’s complex diplomatic and security situation as an aggressive actor in Africa’s Great Lakes (Lemarchand 1970; Prunier 1997). This chapter contributes to a small body of literature that has examined Rwanda’s agency in how it manages aid or development partners (Grimm 2014), and forms its alliances to realize the state’s agency (Beswick and Hammerstad 2013).