In order to foster social reconciliation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has implemented a judiciary system and established a national commemoration period. More importantly, in order to eradicate the ideological foundation of the genocide, the government has outlawed ethnicity as a cornerstone of genocidal propaganda. Ethnography shows that these efforts have been only partially successful and that ethnicity occupies a central, silent space at the centre of Rwandan national politics and social interaction. In this work, I shed light over the entanglement between the memory of the genocide and social identities in Rwanda. I explore the ways in which ordinary Rwandans re-situate their ethnic background through moral categories that surface from the government’s historical narrative of the genocide and of the events that led to it. I analyse the means through which this narrative is established, the judicial enforcement and the memorialisation of the genocide, to illustrate the patterns of blame and legitimacy that saturate these historical constructions. Within these contexts, I explore the ways in which individuals exercise tactical agency in order to re-place their ethnic past in relation to these narratives. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the government’s narrative of the genocide constitutes a moral landscape in relation to which actors acquire — or are denied — instances of victimhood. Negotiation over these instances take the form of accusatory practices which, more or less explicitly, are used in everyday life to define selfhood and otherness with respect to the genocide. My research shows how, cutting across former ethnic boundaries, the category of victimhood represents a form of empowerment, which dialectically depends on the identification of perpetratorship.

In recent years, the IRI has managed to increase its influence in the Middle East. The strategic use of proxy warfare has played a central role as surrounding countries have become destabilised. However, following the positivist logic of structural IR theories, the materially inferior IRI should not be a stronger player in the region’s conflicts than the US and its Arab allies. The Iranian success in proxy warfare, therefore, provides a paradox for the explanatory framework of reductionist IR theories which rely on rational and positivist epistemologies. I argue that this is because these perspectives do not endorse an adequate comprehension of the mutual embedded relations which have served the IRI a strategic advantage in proxy warfare. In a challenge to the parsimonious reductionism of structural IR and security studies, I adopt Feklyunina’s constructivist framework for analysing soft power as a relational identity. Thereby, I switch the focus from a top-down analysis of the IRI to a focus including Iraqi insurgencies’ acceptance or rejection of the IRI’s national identity and foreign policy goals. I argue that identity matter in proxy relations. Hence, I estimate the IRI’s strength in proxy warfare based on potential Iraqi insurgencies’ compatible identities. I employ a longitudinal historical research design tracing the development of collective identities within Iraq. The study finds that the Iraqi Shi’ites share important common facets of their identity with the IRI and have subsequently been willing to fight as proxies against American and Sunni forces in Iraq. However, identity and legitimacy structures in the Middle East are complex, multifaceted, constantly changing, and dependent on context. Iraqi Shi’ites still preserve some reservations and antipathy towards the Iranian regime due to a nationalist sense of community.