Résumé
Twenty-seven years after the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, this article reviews some of the work in
social sciences devoted to this major event at the end of the 20th century, in order to provide a historiographical assessment. In particular, research devoted to the decades preceding the genocide is analyzed, in an attempt to include it in its historical depth without making it the inexorable culmination of social and political developments in the country since the colonial period and the political struggles for independence. On the event itself, the article exposes the different reading grids that have been proposed, among those which insist above all on its ideological background in the context of a racism which results in multiple practices of cruelty during the massacres, and those which further highlight the social and political structures which condition the mobilization of groups of killers.
