Longman's book makes three important contributions. First, it highlights the generative power of historical interpretation in regime consolidation, specifically that a way of invoking the past can really be about ‘paving the way for a particular political agenda in the present’ (8). It traces how an interpretation of history is at the heart of policies to ‘reshape relations’ between groups, between citizens and the state, and has become in effect the very centrepiece of a strategy of ethnic security, and legitimation of power. Second, the book explores how the deliberate distortions of that interpretation of history are intended to create a sense of collective identity and interest, but end up clashing with the reality of peoples’ experiences and the substance of their inherited beliefs. Along with authoritarian heavy handedness and the consolidation of economic and political gains for the ruling elite, these have ‘heightened social divisions and undermined attempts to create a collective memory and unified national identity’ (335). In Chapters 2–5, the key argument is that the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) regime has unwittingly ‘creat[ed] what [it was] afraid of'. In Chapters 6–8, popular narratives make clear the dissonance between the government's perspective and the population's experiences. Third, the book demonstrates that transitional justice strategies have little inherent power to produce a democratising impact. In authoritarian systems, transitional justice potential may not extend to inducing system change; instead it may reinforce the system as it is.

The book takes a synthetic approach to evaluating transitional justice in post-genocide Rwanda by exploring common patterns between memorialisation, education and justice initiatives – areas that scholars have typically treated as discrete domains of study. The book's great strength is its ability to track political change over time. The author's longstanding familiarity with the country – beginning with his first field research visit in the years leading up to genocide, following as researcher and human rights practitioner in the early years of the post-genocide transition, and routine academic engagement since – has translated into the ability to identify trends over time based on empirical evidence. Longman's ground-based teams in the communities he has chosen to study provide a fine-grained perspective to national level changes that he tracks simultaneously. It is rare to encounter a scholarly work that takes both a long and deep view of the phenomena studied, since the field of Rwanda studies is currently dominated by scholars whose engagement with the country began at various points after the RPF secured power and stopped genocide.

At the end, Longman cautions against the idea that transitional justice ‘would have worked’ if only the RPF had been held accountable for crimes committed against Hutu civilians in war and peacetime. He cites this as an example of blind faith in some kind of ‘magical legalism’ (336). This is a key point but one that the author does not elaborate upon. It would seem that holding the RPF accountable for its crimes can potentially deny it an unsullied moral ground, and perhaps compel a correction of the deliberate distortions of their legitimising political narrative, alongside added scrutiny of and constraints on RPF power. All of this might indeed have an overall democratising effect. But perhaps this presumes a democratic context in the first place. The book does not speculate where such a democratising impulse may come from, but speaks clearly to those who make the case that Rwanda's social divisions and legacies of genocide require a benign autocrat: The ‘strategy of domination and indoctrination is not likely to maintain stability in the long term’ (337).