Rwanda

A five-part series using Wintrobe's loyalty-repression model and Verwimp's commune-level data to show that the Rwandan genocide was not the explosion of ancient hatreds but the rational outcome of a budget constraint the dictator could no longer meet.

Uganda reduced its debt-to-GDP ratio from 96% to 28% after HIPC completion and has kept it there for twenty years. Botswana has never been in debt distress despite being a resource economy. Ecuador's 2023 Galápagos debt-for-nature swap saved $390 million in interest payments while funding marine conservation. The countries that escaped the debt architecture share five characteristics. None of them is luck.

How the collapse of the coffee economy forced the Rwandan regime to substitute incentives with systemic repression.

A two-part series on the political economy of coffee in Rwanda and how its collapse contributed to the 1994 genocide.

How the Rwandan state transformed coffee cultivation into a tool for population monitoring and wealth extraction.