ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some terminological distinctions between modernity, the modern social imaginary, modernisation and modern society. It emphasises a cultural and hermeneutic element to modernity that leads to a multiplicity of interpretations. Modernisation, the 'route to and through modernity', to use Goran Therborn's expression, appears in a variety of specific forms that are entangled both with one another and in transnational relations of power. For entanglement to be a useful analytical framework, it is necessary to delineate some types. The chapter suggests four forms of entanglement: relational, hermeneutic, organisational and geo-historical. Therborn identifies 'four major pathways into modernity': the internalist European route; the route of New World modernity; the colonial route; and the adaptive and reactive modernisation. Each defined by 'the conflict lines for and against the new, between modernity and tradition, between modernity and anti-modernity'. The chapter finally locates Burundi and Rwanda into the typological framework of the routes outlined.
