ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the idea of sociology as a global and historical discipline. This is a necessary orientation for sociology rather than a preferable one. The book demonstrates the 'manifold interlockings' of post-independence violence in the Great Lakes region, nowhere more intimately entangled than in Burundi and Rwanda. It helps to understand the phenomena under investigation in terms of their significance for contemporary debates in social theory about modernity and its multiplicity. The book proposes a hermeneutic approach that offers the most plausible way of acknowledging the entanglement of expertise and scientific authority in technocratic and objectifying domination, including over colonial subjects and people today in the Global South. It concludes by examining the relationship between modernity and violence, and the ways in which traditional heritages can be allied to repressive forms of political rule.
