Rwandan officials, suspicious of her interviews with a Hutu who had been imprisoned after the genocide, confiscated her passport and forced her to attend "re-education" sessions for five weeks, before she managed to escape.
In the book, she argues that Rwanda's political culture has not changed significantly since the civil war[10] and finds that the country's "elite rule-makers have little understanding of the lived, ground-level realities of ordinary citizens".
Political scientist Aditi Malik writes that Thomson offers "a perspective that Kagame’s supporters have largely missed... she convincingly shows that Rwanda’s rural majority has been left out of the RPF’s vision of security, peace, development, and democracy".
[11] International relations scholar Herman T. Salton states that Thomson's arguments are convincing and that her conclusion—that "Kagame’s methods resemble those of his predecessors in more ways than one"—is "ominous... particularly for a country whose people have already suffered so much".
[10] Thomson formerly supported the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that took power after the genocide, stating "I was not totally blind to [their] shortcomings but felt that their authoritarian practices [e.g., the executions that she documented in early 1998] were necessary to rebuild a peaceful and secure Rwanda".