Introduction

      Harmony Legal Models and the Architecture of Social Repair

      This book tells the story of how the Rwandan government aimed to remediate the country’s social ills in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, and to rebuild the social fabric through revitalizing a traditional practice of mediation and embedding it in grassroots legal forums. Government officials hoped to use local courts as part of a broader architecture of social repair to help re-create families, repair communities, and rebuild a unified nation, consistent with the global rise in transitional justice. The three legal forums at the heart of this book—genocide courts called inkiko gacaca, mediation committees called comite y’abunzi, and a legal aid clinic—used mediation by third-party actors with the power of punishment to advocate compromise solutions across a wide range of disputes. This book describes how people’s lives were shaped by law-based mediation. It illustrates how people contested collective belonging through the micro-disputes that formed the warp and woof of daily life, and how people negotiated moral community and imagined alternative futures through debates in these new legal forums. By looking across a range of legal forums, it connects the exceptionalism of disputes about genocide to the ordinary disputes people faced living in its aftermath.

      Mediation-based models are by no means limited to Rwanda; they are increasingly implemented by state and international actors, especially in postconflict contexts, often in the name of customary law, local solutions, or restorative justice. This is therefore a story about rebuilding in Rwanda, but also a broader story of how the global embrace of law, particularly in postconflict contexts, shapes people’s lives. Though law-based mediation is framed as benign, and is often promoted on the basis of local culture—by domestic governments such as Rwanda as well as by the transitional justice movement more broadly—I show that its implementation involves coercion and accompanying resistance. Yet, perhaps unexpectedly, in grassroots legal forums that are deeply contextualized, processes based on promoting unity can open up spaces in which people reconstruct moral orders, negotiating what Kimberly Theidon has called the “micropolitics of reconciliation” (Theidon 2012).

      Legal Disputes in the Aftermath of Genocide

      This book adds another strand to the complex story of how Rwandans rebuilt their social lives in the wake of genocide.¹ From April to July 1994, devastating state-led violence designed to exterminate the country’s minority Tutsi population spread from the capital, Kigali, throughout the country.² The extraordinary violence was perpetrated by the military and ordinary civilians, and it extended deep into everyday landscapes, touching all Rwandans. It was framed by a civil war and subsequent violent political and military struggles, ultimately claiming up to a million lives. Since the moment the worst of the violence abated, victims, perpetrators, bystanders, their families, and the recently returned diaspora population have lived side by side across the country’s tightly packed hillsides.

      In the mid-1990s, as bodies lay unburied, and refugees streamed out of Rwanda fleeing retaliatory violence, equal numbers crossed into Rwanda after years in exile. These diaspora people replaced, and eventually exceeded, the dead. Within little more than a decade later, this cosmopolitan mixture of people mingled in markets and manually tilled their adjacent fields, they rode pressed hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder in minibus taxis, and their children sat together in schoolrooms. Reports and documents produced by the Rwandan government and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) commonly diagnosed postgenocide Rwanda as suffering from a “devastated” social fabric among these people, including the “destruction of family bonds” (Biruta 2006:155; Ministry of Finance 2000; Ndangiza 2007).