Law and the architecture of social repair: gacaca days in post‐genocide Rwanda

In this article, I examine post‐genocide Rwanda's gacaca process, in which genocide suspects were tried among their neighbours before locally elected judges. I suggest two limitations in how anthropologists have typically studied post‐conflict legal institutions. Measuring the cultural relevance of law obscures contemporary imbrications of African custom and universal legal principles, and distracts from analysis of the politicized uses of culture. Analysing structural constraints and coercive dimensions, while crucial, can blind us to the very real social work that happens in these forums. Instead, I argue, what differentiated gacaca was how deeply it was contextualized – embedded in daily life, public, participatory, routinized, and based on oral testimony – and this contextualization formed the basis of its situated relevance to people's efforts to shape forms of sociality. People used gacaca sessions to negotiate the micro‐politics of reconciliation, which included debating definitions of ‘genocide citizenship’, guilt, innocence, exchange, and material loyalty. I argue for moving beyond the underlying assumption in critical transitional justice studies that law and reconciliation are mutually exclusive, to acknowledge that the instrumental and often divisive dynamics in gacaca do not merely reflect institutional failures but, rather, reflect the inherent violence of social repair.