their social identities as well as their rights to access to resources from the men to whom they were related (Burnet 2012:43). In the postgenocide context, even as efforts were made to improve women’s rights and individual security—including changes in national law to assure ownership rights for women, increased legal protections, and more representation by women in government decision-making bodies—women remained vulnerable, especially in rural areas, in part because of persisting normative assumptions that women’s access to resources were linked to unequal relationships to particular men, especially in a context of widespread death and dislocation. As Burnet explains, “Women’s economic lives were circumscribed by contemporary interpretations of patrilineal inheritance systems whereby women remained economically harnessed to economic units controlled by male relatives” (2012:76). Yet, while the relational nature of women’s rights could render women more vulnerable, it also increased space for negotiation, as women debated prevailing assumptions about care and obligation within these social categories. Burnet argues that it is precisely women’s role as the “primary social mediators between households, kin groups, and community” (2012:13) that gave them some space to help transform Rwandan society.
Finally, I show one of the ways legal forums shaped conceptions of ethnicity in postgenocide Rwanda, by creating what I call “genocide citizenship.” I build on work by contemporary anthropologists who explore how ethnic logics persist in Rwanda today, as ethnicity remains one among many salient factors of Rwandans’ identity, intertwined with other forms of identification, such as class, gender, age, and region (Eltringham 2011; Hintjens 2008). I supplement their focus on ethnicity in everyday life, including among youth (McLean Hilker 2009, 2011, 2012), educated urban residents (Eramian 2014a, 2014b), women (Burnet 2009), and members of the diaspora (Eltringham 2004) by showing how ethnicity shapes, and is shaped by, discussions in legal forums. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 3, I argue that within the postgenocide context marked by the official erasure of ethnicity, legal forums perhaps paradoxically solidified social categories linked to one’s position with respect to the genocide, which were formalized by the state and carried access to state-backed resources (hence serving as a form of genocide citizenship).
Overall, this book adds to contemporary anthropological scholarship on Rwanda by providing detail on how people maneuvered within the legal architecture of social repair that was such a pronounced part of Rwanda’s postgenocide reconstruction efforts, showing how law-backed mediation shaped the meanings of institutions and practices such as exchange, gender, and ethnicity in other social fields. Analyzing mediation practices, specifically how they combine calls for unity with punishment in legal forums, allows us to attend to the processes through which rule of law is produced and naturalized in a “moral economy of justice” (Clarke 2009), and to how legal categories create and acknowledge specific categories of guilty and innocent personhood (Kelly 2011; Niezen 2010), while also attending to how people “search for normal” (Abramowitz 2014) and reestablish collective belonging across, within, and containing deep divides following violence (Bolten 2012b; Finnstrom 2010; Hromadžić 2015; Ring 2006; Schuetze 2010; Theidon 2006). Participants expressed their knowledge of not only the fictions of justice (Clarke 2009) but also the fictions of harmonious community, showing that people are always contesting what it means, and their place within it. Conversations in legal forums shed light on the contested cracks at the core of official ideas about justice and unity.
Consider the following excerpt from a later portion of Alphonse’s trial. An older woman I call Grace stepped forward to testify, indicating she would speak as umuhohotewe, one who was victimized (a privileged designation distinct from abatangabuhamya, those who testify as witnesses). Grace explained that during the genocide Alphonse had taken her children to protect them but then had demanded money from her to pay the killers to spare their lives. She asked to be reimbursed for the cash, approximately $6. Alphonse responded to her charges by admitting to receiving the money and describing how he had taken it to a local authority in order to procure false Hutu identity papers for the children. As Grace renewed her demands, one of the inyangamugayo, whom I call Faustin, himself a genocide survivor, chided her that she should be grateful that her children had survived. Rather than pressing Alphonse for money, Faustin continued, Grace should recognize he had done her a favor. People in the assembled crowd laughed aloud at Grace’s claim and at Faustin’s gentle remonstrance.
In this example like many others, the inyangamugayo had to actively intervene to advocate compromise. Yet, the inyangamugayo pressuring Grace had experienced the same violence as she had, had also lost family members, and currently lived in an equivalent position of poverty. These shared structural and experiential dimensions do not erase coercive potential, of course, but they suggest to me there is limited utility to an analysis that reduces every interaction to coercion or that distrusts any performance of unity and forgiveness as disingenuous. Similarly, even as some participants suggested Alphonse’s confession was coerced, other participants implied that he may have been the one exerting pressure on others, such as Grace. I fear that focusing analysis on measuring coercion risks reproducing the hierarchy of suffering contained in the government’s dominant narrative of the genocide, which silences and delegitimizes particular forms of experience (Burnet 2012; Doughty 2008; Lemarchand 2009).
Likewise, in the comite y’abunzi example with Beata and Joselyne, while we can and should ask how coercion shaped the women’s participation, we need to move beyond coercion to explore the complex dynamics around why Joselyne would come to a legal forum to address Beata’s accusations that she engaged in sexual acts with passing men, or to examine what was at stake in the kinds of logics and language that mediators used to reason with the participants. Similarly, the employment dispute between the watchman and the nuns before the legal aid clinic does not seem to be adequately captured as a “crime of exploitation,” which Harri Englund writes of in connection with legal aid as mediation in Malawi (2006:123–169). More generally, Rwandans routinely told me that they perceived the call for compromise within comite y’abunzi and the legal aid clinic as relatively benign, because individuals, not the state, served as plaintiffs and there was no armed police presence. People in structural positions that tended to render them vulnerable through gacaca sometimes felt the abunzi or the legal aid clinic staff could, in fact, challenge status quo power relations, such that the people likely to feel coerced were those with comparatively high economic, social, and political capital.
Overall, I suggest that it behooves us to move beyond the broad brush of coercive harmony, to attend equally to the fraught and iterative processes through which people varyingly took on and contested the self-regulating practices of mediation. My attention to coercion and negotiation may seem part of a theoretically dated discussion of structure and agency, yet these themes remain a central conundrum in contemporary scholarship on Rwanda (Burnet 2012; Clark 2010; Straus and Waldorf 2011; Thomson 2013), and in Rwanda itself, thanks to the strongly centralized, and increasingly authoritarian, state. Ultimately, I see acts of agency in Rwandans’ use of grassroots legal forums, wanting to ensure I do not reduce Rwandans who participate in these forums to automatons, even as I recognize the deeply controlling and threatening nature of the state, and the way state power penetrates people’s ordinary lives, as Thomson (2013) has richly described. Instead, I ask, how do people contest meanings of gender, guilt and innocence with respect to the genocide (“genocide citizenship”), access to resources, family, and ethnicity within postgenocide Rwanda’s architecture of social repair? Examples throughout this book raise complex questions about why, when, and how people advocate for and against unity, and what, ultimately, is at stake in the debate over the legitimacy of mediation principles. The ethnographic chapters that make up the body of the book explore these contested negotiations in order to examine how people attempted to remake moral communities within frameworks of mediation.
Notes on Fieldwork and Field Sites
This book is based on eighteen months of ethnographic research I carried out in Rwanda between 2002 and 2008, including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, conducted in Kinyarwanda, French, and English. I attended fifty-six gacaca sessions during an extended stay from July 2007 through July 2008, as well as fourteen mediation committee sessions and twelve legal aid clinic sessions. I supplemented attendance at gacaca sessions with repeated semistructured interviews with a cross-section of people