Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

Chapter 8 focuses on the popular musical competition Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It pays particular attention to local debates about the merits of both ‘playback’ – i.e. lip-synched – and ‘live’ performance, and what they reveal about the wider relationship between the state and Rwandan youth. The chapter argues that the competition attempted to create a post-genocide celebrity subject who was required to ‘playback’ government ideology through both words and actions. However, audiences were not satisfied with these playback performances and insisted instead that popular artists should be able to perform live. These debates indexed wider anxieties about young people’s ability to access global networks – perceived to be the way to wealth and success – and called into question who was and who was not included in the government’s development vision.

This chapter examines the popularity of Kinyarwanda-language rap and hip hop in urban Rwanda. It considers how it can be understood as a genre both of anger and sorrow, revealing Kigali as a site not of progress and modernity but rather of poverty and deception. The genre’s use and invention of Kinyarwanda slang is considered, as well as its politics. The chapter argues that a simple resistance–domination binary is unhelpful for truly understanding hip hop’s local complexities. Instead, it takes into account the carefully guarded silences that hip hop artists maintained, and the ways in which the performance of swaga was less available to young women than to young men.

Chapter 4 examines in detail a Christian crusade called Rwanda Shima Imana or Rwanda Thanksgiving Day. It explores the controversies that arose from it, in particular a conflict between a well-known Pentecostal pastor and the Catholic singer Kizito Mihigo. The conflict was in part about power: who has the right, ability, and authority to interpret the Bible and, by extension, Rwanda’s history and collective memory. This chapter also complicates the process of transformation, as some hearts were considered unable to transform, a situation which was often related to ethnic identity.

The Introduction revisits the judicial saga between the vulture fund FG Hemisphere and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s cobalt reserve, before Britain’s Privy Council to illustrate the blurry divisions between state/non-state entities, offshore/onshore capitalism. Tracking the patterns of symbolic valuation that justify the relationship between the African South and the global economy requires breaking away from the functionalist understanding of law and global value chains. The Introduction sets out the book’s research strategy, which is further explained in Chapter 1. Embracing the global turn in sociology, this involves tracking interconnected dynamics of legal intermediation across Britain, France and the US, in former British, French and Belgian colonies, in tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, as well as in the institutionalisation of the international legal order. Approaching these interconnected dynamics as imperial encounters provides us with a history of the present relationship between law, politics and global finance.

Chapter 7 tracks the transformation of the position of Paris induced by the neoliberal turn. The marketplace of intermediaries between resource-rich African states and French businesses has long been derided as an outgrowth of the Françafrique, the interpersonal shadow networks linking France to its African pré carré. The neoliberal turn fostered the prominence of corporate lawyers as key intermediaries between the state and the market. It was also deployed within the system of the Françafrique. Due to the historical distancing of the Paris bar from business, French corporate law pioneers contributed to the expansion of a French corporate bar under the double thrust of the European Common Market and the model of the Wall Street corporate law firm. It is also as intermediaries of US multinational corporate law firms that they entered the former French pré carré in Africa qua a legal market.

Chapter 8 examines how social hierarchies are reproduced through the operations of justice. It argues that justice institutions, whether national or supranational, are systematically characterised by restricted professional markets of repeat players (Galanter 1974) who act as gatekeepers of the relationship with justice users (individuals, corporations or states). The globalisation and financialisation of global value chains is reinforcing rather than weakening the post-Cold War competition between legal ordering claims. The contrasted development of justice institutions (from the US Supreme Court; asylum justice; interstate adjudication; investment arbitration to international criminal justice) demonstrates that it is fostering the global diffusion of the Wall Street model of the corporate law firm as an engine of legal globalisation and for the reproduction of legal and social hierarchies. This positions justice institutions as practical and symbolic boundary-making sites between capitalism’s so-called cores and its peripheries.