Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T10:50:01.869Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gacaca, Genocide, Genocide Ideology: The Violent Aftermaths of Transitional Justice in the New Rwanda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2020

Mark Anthony Geraghty
Mark Anthony Geraghty*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University College London
*
m.geraghty@ucl.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article investigates the violent aftermaths of Rwanda's 1994 Genocide and Liberation war by analyzing its Gacaca Courts, which framed themselves as a “traditional” mechanism of transitional justice. These specialized genocide tribunals, in operation between 2002 and 2012, authorized laypersons to sentence their neighbors to up to life in prison. They passed judgment on almost two million cases, at an official conviction rate of 86 percent. I argue that through their practice, “genocide” came to be constituted as a crime whose contours extended far beyond the boundaries of any international legal definition. It included a wide range of acts, utterances, and inner states, as potentially infinite manifestations of a boundless criminal interiority named “genocide ideology,” the necessary ‘driving force’ behind acts of genocide. Within Gacaca, genocide ideology was constituted as the continuing destructive potential of Hutu to menace or even disrespect innocent Tutsi, who were constituted as metonymic of the “new” state. The paranoid hermeneutics of those trials led them to project such an interiority within ‘others,’ imagined as constantly on the verge of erupting into insurrectionary violence, threatening the state's very foundation. The figure of the “Hutu” was transformed into a negative political category operating as a spectral threat haunting the New Rwanda. Gacaca led to a realization throughout the vast population that it marked as “Hutu” that the crime of genocide could potentially inhabit any and perhaps even all of them, thereby producing a generalized fear and pervasive silence.

Keywords

Gacacagenocidegenocide ideologyviolent aftermathslaw-founding violencerevolutionthe New Rwandawitchcraft
Type
The Good Kill: Law, Ethics, Technique
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 588 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor. 2010. Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Amin, Shahid. 1995. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Austin, John. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1997[1921]. Critique of Violence. In Bullock, Marcus and Jennings, Michael W., eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. New York: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 2006. Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Eiland, Howard and Jennings, Michael W., eds. New York: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Blanchot, Maurice. 1981. The Narrative Voice. In The Gaze of Orpheus, and other Literary Essays. Barrytown: Station Hill Press.Google Scholar
Chakravarty, Anuradha. 2016. Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda's Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chanock, Martin. 1985. Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clapham, Christopher, ed. 1998. African Guerrillas. Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L.. 2012. History on Trial: Memory, Evidence, and the Forensic Production of the Past. In Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John L. 2001. Colonialism, Culture, and the Law. Law & Social Inquiry 26, 2: 305–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corey, Allison and Joireman, Sandra. 2004. Retributive Justice: The Gacaca Courts in Rwanda. African Affairs 103, 410: 73–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1977. Limited Inc. Graff, Gerald, ed. Mehlman, Jeffrey and Weber, Samuel, trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’ In Anidjar, Gil, ed., Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Doughty, Kristin. 2016. Remediation in Rwanda: Grassroots Legal Forums. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Allen. 2015. Traumatizing the Truth Commission. In Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felman, Shoshana. 2002. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Fields, Karen. 1985. Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Bertani, Mauro and Fontana, Alessandro, eds. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2014. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Harcourt, Bernard E. and Brion, Fabienne, eds. Sawyer, Stephen W., trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fujii, Lee Ann. 2009. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Geraghty, Mark Anthony. 2016. Genocide Ideology, Nation-Building, Counter-Revolution: Specters of the Rwandan Nation-State. PhD diss, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Getty, Arch, Naumov, Oleg, and Sher, Benjamin. 2010. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Gravel, Pierre Bettez. 1968. Remera: A Community in Eastern Ruanda. Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
Henderson, Jennifer and Wakeham, Pauline, eds. 2013. Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terrence. O., eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hodos, George H. 1987. Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, Richard. 1965. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Michael. 2003. From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual Healing. Australian Journal of Anthropology 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imvaho Nshya. 2004. Kurwanya Ingengabitekerezo Ya Jenoside, Bisaba Uruhare Rwa Buri Wese—Hon. Safari. Edition no. 1558 (19–25 Nyakanga [July]): 7.Google Scholar
Ingelaere, Bert. 2016. Inside Rwanda's Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Kagame, Alexis. 1969. Introduction Aux Grands Genres Lyriques de l'ancien Rwanda. Butare: Éditions universitaires du Rwanda.Google Scholar
Lepselter, Susan. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Madley, Benjamin. 2016. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2000. The Truth According to the TRC. In Amadiume, Ifi and An-Na'im, Abdullahi, eds., The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle and Coutin, Susan Bibler. 2014. Technologies of Truth in the Anthropology of Conflict. American Ethnologist 41, 1: 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moodie, Ellen. 2010. El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mwambari, David. 2019. Music and the Politics of the Past: Kizito Mihigo and Music in the Commemoration of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Memory Studies (Feb.): 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morality. Clark, Maudemarie and Swensen, Alan J., trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.Google Scholar
Perez, Isaias Rojas. 2008. Writing the Aftermath: Anthropology and ‘Post-Conflict.’ In Poole, Deborah, ed., A Companion to Latin American Anthropology. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Prunier, Gérard. 2009. Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Reyntjens, Filip. 1990. Le Gacaca Ou La Justice Du Gazon Au Rwanda. Politique Africaine 40: 31–41.Google Scholar
Reyntjens, Filip. 2013. Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 123–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Rosalind, Waldorf, Lars, and Hazan, Pierre, eds. 2010. Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, James. 2006. Naming the Witch. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Slotta, James. 2015. Phatic Rituals of the Liberal Democratic Polity: Hearing Voices in the Hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 1: 130–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taussig, Mick. 1989. Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as a State of Siege. Social Text 23: 3–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teitel, Ruti. 2008. Transitional Justice Globalized. International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, 1: 1–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theidon, Kimberly. 2014. Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Viola, Lynne. 2017. Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Waldorf, Lars. 2006. Mass Justice for Mass Atrocity: Rethinking Local Justice as Transitional Justice. Temple Law Review 79, 1: 1–87.Google Scholar
Whyte, Martin King. 1974. Small Groups and Political Rituals in China. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Monica Hunter. 1951. Witch Beliefs and Social Structure. American Journal of Sociology 56, 4: 307–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Richard. 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar