Introduction
Claude complained about the overburdened court system: “I think this is our culture. In Rwanda, people like to go to court” (June 2022).Footnote 1 As a legal aid provider at a Rwandan non-governmental organization (NGO), Claude and his colleagues are proponents of the international and national programming on the rule of law, which, according to the increasing rates of reported rights violations, is successful in raising awareness of the law’s potential in recognizing disputes. But Claude and his colleagues also acknowledge that the court system is universally known for its cumbersome process. The system, they argue, is not designed to handle each and every dispute, and this is especially challenging in the context of Rwanda, where the Government of Rwanda (GoR) promotes “unity and reconciliation” through legal institutions that continue to rebuild and distance themselves from a “culture of impunity” and decades of “bad governance” prior to and throughout the 1994 genocide (Buckley-Zistel Reference Buckley-Zistel2008; Burnet Reference Burnet2008; Clark Reference Clark2010; Gasanabo et al. Reference Gasanabo, Nikuze, Brehm and Parks2020; Nyseth Brehm and Fox Reference Nyseth Brehm and Fox2017). Drawing on interviews with legal aid providers, this article asks: how do intermediary actors like legal aid providers manage unwieldy caseloads while communicating the “unification” aims of the state?
In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda,Footnote 2 Claude’s declaration that there is a culture of legal optimism appears striking, given that legal aid providers at both NGO and governmental legal aid centers (MAJ)Footnote 3 manage cases with the goal of ensuring most never reach the courts. As Claude explains, “We need to not only make them aware of the laws but make them aware of what the laws do” (June 2022). By increasing awareness of what laws do, Claude wants to create shared expectations of individuals’ obligations to maintain the state’s vision of social cohesion. In this way, people will come to learn the limits of the law and prevent misaligned expectations when the process is slow, expensive, inadequate, or against their favor. In interviews with lawyers such as Claude, I situate the case study of legal aid providers in Rwanda within the broader literature on how intermediators strategically navigate contexts undergoing ideological consolidation and resource restrictions.
The scholarship on collective memory shows how social and political transformations are especially significant in revealing how political leaders rely on the reciprocal relationship between “culture” and law to shape governance strategies (Jansen Reference Jansen2007; Savelsberg and King Reference Savelsberg and King2007; Savelsberg and McElrath Reference Savelsberg and McElrath2014; Teeger Reference Teeger2014; Zubrzycki and Woźny Reference Zubrzycki and Woźny2020). These processes unfold in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts where social actors grapple with multiple, and at times conflicting, ideologies regarding the law’s utility (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2021; McDonnell Reference McDonnell2020; McEvoy Reference McEvoy2019; Roychowdhury Reference Roychowdhury2021). Importantly, social actors who are charged with delivering social services become decision-makers in navigating institutional logics and constricted political contexts alongside the complex realities presented before them (Batesmith and McEvoy Reference Batesmith and McEvoy2025; Kucinskas and Zylan Reference Kucinskas and Zylan2023; Shiff Reference Shiff2021; Watkins-Hayes Reference Watkins-Hayes2009).
Drawing primarily on ethnographic observations and 30 interviews with legal aid center staff throughout Rwanda, I argue that legal aid providers’ strategies to manage cases are guided by the state’s ideological pursuit of unity and reconciliation. I conceptualize the state’s use of unity and reconciliation as a moral vision of social cohesion. Moral visions are bundles of beliefs and ideas about how to behave and interact with others in the present and immediate future (Farrell Reference Farrell2015). Specifically, Rwandans are expected to avoid interpersonal conflict, and when conflict does arise, they should resolve disputes amicably. As I show, the state’s vision of social cohesion relies on each and every person, including the legal aid providers, to fulfill their obligations to the family, community, and the nation. That is, the state’s moral vision of social cohesion emphasize communal well-being over individual rights.
Legal aid providers in Rwanda rely on two strategies to communicate the moral vision of social cohesion in hopes of reducing cases, but equally important, shaping ways of being as subjects of the state. First, legal aid providers orient people to the evolving institution of legal aid through community gatherings that attempt to prevent disputes from occurring in the first place. As such, orientation is an active and interactional process to shape the importance of building and maintaining relationships to ensure social cohesion in the form of loyalty to the state’s agenda. Second, legal aid providers stall people from taking cases to court when they risk the state’s mission of social cohesion that promotes and maintains peaceful relationships. They also depict the courts as resulting in a “winner-vs-loser” that risks the communal aspect of social cohesion, where both parties resolve the conflict with contempt for the courts rather than content with each other. These strategies ultimately reduce cases from reaching the courts while reaffirming the state’s control.
The implications of this study go beyond the case of post-genocide Rwanda by helping us better understand how intermediators charged with delivering social services deal with constraints that are related to the influence of international aid, national politics, and local inequalities. Rather than assume social actors’ actions are solely predictable by the state’s ideology or lack of resources, I argue we should consider how lawyers in a politically repressive and resource-constrained context creatively maintain the state’s ideological pursuits while also appealing to local populations.
In what follows, I review the literature on the state’s use of ideology during societal transitions before turning to the scholarship on social actors as decision-makers within constrained contexts. I then introduce the Rwandan case to contextualize its post-genocide governance and legal environment. Next, I draw on my ethnographic and interview data to show how that state’s moral vision of social cohesion influences the interconnected strategies used by legal aid providers to simultaneously manage cases through two strategies: orienting and stalling. The strategies I identify explain two interconnected processes that demonstrate how legal aid providers navigate the constant push and pull factors from international, national, and local influences. The outcome of these strategies is that legal aid providers expand the governance system in their communication of the state’s moral vision of social cohesion. Finally, I conclude by exploring the significance of my findings for how intermediators navigate multiple constraints during societal transitions.
Moral visions of social cohesion
A cultural sociology perspective argues that “unsettled” times are ripe for political leaders to promote agendas. This is because “cultural meanings are more highly articulated and explicit, because they model patterns of action that do not ‘come naturally’” (Swidler Reference Swidler1986: 284). Oftentimes, political leaders encourage new ways of being that align with group cohesion while distancing the present (and future) from traumatic pasts (Jansen Reference Jansen2007; Simko Reference Simko2018). In the wake of mass violence, states draw on transitional justice mechanisms, including criminal courts, truth commissions, and constitutional reform, to promote a unified way of being (McEvoy Reference McEvoy2007; Savelsberg and McElrath Reference Savelsberg and McElrath2014; Teitel Reference Teitel2000). In doing so, leaders enforce new ways of being through state discourse that promotes a certain ideology for governance goals (Triplett Reference Triplett2024).
Societal transformations thus provide states with opportunities to consolidate their legal systems and cultural values under nationalist ideologies. Consider Laura Nader’s (Reference Nader1990) concept of harmony ideology. Harmony ideology is the notion that local solidarity and cultural identity are maintained through “a view of harmonious behavior as more civilized than disputing behavior [and] the belief that consensus is of greater survival value than controversy” (Reference Nader1990: 2). Nader further argues the components of harmony ideology are common across contexts where the historical influence of colonialism and missionaries on alternative dispute resolution (ADR) are diminished while local leaders emphasize an “illusion of peace” as a “natural” practice tarnished by colonialism (Reference Nader1990: 3). The promotion of “harmony” further signals a sense of legitimacy to external actors that outside intervention is not necessary and instead positions the harmonious community in relation to neighboring “dysfunctional” communities. Ultimately, harmony ideology is a way of organizing social life before and throughout the law with attention to social relations (Doughty Reference Doughty2016; Markovits Reference Markovits1986; Nader Reference Nader1990).
Kristin Doughty’s (Reference Doughty2016: 169) work on grassroot legal forums in the immediate aftermath of post-genocide Rwanda builds on harmony ideology to show how intermediators at the university legal aid clinic had discretionary power which was “often linked to national policy,” but also “not reducible to implementing national policy” when deciding to use mediation. In doing so, Doughty (Reference Doughty2016: 176) finds intermediators become brokers who negotiate the ambiguous connotations of “culture” through legal guidance to shape “norms of belonging, responsibility, and access to resources in the present.” Consequently, I extend Doughty’s work by homing in on such discretions that occur in the gap between policy and complex reality, especially as legal clinics expand across the country and caseloads continue to increase. I argue that we can better understand legal aid provider’s discretionary power as strategies to manage cases and how the use of “culture” maintains the state’s legitimacy.
Before turning to the strategies in detail, I conceptualize moral visions as a governance strategy to consolidate ideologies. I argue that the Rwandan state’s use of a moral vision of social cohesion emphasizes a forward-looking bundle of beliefs prescribed to citizens about how society ought to be. In doing so, I adopt Justin Farrell’s (Reference Farrell2015: 35) conceptualization of moral visions as “… a bundle of practices, beliefs, and feelings groups (and individuals) use to discern right and wrong, good and bad, desirable and undesirable, just and unjust ….” I extend his vision of nature and environmental conflict to the post-conflict context, arguing that moral visions of social cohesion are a similar bundle of cognitive beliefs for social relationships to rebuild the social fabric of society. For Farrell, “vision,” as a bundle of beliefs and practices, aligns with literature on repertoires (Swidler Reference Swidler1986), schemas (Enriquez and Saguy Reference Enriquez and Saguy2016; Shiff Reference Shiff2021), and worldviews (Carroll Reference Carroll2014) in understanding how people make sense of societal complexity.
Visions are important in shaping societal transitions, especially in contested periods when political leaders invoke visions to idealize an ahistorical past (Luft Reference Luft2015, Reference Luft2020). In Nazi Germany, for example, racialized visions created and enforced a binary between an idealized “race” while excluding “the Other” (Skarpelis Reference Skarpelis2023). Examining the contested Polish Constitutional Preamble, Geneviève Zubrzycki (Reference Zubrzycki2001: 641) similarly shows how post-communist Poland’s “civic vision” relied on an “attempt at ‘indigenizing’ a vision of the nation” that draws on “various (glorious) historical precedents” and makes “the deliberate effort to bypass the period most clearly associated with the civic discourse in contemporary social consciousness ….” Transitional periods thus allow for “visions” to be promoted as nostalgic unity while simultaneously consolidating nationalist ideology for present-day state governance.
Richard Wilson (Reference Wilson2001) makes a similar argument about post-apartheid South Africa, where the concept of “Ubuntu” blended human rights talk into nation-building. Ubuntu became enmeshed in post-apartheid politics, “representing a romanticized vision of ‘the rural African community,’” emphasizing “reciprocity, respect for human dignity, community cohesion and solidarity” (Wilson Reference Wilson2001: 9). Yet rather than view Ubuntu and similar concepts as tenets of unique cultural contexts, Wilson (Reference Wilson2001: 13) suggests they are examples of “‘cultural’ signs” that are given nationalistic meanings to “historicize and naturalize” the “rhetorical repertoire of state discourse.”
What is more, the connotation of vision signals “a sense of forward-looking” that shows parallels to “the utilitarian vision looking toward ‘progress’ or the spiritual vision looking toward creating an eventual ‘Eden’” (Farrell Reference Farrell2015: 35). This is an important signifier in Rwanda where international development efforts seek to “progress” society while national policy agendas, such as the aptly named Vision 2020 and 2050, blend development and nation-building initiatives to consolidate the state’s ideology of unity and reconciliation (Purdeková Reference Purdeková, Campioni and Noack2012; MINECOFIN 2012, 2020). We can thus use the double meaning of “vision” as both “seeing what is and imagining a desired state of affairs” (Scoville Reference Scoville2022: 1104). Clearly, visions are important as both analytical tools and in guiding national narratives and belief systems, but we must also consider how visions are communicated.
Strategies and decision-makers
One way the state’s ideology is transmitted to everyday people is through their interactions with the law. Indeed, lawyers communicate legal jargon as it is often incomprehensible to the ordinary person. In examining the interaction between lawyers and clients, Sarat and Felstiner (Reference Sarat and Felstiner1986: 94) argue that such interactions are “where legal norms and folk norms come together to shape responses to grievances, injuries, and problems.” Further, discussions around conflict are spaces where informal norms, myths, and stories enforce expectations and boundaries around “insiders” and “outsiders” (Edelman et al. Reference Edelman, Uggen and Erlanger1999; Engel Reference Engel1984; Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse1986) or “classifications between ‘who we are’ and ‘who we are not’” (Yazdiha Reference Yazdiha2017: 4) within a given community.
We also know that “the state” is not a singular entity but instead includes street-level bureaucrats embedded in institutional logics who become decision-makers, seeking to resolve the complex social problems presented before them (Lara-Millán Reference Lara-Millán2014; Seim Reference Seim2017; Watkins-Hayes Reference Watkins-Hayes2009). Talia Shiff (Reference Shiff2021) provides a rare look into the process of United States asylum law, where lawyers navigate “discordance” – the mismatch between moral categories of deservingness and codified law. Shiff (Reference Shiff2021) argues that “bureaucratic creativity” emerges when lawyers rely on affective, cognitive, and organizational processes to determine asylum cases. Such explanations suggest social actors become adept in making decisions to manage social problems, and that these decision processes become shared within institutional logics across contexts (Bowman et al. Reference Bowman, Lowrey-kinberg and Gould2024). As such, social actors charged with managing social problems contend with the meaning of legal ideology in situations where they are “reacting to the law rather than determining its meaning” (Edelman Reference Edelman2016, 12).
These spaces within organizations where social action is shaped by contradictions between institutional logics and cultural scripts are what Erin McDonnell (Reference McDonnell2017) conceptualizes as “pockets of bureaucratic governance.” Social actors within institutional bureaucracies are not acting with “merely material manifestations, such as written rules and regulations, but also a set of orientations, practices, and inclinations grounded in the lived experience of people” (McDonnell Reference McDonnell2017: 503). Expanding on this, Ferguson (Reference Ferguson2021: 701) demonstrates how “pockets of world society” emerge for social actors in Senegal’s judiciary, who operate in a context where liberal human rights scripts are both accepted and distanced, based on the prioritization of a Western audience or a national collective consciousness.
This is in line with Jillian LaBranche’s findings that Rwandan teachers are constrained by macro-level factors, such as government mandates dictating curriculum and speech, as well as micro-level factors, such as their personal experiences during the violence and students’ familial knowledge and experiences of genocide (LaBranche Reference LaBranche2026). These constraints create “spaces of opposition and negotiation” for both parents and teachers to contend with the state’s official narrative (LaBranche Reference LaBranche2024). Social actors within institutional bureaucracies clearly become creative in their strategies to serve and interact with everyday people, even in heavily censored and restrictive contexts. Markovits (Reference Markovits2010: 201) work in socialist East Germany shows how the “warmth” of the law that appeared to focus on harmonious relationships actually relied on lawyers to promote “… a creation–a fiction, rather–of the state itself ...” Her work further shows how lawyers viewed the family unit as an instrumental function to the state’s success, which shows similarities to how legal aid providers in Rwanda convey obligations in their management of cases (Markovits Reference Markovits1986, Reference Markovits1989, Reference Markovits1971).
Similarly, the active process of waiting shows resemblance to Poulami Roychowdhury’s (Reference Roychowdhury2021) study of gender-based violence (GBV) in India, where she illustrates how legal aid providers “incorporate” women into the state by assigning tasks, duties, and reminders of their obligations to move their cases forward. While Roychowdhury suggests low state capacity and legal enforcement drive incorporation, I show how the GoR’s moral vision drives incorporation. In doing so, I take up Doughty’s call to explore how the practice of waiting in Rwanda is an active process “forming social solidarity and a means of navigating an ambiguous present” through the communication of the state’s moral visions of social cohesion (Doughty Reference Doughty2016: 230).
What is more, recent research challenges the binary between “resistance” and “complicity” among professionals in organizational cultures that present moral challenges (Kucinskas and Zylan Reference Kucinskas and Zylan2023). This is the case in heavy-handed state contexts, such as post-genocide, authoritarian Cambodia (Batesmith and McEvoy Reference Batesmith and McEvoy2025) as well as rural, resource-restricted United States where the state’s absence leads judges to “self-identify not only as decision-makers, but as the eventual, if not only, source of respect, time, and ultimately, access …” to legal aid (Statz Reference Statz2021: 13–14). Clearly, lawyers deploying strategies to manage cases while also grappling with the state’s conditions is not unique to Rwanda.
This paper thus builds on these literatures to consider how legal aid providers react to the GoR’s ideology of social cohesion through their process of assisting poor and rural people. I argue that legal aid providers in Rwanda rely on two strategies: orienting and stalling. I define orienting as the strategy employed by legal aid providers to align individuals within a new moral order, one that encourages them to behave and act in a manner that prioritizes fulfilling obligations for the nation’s greater good. While orienting is a process of guiding people into the ideology of the law, stalling cases is a strategy to halt people in the legal process. Although the case is on hold, people are not waiting around aimlessly. For Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu2000: 238), waiting is “delaying without destroying hope, of adjourning without totally disappointing …” which is the intent of legal aid providers who want to maintain ties with people bringing forth cases.Footnote 4 Legal aid providers follow this line of thinking in their desire to maintain ties with people bringing forth cases, while structural and institutional barriers limit the case from moving forward. In doing so, cases are kept out of the court system to avoid a “winner-vs-loser” scenario while also legitimizing the moral vision of social cohesion that expect obedience to, and participation in, the state’s ideology. Before turning to these strategies, I next provide a brief overview of the post-genocide Rwanda case.
Case background: post-genocide Rwanda
To better understand how legal aid providers communicate a moral vision of social cohesion, I briefly contextualize two interconnected elements of the case: Rwanda’s post-genocide governance and the evolution of legal aid.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ended the 1994 genocide, which followed the 1990–94 civil war. The RPF has remained in power since, primarily by President Paul Kagame, first elected in 2000. A large influx of international aid followed the genocide, and the GoR’s ambitious development priorities, such as economic growth and gender equality, have garnered it the “donor darling” moniker (Mann and Berry Reference Mann and Berry2016). While this is celebrated by some international actors, others argue it excuses the consolidation of state power through nation-building and development initiatives. This consolidation relies on the “hegemonic master narrative” that posits the RPF has “the sole legitimacy and moral authority to define and interpret” the past as the victors who ended the genocide (Mwambari Reference Mwambari2023: 5–6).
The GoR generally enforces normative binaries through their narrative, such as present-day “good governance” practices vs the “bad governance” of colonialism and the subsequent independence period that promoted divisionism (Caponi and Göçek Reference Caponi, Göçek, Jacobs and DeGloma2023). As such, the discussion and naming of difference remains politically charged and highly sensitive topics of discussion around race, ethnicity, and regional differences are outlawed per the Rwandan Constitution (2003 (rev. 2015): Ch 3, Art. 10, #2; Luft and Thomson Reference Luft and Thomson2021). The GoR also positions itself in relation to the future using a “conflict-development nexus,” which puts forth moral assumptions: development is good, conflict is bad, and all conflict must be addressed to promote development for the collective nation (Purdeková Reference Purdeková, Campioni and Noack2012). The state embeds its moral binary boundaries – e.g., past vs future, conflict vs development, and good vs bad – in essentially all sectors of Rwandan society through their National Decentralization Policy (2001, 2021) that charges local governments with implementing national policies.
“Home-Grown solutions” (HGS) exemplify this; defined as “‘trade mark’ solutions developed by Rwandans based on local opportunities, cultural values and history to fast track their development” (Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda 2003 (rev. 2015): Ch 3 and “have been the bedrock of Rwanda’s reconstruction and transformation journey after the Genocide against Tutsi” (Rwanda Governance Board 2022). Further, the National Policy of Unity and Reconciliation (2020: 3) tasks each institution and individual with roles to fulfill for “a common vision for a better future,” and both governmental and NGOs should consider HGS throughout their operations to meet development goals. In this way, HGS are a tool to institutionalize a national collective memory into the political and legal system, influencing how moralized organizational and bureaucratic policies are “decentralized” throughout the country (Savelsberg and King Reference Savelsberg and King2005).
The state-led transitional justice hybrid courts, inikio gacaca (often shortened to gacaca), are among the most criticized HGS. Roughly translating to “courts of the grass,” the government implemented the courts to address nearly two million genocide cases in the wake of Rwanda’s decimated legal infrastructure and overcrowded prisons (Nyseth Brehm et al. Reference Nyseth Brehm, Uggen and Gasanabo2014). The name aptly describes the outdoor space where dispute resolution took place and carries over as a pre-colonial method of dispute resolution that continued throughout colonialism and post-independence as a system that addressed conflict related to property, land, and family disputes (Burnet Reference Burnet2008; Doughty Reference Doughty2015). For genocide crimes, the courts combined international criminal law with traditional dispute resolution that focused on restoring relationships and emphasized one’s “sense of worth primarily through their embeddedness in communities, from their connections first to family and then to their wider community” (Clark Reference Clark2010: 52).
A major critique among scholars is the RPF’s use of gacaca to extend lawfare, i.e., the use of legal institutions for political coercion (Meierhenrich Reference Meierhenrich2024).Footnote 5 Indeed, from 2002 to 2012, Rwandans were legally obliged to attend and participate in their community’s gacaca, which drastically shaped how people were socialized into subsequent legal institutions with expectations that mediators, and the state at-large, would continue to be accessible when resolving disputes, and their participation in the system was heavily encouraged, if not necessary. The courts also revealed distrust between neighbors years after the genocide and created new conflict related to court decisions, such as property rights, furthering the need for continued legal assistance (De Winne and Pohu Reference De Winne and Pohu2015; Doughty Reference Doughty2014, Reference Doughty2017).
At the Gacaca courts closing ceremony, President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame (June 18, Reference Kagame2012), remarked,
Gacaca, granted, had its imperfections. It received criticism both from within and outside Rwanda, yet those criticizing offered no viable alternatives that could deliver the results we needed … Although we are closing Gacaca courts today, we are aware that they have not resolved all problems. Many issues remain outstanding and will be dealt with through the formal courts.
Yet legal aid providers work hard to prevent additional cases from reaching the formal courts while dealing with these outstanding issues.
In 2001, Rwanda’s first legal aid clinic opened at the University of Rwanda – HuyeFootnote 6 to address ordinary disputes outside of gacaca, established in the same year. Still (re)-building the legal profession, law professors and students provided pro bono services for rights violations to poor Rwandans at the campus south of the capital. The high demand for legal aid led to the expansion to two universities in Kigali and the establishment of the Legal Aid Forum in 2006. Soon after, MAJ began rolling out as a national endeavor in 2007. The second phase of MAJ included a total of five districts before the implementation to all 30 districts in 2014 (Prime Minister’s order No 40/03 of 25/04/2014). This established the current uniform structure of MAJ with three lawyers employed by the Rwandan Ministry of Justice (MINIJUST) in each district, regardless of population size: a coordinator, a bailiff, and a staff overseeing GBV cases and comite y’abunzi (local mediators or abunzi) (Gasasira Gasana et al. Reference Gasasira Gasana, Gachihi, Amatsimbi and Ruvebana2021a; MINIJUST 2025).
While distinct from normative transitional justice mechanisms, legal aid clinics operate under the GoR’s “conflict-development nexus” logic that peace is possible through accessible legal institutions, a participatory approach, and emphasis on reconciliation (Purdeková Reference Purdeková, Campioni and Noack2012; see also Doughty Reference Doughty2016; Gasasira Gasana et al. Reference Gasasira Gasana, Gachihi, Amatsimbi and Ruvebana2021a, Reference Gasasira Gasana, Gachihi, Amatsimbi and Ruvebana2021b). The goal is thus to address disputes early on in hopes of preventing “cycles of violence” from starting again, notably in the context where hundreds of thousands of people convicted of genocide crimes are being released back into the same communities where they violated the very basis of social cohesion (King Reference King2011; Nzitatira and Gasasira Reference Nzitatira and Gasasira2024; Schenk-Day et al. Reference Schenk-Day, Nzitatira and Caponi2025).
Given the legal environment of Rwanda, where the state’s control over civil society heavily blurs the line between governmental/non-governmental, I conceptualize both MAJ and NGO legal aid centers as “catch-all bureaucracies” where frontline workers’ become “first responders” in interacting with clients who are “exposed to a range of individual-, family-, and community-level issues that are directly or indirectly tied to being at the bottom of the societal ladder” (Watkins-Hayes Reference Watkins-Hayes2009: 31).Footnote 7 NGOs in Rwanda work closely with the government to carry out approved programs, and those offering legal aid fall under the purview of MINIJUST. As such, there remains a great deal of interconnectedness between MAJ and NGO legal aid centers as they work closely together to address claims, and despite their institutional locations, the legal aid providers work together as colleagues to manage disputes while communicating the state’s policies.
This is not to diminish the important differences in funding structures and organizational hierarchies between state and non-state entities, and indeed, NGO staff acknowledged some separation from the state. However, the main difference between legal aid providers at MAJ and NGOs is that the government employs the former, while the latter largely rely on employment through rule-of-law promotion contracts funded by international actors such as the European Union (EU) and (formerly) United States Agency for International Development (USAID). These contracts encompass training on access to justice and rule of law programming that NGO staff implement for MAJ. Further, MAJ addresses both civil and criminal legal issues, but only represents civil cases in court. NGOs may specialize in assisting certain “vulnerable” groups (e.g., women, children, rural populations, people with disabilities, etc.), but as catch-all bureaucracies, they find themselves assisting with a variety of social problems brought before them, including those that are beyond their scope and capabilities.
The process of providing legal aid primarily begins when an individual – referred to as a “rights-holder” or “beneficiary” – brings forth a claim to the legal aid office. For some, the process begins earlier when local leaders and partner organizations, unable to initially resolve the dispute, may refer the individual to seek legal aid. The National Legal Aid Policy (2014) outlines that the evaluation of claims-making is a “merit test” to “discourage and prevent frivolous claims” by asking questions such as, “‘Is there any chance that this case can be won?’ ‘Is the addressed court competent’ or ‘Are there alternative routs [sic] to handle the case.’” The ability to answer such questions is essential to winning a court case, but also preventing cases from entering the court procedures that risk unity and reconciliation. For people whose lives are drastically changed by accessing rights to bodily autonomy, property, or economic support, losing a case in court when the law has been promoted as the solution can rupture their trust in legal aid providers. Losing cases then risks social relationships remain frail rather than healed. Thus, creating shared expectations is especially important within a context where legal institutions, and policies in general, have undergone several iterations in the past few decades.Footnote 8
For some time, legal aid providers relied on ubudehe categories to provide free legal aid to the indigent. Roughly translating to “collective action” in English, ubudehe was an HGS targeting poverty by ranking households based on need. Social services, such as legal aid, were provided for reduced costs, up to fully covered, based on the categorization of one’s household rather than their individual means.Footnote 9 Now phased out, legal aid providers consider additional characteristics as a way to holistically assess vulnerability, such as the claimant’s relation to the genocide, disability status, geographic location, and family support. Given that silencing of ethnicity is embedded throughout Rwandan society, legal aid providers strategically navigate such silences within their day-to-day jobs of interpreting codified law and policy for Rwandans deemed vulnerable (Burnet Reference Burnet2012). In this article, I conceptualize vulnerability as both the intersecting identities and experiences that individuals have along axes of oppression, or in the Rwandan context, the status as an historically marginalized people (Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda 2003 (rev. 2015); Collins et al. Reference Collins, Laws and Ntakirutimana2021), as well as the moralized assessment of an individual’s risk at increasing further disruption in their family and community.
In studying Rwanda’s post-genocide legal environment prior to MAJ’s nationwide expansion, Doughty (Reference Doughty2016) argues that we must consider how people adapt to the heavy influence of the state rather than assume the state’s coercion is a unified predictor of behaviors and actions. She cautions that identifying the state’s coercive nature should not be absent from a critique of international influence, nor should it romanticize “grassroots, bottom-up processes [as] the only repository of real social transformation” (Reference Doughty2016: 229). I build on Doughty’s (Reference Doughty2016) work to consider how the continued expansion of legal aid and increased case reporting have shaped legal aid providers’ strategies. For example, at MAJ alone, there is an overall increase in cases from 2015/2016 to 2023/2024 (17,869 and 20,227 cases, respectively) (MINIJUST 2017; 2024).Footnote 10 While the increased cases are likely a sign of increased awareness and improved reporting mechanisms, it is also a concern for justice sector staff. At what point in implementing a reporting mechanism should cases stabilize? How should legal aid providers manage the continued increase in reporting? Often left to their own decision-making in day-to-day tasks, legal aid providers are grappling with these questions to alleviate the overburdened courts by orienting people toward expectations and stalling cases from reaching the courts.
Research design and fieldwork
Using the case of legal aid in post-genocide Rwanda, this article relies on ethnographic and interview data from 2022 to better understand how intermediators manage push and pull factors from above and below. I focus on legal aid staff because they, more than heads of state and upper-level officials, are responsible for routinely interacting with Rwandans to shape and enforce legal beliefs and moral pathways for social action.
I spent three months conducting ethnographic observations as a research intern at a Kigali-based NGO and legal aid center. In addition to observations at the legal aid center, my data include trips to legal aid centers throughout Rwanda, awareness-raising events, and meetings with donors and government officials. I also draw upon 30 official semi-structured interviews, averaging around 90 minutes each, with current legal aid providers.Footnote 11 I define official interviews as those where I sat down with the specific purpose of going through my interview guide. Not included in this number are the dozens of unofficial interviews conducted during ethnographic participation; the majority of respondents were involved in several informal interviews. Of the 30 interviews, 19 were with MAJ staff, and the remaining 11 were with NGO staff who work closely with MAJ. Further, 16 were women, and 14 were men. All respondents had formal education training with at least a bachelor’s degree and supplemental credentials, while many were obtaining, or had already completed, graduate training.
I relied on snowball sampling due to the relatively close-knit network of legal aid providers. As I expected, there was some hesitation to speak to me, a foreigner, about social problems. This required several weeks of relationship-building. I benefited from the assistance of two Rwandan research assistants with whom I built rapport during previous trips, who also served as translators. Both research assistants, a man and a woman, each have over a decade of experience in conducting qualitative research. After some time, MINIJUST provided me with the contact information of all MAJ staff to conduct interviews and attend staff trainings, where I began purposively sampling based on geographic location and demographic characteristics. I am conscious that legal aid provider’s time with me equated to time away from their job in assisting people with real material needs and immediate assistance for legal matters; thus, I am grateful that MINIJUST allowed me to conduct several interviews during training sessions to minimally disrupt legal aid providers’ core responsibilities.
My Kinyarwanda is elementary, and respondents had a large variance in their comfortability with English, so interviews were conducted in one of three ways, in roughly equal distribution: solely by me, together with one research assistant, or solely by one of the research assistants. Similar to Nzitatira and Gasasira (Reference Nzitatira and Gasasira2024), I found no notable differences in the interviews based on the interviewer’s identity nor language of the interview. I suspect this is in part due to the study being explained as part of an American university study and the strong rapport my research assistants built with respondents.
Scholars have regularly discussed the ethical and logistical challenges of conducting research in Rwanda (e.g., Ingelaere Reference Ingelaere2015; Longman Reference Longman2017; Thomson Reference Thomson2018). I relied on these accounts to shape my research project as one that prioritizes safety and trust. In doing so, I use pseudonyms and refrain from mentioning locations and other potentially identifying information. The interviewer stated this upfront to participants and printed this in the interview guide that was approved for the research permit. I wanted to create a comfortable, open dialogue where interviewees could express their ideas and beliefs without explicit ties to their identity. However, this is not the norm in Rwanda, where transparency is often emphasized at the expense of anonymity. Given this, I also paid particular attention to “silences” and other metadata such as rumors and gossip (Burnet Reference Burnet2012; Fox Reference Fox2021; Fujii Reference Fujii2011). A few people wanted to participate, but only if they could use their own names. I explained that this would risk compromising the anonymity of the rest of the respondents due to the small sample size. One person ended up not participating for this reason, and a handful of respondents asked not to be recorded. When interviewees preferred not to be recorded, I or one of my research assistants took detailed notes. When participants consented to being recorded, interviews were transcribed with identifying information redacted.
I relied on abductive analysis to conduct several iterations of coding, going back and forth between my data and the literature to theorize how legal aid providers communicate moral ways of being while managing cases (Timmermans and Tavory Reference Timmermans and Tavory2022). Initially, I was interested in how legal aid providers categorize gendered harm, but this iterative process of abductive coding revealed how central the moral vision was to this process of managing cases in my written memos for each interview. I then coded for themes such as “case management strategies,” “comparison to past,” “hopes and aspirations,” “metaphors of conflict resolution,” and “perceptions of the law.” I also created diagrams and memos for my ethnographic field notes to connect themes across time and in relation to interviews. Through memo writing, I was able to focus on the importance of narratives that evolved throughout conversations and interviews, and often, at multiple iterations for the same respondent. These narratives revealed how respondents navigated multiple power dynamics, material restraints, and their own aspirations, which is important for how they communicate moral visions of social cohesion (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1995).
Findings
Legal aid providers seek to accomplish two, often contradictory, goals in their daily work: increase awareness of the law and alleviate their caseloads. I argue that legal aid providers attempt this by orienting people within the law’s potential as well as its limitations. They also stall cases perceived as antithetical to reconciliation and communal obligations. Both strategies require careful navigation of the cases brought before them in order to uphold the state’s vision of social cohesion.
While I present orienting first and then stalling, the strategies are not mutually exclusive. When claimants are not actively participating in the state’s vision for social cohesion by upholding their obligations, such as when one seeks separation from their partner, their case may be stalled. While stalling the case from reaching the courts, legal aid providers will (re-)orient the claimant into the moral vision of social cohesion that reminds them of their obligations to their family, community, and nation. This is important because, as I later show, stalling is not the end goal. Rather, I conclude that the end goal for legal aid providers is to shape ways of being that prioritize amicable relationships and the legitimacy of the law, and therefore, the state. Legal aid providers attempt this through a continuous emphasis on the interconnectedness of relations – between individuals and between individuals and the state.
Orientation
The office will orient vulnerable people on whether to take their case to court, the type of court to go to where necessary, or whether to go to mediators or whether there is no case at all … We want to help people to think of justice beyond courts of law and lawyers. We want Rwandans to fully participate in their justice system. (Tharcisse Karugarama, Former Minister of Justice)Footnote 12
How do people know when to take a case to court? What does legal mobilization entail for legal aid providers in evolving legal institutions? My data suggests legal aid providers rely on a strategy of orientation to market the potential possibilities of social cohesion. I define orientation as a relational, interactive process where legal aid providers attempt to align people with the procedures of the law and moral ideas about living together peacefully, as prescribed by the state. Given the critiques of gacaca and the dynamic evolution of the legal environment over the past several decades, legal aid providers attempt to challenge the law as an ultimate, top-down approach and instead position the law as one tool among many to resolve and prevent conflict. This strategy also attempts to alleviate the overwhelming caseloads that continue to increase.
The gap between what people understand about the law versus what the law actually says is a reality of rapid changes in legal institutions over several decades. It is within this context that legal aid providers orient people toward the dynamic Rwandan laws by communicating shared visions of social cohesion. David explained the job of legal aid providers as educators of the law first, then enforcers:
We know very well that ignorance of the law is not an excuse. But again, people should be helped instead of getting punished … There cannot be social cohesion when people are not sensitized, when they are not taught about what the law says on each and every thing. (July 2022)
Rather than bring down the “heavy hand of the law,” David and his colleagues focus on strengthening relationships, rather than punishment, for the people they counsel. Indeed, the prioritization and sustainability of relationships is crucial to a moral vision of social cohesion. Drawing on the moral vision of social cohesion that emphasizes peace and civic obligations, legal aid providers narrate the home as a building block for social cohesion in the community and the nation. In this way, relationships within the home are positioned as foundational to relations throughout the community and nation. This is explicit in an excerpt from a conversation I had with Antoine, “A country starts from the family. So having problems with the family causes problems at the country level. So we are happy to see people opening up, telling us their problems, their causes of the conflict, then we help them find a solution” (July 2022). Antoine, similar to his colleagues, relies on relationships with the people they serve to ensure interpersonal conflict is dealt with in hopes of preventing additional conflict within the community.
In this same vein, legal aid providers spend a great deal of effort enticing people through community legal awareness programs. These events bring people together, often with entertainment, to provide guidance and information on new laws, policies, and government expectations. The interaction between legal aid providers and vulnerable people allows for the transmission of expectations around obligations for the shared path toward social cohesion. In addressing the community, legal aid providers seek to deter conflict and disputes as a preventative mechanism. This is why legal aid providers proactively go into communities to promote their services alongside the realities, that is, the limitations, of the legal system. Yet legal aid providers are careful not to berate people with the heavy hand of the law. Instead, they creatively showcase the law through entertainment at sensitization programs.Footnote 13 This was evident during one of my observations when I first met Antoine.
After a several hour car ride from Kigali, we approached the village green that was already filling with people. Antoine was wearing a black polo with bold white lettering across the back that read “HITAMO GUKEMURA AMAKIMBIRANE MU BWUMVIKANE” which roughly translates from Kinyarwanda to “choose to resolve conflict amicably” in English. He and fellow legal aid providers and paralegals wore the shirts as they greeted a few of the hundreds of people packed around a stage with blaring music in the village center.
To kick of the event, Betty, a boisterous legal aid provider, announced a dance competition where participants had a chance at winning one of the polos. Betty surprised the handful of eager participants by not only gifting a polo to each of them, but by dancing with them. The audience erupted in laughter and cheers louder than the music. (Field Notes, June 2022)
These reactions by community members during the legal programming are strategically crafted by legal aid providers to present positive interactions with the law. The messaging printed on the shirts and shared through dancing is a nod to the encouragement of resolving disputes peacefully through dialogue rather than violence.
After the dance competition, a group of professional actors conducted a drama that depicted how rights violations are especially detrimental for people with disabilities, children, and the elderly. Attendees watched as the drama presented a storyline of respecting each other’s rights for the benefit of the community, but also how community members should stand up for the rights of others. To conclude the event, a mobile legal clinic was set up where people could seek legal advice and showcase their good citizenship obligation to report rights violations which was presented during the aforementioned drama. (Field Notes, June 2022)
The hours-long programming and collective entertainment are a stark contrast from the somber Gacaca courts, which operated in village centers only a few decades prior, but both justice mechanisms rely on bringing people together in their communities to be “peaceful citizens” (Eramian Reference Eramian2018). Legal aid providers such as Rose spoke in optimistic metaphors about the spreading of legal ideology by explaining, “The major reason for the establishment of MAJ, the major one, is decentralization. Bringing justice near the people” (July 2022). This slogan of “bringing justice near the people” was common throughout interviews as a justification for the expansion of legal aid as a means to orient people closer to where they live. According to Michael, who worked for Gacaca before MAJ, this expansion of services is a corrective to past governance. He recalled there were “no institutions to hold [people] accountable,” and “If there is a big army officer who gives orders to rape and kill, then people do it happily because it is sanctioned by leaders. I saw that – people talking about that during Gacaca” (July 2022). Michael was not alone in thinking that presenting the rule of law to people would prevent future violence by creating bilateral accountability between the government and its citizens through a visible presence. Yet legal aid providers were empathetic to the continued lack of knowledge about the laws.
As David explained,
In order to help people avoid [breaking the law], we lay some preventive mechanisms, instead of dealing with the consequences, we do teaching, we go to them, tell them, “Now the law is like this. In the past, we allowed you to do ABCD, now the law doesn’t allow it.” Instead of facing the consequences, we prevent things before they happen. (July 2022).
In raising awareness of the obligations people have to uphold good citizenship, legal aid providers have distanced the traumatic past from shared visions of how people should behave in the face of new institutions of accountability. This is in line with the civic education initiative of Ndi Umunyarwanda (roughly translating to “I am Rwandan”) that encourages unity and reconciliation through crafting a collective national identity after the genocide. In this way, orienting people is an interaction with fellow community members and the law’s possibilities as well as limitations. Legal aid providers deploy this strategy to shape future visions of the community where conflict and disputes are minimal and handled through “amicable resolution.” Importantly, it is also an opportunity for people to be taught, or reminded, of their obligations as citizens before a case is moved forward. In a conversation several weeks after meeting at the community event, Antoine again explained the importance of guiding people into ways of being rather than being overly assertive with the law:
So you don’t go directly with your laws, telling them that you have to do this. What you have to do is understand them, teach them, involve them, tell them what is right without parachuting things from above. You parachute them to them. So, you have to understand them and involve them because they are our bosses. They are the people we serve. So we have to understand how people behave in a different context, and the policies should be married to the values within the community that you are working. (June 2022)
Here, Antoine nods to the different contexts within Rwanda. Even though MAJ is nationwide, and a national identity of “One Rwanda” is emphasized, legal aid providers are acutely aware of regional differences that require purposeful engagement. If legal aid providers are seen as outsiders via their relationship with, and relative identity as, educated elites, then they risk increasing distrust of the legal institution, and subsequently the state. Moreover, Antoine highlights how legal aid providers should “parachute them to them,” or in other words, community members are responsible for creating and maintaining peaceful relationships among each other.
As the examples above show, legal aid providers deploy orientation to prevent future conflict and dispute by highlighting the importance of relationships. But how do legal aid providers manage cases brought before them that risk these relationships? The answer lies in the next section, which shows how social cohesion is valorized in attempts to maintain relationships.
Stalling
Stalling is a process whereby legal aid providers rely on social obligations to the community to halt people in the legal process. This process maintains ties with vulnerable people by keeping them invested in what the law may provide in the future (i.e., a resolved case), but also in what they can contribute as “good citizens” in the meantime (Doughty Reference Doughty2016, Reference Doughty2017). By doing so, legal aid providers prevent losing a case by virtue of not taking the case to court. As a result, cases do not become part of the overburdened courts. Instead, providers take on the burden to counsel people on how to participate in ideals of social cohesion: amicable relationships and truth-telling. In other words, legal aid counsels people into ways of behaving and acting that prioritize social cohesion rather than taking the case to court. Stalling unfolds in two ways. First, cases that do not align with social cohesion as maintained relations are processed through ADR, notably marital disputes. Second, cases without sufficient evidence are stalled to avoid losing in court. As we will see in later sections, legal aid providers rationalized that it is better to withhold a case from court than to upset a client who becomes distrustful of the legal process.
Stalling separation
John, a middle-aged man with a calm demeanor, is a program manager at an NGO and trains legal aid providers on ADR. During one of our conversations, John described conflict and disputes as “normal parts of society” (July 2022). His pragmatic view of society is built into his training modules, and he is blunt that a utopian society is unrealistic. Shared visions of the future should not expect an absence of conflict, but instead, he explains, “The goal should be a society where conflict is mediated through amicable reasoning” (July 2022). In this sense, being amicable is a core component of good citizenship, where people rely on empathy, honesty, and level-headedness to address issues.
Antoine, a legal aid provider, expanded on this:
Couples who come to us, they open up. They tell us what brings in the differences, which causes the problem, we help them find a solution. Actually, that is what we want. With such a couple, we are happy with that because that’s what we intend to do, we intend to help people come out with solutions. (July 2022)
Legal aid providers deploy ADR to accomplish what the law does not do: rebuilding relationships and trust in an efficient, personal manner. Alternative practices emphasize that both parties, often a husband and wife, come together and discuss their problems. Couples came to participate in ADR primarily through one of two ways: (1) one member files a case, and the other party is summoned to the legal aid center, or (2) a local leader recommends the couple be summoned to the legal aid center due to disputes visible in the community. Through both of these entries to ADR, legal aid providers must assess the risk and potential ripple effects in the community before deciding how to mediate the dispute. Legal aid providers are determined to reduce the case backlog in the local courts, ensure future conflicts and violence do not evolve further, and avoid divorce filings; stalling is a strategy that seeks to accomplish these goals.
As previously noted, legal aid providers convey the normative law as a system designed to have a winner and a loser in the courtroom. Summoning someone to the legal aid center for ADR attempts a different approach where no one loses, but there is also no guarantee that anyone will win. As the examples below show, the strategy of stalling prevents people from “losing” cases by prioritizing communal well-being over individual desires. Legal aid providers largely viewed separation and divorce as detrimental to the family and community, as Antoine’s quote in the previous section nods to. Accordingly, legal aid providers prioritized counseling couples to overcome disputes and conflict for the continuation of a relationship that symbolizes unity and reconciliation beyond their relationship alone.
As such, legal aid providers take on a counseling role and sometimes attempt to rekindle romance. Legal aid providers regularly spoke of mediatating couples when there is a mismatch between their expectations around desire and pleasure. Couples often attempt to remain together, albeit aromantic, until one partner has reached a breaking point. Grace, a veteran MAJ staff, spoke of this most vividly when she animatedly explained how a wife came to her office to seek a divorce from her husband, with whom they had three children. “Enough was enough,” Grace recalled the woman saying in reference to her husband’s impotence and subsequent jealousy when she was around any other man (July 2022).
To Grace, this was not “enough” to separate because “within the law, there is no article that allows couples to divorce or separate because of the sexual inactiveness.” First, Grace thought to find a loophole in the law and “advised [the wife] to handle that using other articles of the law” rather than “reporting that it was because of sexual inactivity” (July 2022). Before Grace was willing to follow through on a loophole, she wanted to ensure separation was the best way forward, so she stalled the case from going to court:
But I also wanted to listen to another party, the husband because, maybe, I thought the wife was not telling the truth. So, I summoned the husband. The husband agreed that that’s how the case was, but before [being impotent], everything the husband wanted to try it, he failed. Tried several times while failing, and the wife got tired of that. (July 2022)
In this case, we see how summoning additional parties is used to manage cases, and the moral vision of social cohesion aims to maintain relationships through mediation. Further, the moralization of separation was expressed in the law through limiting the faults allowed for divorce filings. In the case Grace was dealing with, separation was not allowed by the law, so she sought to stall the case until she believed the couple would live peacefully among each other. Further, if Grace were to go through with allowing separation through a loophole, but word spread that this was done, Grace would likely find herself with even more cases before her of similar asks. For these reasons, Grace sought to reconcile the couple due to her belief that she could reignite their romantic love as a way to contribute to the moral vision of social cohesion. That is, so long as she could figure out the cause of the man’s sexual impotence.
As Grace recalls, the husband tried visiting traditional doctors and healers to no avail. After this, the husband finally confided in a friend who referred him to a psychiatrist. The husband explained the situation to the psychiatrist who prescribed medication to relieve his impotence that, accordingly, was a psychological result of using the withdrawal method as birth control since he “didn’t want the wife to go for [birth control] pills because they have side effects”; continuing the details of the case, Grace shares, “when he told the wife that the problem was solved, the wife refused to accept [the use of the medication]” (July 2022).
For Grace, the conflict was not about the wife no longer desiring the husband, but instead the wife’s unacceptance of the medicine to assist with sex, so she tried to convince the wife, “Go and try him. If he’s telling you that he’s fine, go and try him” (July 2022). Initially, the wife refused, but Grace continued meeting with the couple, summoning them into their obligations to remain together, and simultaneously stalling them from separating. Eventually, Grace says, the wife accepted her husband’s use of the medication. In conclusion, Grace smiled, telling me, “That’s how it ended. Successfully” (July 2022).
Legal aid providers spoke of preventing a couple’s separation and a court case as a success. They rationalize that they contribute to social cohesion by mediating couples through the process of overcoming a mismatch in moral beliefs. As Grace’s recalling of the case illustrates, the husband’s distrust of birth control pills created a need for his own pills. While the couple remains married, the case also illustrates how dispute resolution can position the husband’s desires over the wife’s narrative. It is unclear if the wife rejected her husband’s use of medication out of spite for him denying her birth control. Regardless, Grace had to navigate “traditional” systems with “modern” systems to keep the couple together and relied on the idea that frequent sex sustains a marriage.
While legal aid providers may classify these cases as successful, women’s desires may be overcome by the collective, shared vision for social cohesion. Despite an emphasis on women’s empowerment broadly, individual rights are overshadowed by social, collective obligations.
Stalling losing cases
As previous sections detail, legal aid providers spend a great deal of energy guiding people out of the standard legal process to instead adopt extra-legal resolutions. But what happens when a case is brought forward that does not follow the national policy guidelines that necessitate taking a case to court? In such instances, legal aid providers stall the case from going to court to allow for evidence collection in the short term, if possible, or to avoid losing a case altogether in the longer term. This strategy again prioritizes reducing the court’s burden of cases while ensuring that people’s expectations about the law do not become misaligned when they lose a case. While legal aid providers put in a great deal of effort to avoid a “winner-vs-loser” scenario in court, they also understand the necessity of rights violations winning in court to support the potential of the law. This potential, though, relies on claimants securing evidence and legal aid providers’ belief in claimants’ honesty.
After working in the courts in another position, Marie Louise found herself frustrated at the number of cases lost due to people not knowing the evidentiary procedures. Noting this as why she took a pay cut to be a legal aid provider, she added, “Going to court requires evidence. Failure to prove that, you lose the case” (July 2022). The reliance on evidence over hearsay separates ordinary courts today from transitional justice Gacaca courts, where truth-telling was policed by community members’ own experiences. In ordinary courts of law, the defendant and plaintiff may draw on testimonies, but tangible evidence is positioned as a guaranteed win. This change challenges the way people understand legality, given the public, widespread presence of Gacaca for over a decade that initially influenced the creation of access to justice centers and continues to shape the legal culture of Rwanda (see also Doughty Reference Doughty2016; Gasasira Gasana et al. Reference Gasasira Gasana, Gachihi, Amatsimbi and Ruvebana2022). Another example of this that legal aid providers pointed to was abunzi, an HGS established in 2004 and focused on resolving conflict at the cell level. MAJ oversees the abunzi within their district in hopes that the local mediators will resolve disputes at the cell and sector level before they become legal issues. However, the legacies of gacaca present a need for expectation management. Abunzi mediators are called inyangamugayo, “person[s] of integrity,” which is the same title gacaca judges held, and many gacaca judges went on to serve as abunzi (De Winne and Pohu Reference De Winne and Pohu2015). During gacaca, inyangamugayo were tasked with deciding genocide cases. Today, inyangamugayo are taught not to make final decisions on cases but instead to guide people through ADR to reach their own conclusions, ideally amicably. Given this, legal aid providers encountered problems with managing the expectations of the general Rwandan who attended gacaca, and now sees a similar mechanism, yet intermediators have different roles with the same titles. If abunzi are unable to resolve the case, legal aid providers step in.
When evidence is lost or destroyed, Marie Louise and other legal aid providers believe individuals seeking legal aid may excuse their lack of knowledge about the bureaucratic process of accessing justice and instead blame corruption, knowing the zero-tolerance policy for corruption is taken seriously by the government. Marie Louise elaborates, “And in most cases, people claim that bribes were involved or corruption was involved, but not because of that, but because they don’t know” (July 2022). Then, if a claimant falsely claims corruption was involved, they are penalized for lying in a court of law, which, as Marie Louise explained, wastes both time and money.
The problem of “not knowing” is being combated with awareness-raising campaigns such as the one mentioned in an above section. For example, legal aid providers share recommendations for what to do after sexual violence: report within 48 hours; do not shower nor change your clothes. This advice is to preserve DNA – what legal aid providers spoke of as “the gold standard” for winning a court case. Yet they also acknowledge this is not always attainable for the victim. As such, legal aid providers stall cases from reaching the court until sufficient evidence is collected and the claimant’s narrative is fact-checked.
However, even if a victim follows these guidelines precisely, there are still hurdles in obtaining DNA tests. Throughout the process, the onus is on the victim to collect the evidence and promptly report the offense. In Laurent’s words, “Proof will disappear as time passes, so the issues we face here, injustice, because not sharing information on time may let that abuser be free even though they really did it, but without proof, things become difficult” (July 2022).
Legal aid providers must navigate the promises of DNA carefully, and they spoke about their fears of jeopardizing the case if they upset the claimant. If that happened, they explained, then it was a reflection back on them as legal aid providers who failed to ensure the claimant maintained the obligations of “good citizenship.” Legal aid providers spoke about learning the need to stall clients after their mistakes in taking cases to court without having enough evidence. Otherwise, losing a case ruptures the harmonious relations among people, as Claire’s experience exemplifies. Claire recalled what she described as one of her most troubling cases at the beginning of her career that shifted how she approached evaluating evidence and the risk of claimants disrupting social cohesion. As an inexperienced legal aid provider, Claire gave a great deal of autonomy to a woman seeking child support:
And she, well I lost the case. But it is not because I didn’t support, it is because
she shared the wrong information. So, we lost the case. (June 2022)
In Claire’s recalling, she does not blame the woman for sharing the wrong information because “You could see she was traumatized” (June 2022). Instead, Claire blames herself for not doing a better job stalling the woman to ensure the evidence and information were accurate. Claire explained that the woman, upset with the loss in court, continued to face further interactions with the law with her untreated trauma and struggles to provide adequate childcare. The conclusion, Claire summarized, was “Sometimes what happens when people lose cases. People don’t accommodate it” (June 2022).
With an overburdened court system, stalling is one way to strategically slow the process of cases that, if lost, could present further cases and entanglements in the legal system. However, as more than one legal aid staff member reminded me, “justice delayed is justice denied.” Continuing to interact with the individual bringing the case forward is important to nurture trust, but legal aid providers must also keep the imagination of justice alive.
It’s unclear how long this imagination of justice can be maintained. Mary was facing this question during our interview when she shared an ongoing case that is based on years of communication with a young girl who was gang raped by three men. After spending time in the hospital for complications related to the assault and finding out she was pregnant, the young girl sought information on the verdict of the three men. Even though all three men were arrested, Mary explains,
[The young girl] didn’t know if her rapists were declared guilty or not. For her to request a DNA test from [the three men] to identify the father, I asked my colleagues about this case as you only accuse one person when it comes to a paternity test. But now, she doesn’t know who to accuse as she has been raped by 3 people, at the same time. One of my colleagues told me that we can’t accuse 3 people at the same time, and I said that it should be the case as she is looking for the father who is among them. (July 2022)
Mary acknowledges the complex and illogical procedure, but she grapples with how to move the case forward, even with DNA. While the young girl was required to collect and report her evidence within 48 hours, and her child is able to provide DNA evidence of one of the perpetrators, the young girl, as a victim, is reminded of her obligation to continue collecting evidence. Mary details the lengthy process:
That is a recent case, and we are still in the procedures as those guys were convicted in 2018. When the girl came to me, she didn’t know their names, but I asked her to search for those names. Then we started the procedures with the prosecutor and are waiting for the girl to come back to me with more information. (July 2022)
At the time of the interview in 2022, this “recent” case was related to a crime that occurred four years prior – highlighting the truth behind the court’s reputation of being a lengthy process with a significant amount of cases backlogged for a four-year-old case to be “recent.”
Both Claire and Mary’s experiences with managing cases highlight how legal aid providers are limited in their ability to move cases forward for a court procedure. While there are significant structural constraints to moving cases forward, legal aid providers also stall people’s behaviors from going against social cohesion in the meantime. Other strategies outlined in this paper showed how legal aid providers circumvent the courts to provide resolutions, but cases that do require a court resolution often fail to provide adequate or quick resolutions to victims of violence. Claimants’ material needs and desires for justice are stalled from adding to the overburdened court system. Unable to receive support from other institutions until court decisions are finalized, victims of violence are required to patiently wait so as not to risk visions of amicable citizenship and trust in legal institutions. When they do, such as in Claire’s case, they become further entangled in the law, and still without adequate assistance or support.
Discussion and conclusion
This article shows how a moral vision of social cohesion shapes the strategies legal aid providers deploy to resolve cases brought before them. In the decades following the 1994 genocide, the GoR prioritized rule of law as a fundamental component for a reconciled, post-conflict society. The transition to ordinary courts from gacaca courts continued the state’s attempt at creating and promoting its ideology of unity and reconciliation as necessary for long-term peace. This messaging was “successful” in the sense that Rwandans overwhelmingly knew their right to court procedures and sought out the court’s determination. However, this has led to an overburdened court system with long wait times and burdensome court fees that risked the legitimacy of the rule of law for successful governance. To combat this, the GoR instituted the National Legal Aid Policy (2014) for both governmental and non-governmental centers to provide free, accessible legal services. Today, legal aid providers continue to find themselves addressing the expectation gap that courts can resolve all disputes. Within this context, legal aid providers face two contradictory tasks in their jobs: increase access to “the law” and reduce the overburdened courts’ caseload. This article identified two strategies that legal aid providers rely on to manage this contradiction: orienting people to their obligations as citizens and stalling cases from reaching the courts.
By examining how cases brought forth by vulnerable Rwandans are managed, we see how legal aid providers relied on moral ideas of being to resolve disputes and conflict while navigating written law and policies. I argue that the legal aid providers’ strategies of orienting and stalling evolve in their application of a moral vision of social cohesion, which draws on cultural ideas about amicable relationships, forgiveness, and unity as Rwandan citizens. Legal aid providers orient people at community events and within legal aid centers, focusing on legal awareness and obligations toward family and nation. This strategy, which incorporates aspects of identity, relationships, and expectations, capitalizes on the gap that emerges in political and social transformation to create new lines of action, or ways of being. Relying on the hopeful connotation of social cohesion, legal aid providers promote positive, peaceful relationships to idealistically prevent future disputes before adversarial procedures are necessary. Yet, orienting vulnerable people does not reduce their vulnerability nor does it fully avoid the hegemonic power of the law, despite legal aid providers’ best attempts to work with, and outside of, the courts (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998). Future research may consider how this process builds on Iddo Tavory’s (Reference Tavory2016: 7) call for a “sociology of summoning” that examines the relationship between participation, identification, and communal attachment as more complex than either a “dour command” or “warm, fuzzy feeling.”
Stalling, on the other hand, seeks to prevent the disintegration of social cohesion by delaying case progression and instead focusing on dispute resolution and evidence gathering, and in the absence of evidence, preventing the potential disappointment of losing a case. Indeed, stalling shows similarities to the strategy of waiting that poor people are subject to by the state in other contexts. Claimants are not standing still in the bureaucratic office until the slow gears of bureaucracy provide alleviation, as waiting suggests (Auyero Reference Auyero2012). Instead, I show how stalling requires an active process of socialization (Doughty Reference Doughty2017); Rwandans’ participation in dialogues, conflict resolution, and evidence gathering is a process of socialization beyond logistical case management for ordinary disputes. Instances of stalling were illuminated through cases of ADR, where legal aid providers aim to reconcile couples’ disputes and avoid separations that may undermine the state’s vision of social cohesion. However, stalling is often closely aligned with the notion of “justice delayed is justice denied,” requiring legal aid providers to maintain ties with claimants that reassure their case is being managed when structural constraints create barriers to justice. In this way, legal aid providers attempt to continue the “forward-thinking” aspect of vision (Farrell Reference Farrell2015) for claimants to imagine a future where their case is, possibly one day, resolved.
The literature on collective memory demonstrates how global norms and cultural trauma shape transitional justice mechanisms (Savelsberg and King Reference Savelsberg and King2005, Reference Savelsberg and King2007), and this article advances this scholarship by showing a continuation: how transitional justice mechanisms shape legal environments after their conclusion. As nations continue to grapple with difficult pasts (and presents), I argue that the transition from transitional justice should be considered as such, where norms and ideas are “transitioned” onto subsequent institutions with adaptations by the ruling government. This is in line with more recent literature on the hybridity of court systems that challenges a view of ADR as a distinct practice from normative legal procedures (Dunn Reference Dunn2017; Weiss Reference Weiss2025).
More centrally, these findings contribute to the research on ideological consolidation throughout societal transitions. The concept of a moral vision of social cohesion and strategies I introduce are not specific to post-genocide Rwanda. Political leaders capitalize on crises to consolidate ideology and moral ideas of right and wrong, legal and illegal, into visions. In this way, moral visions of social cohesion are a response to cultural trauma (Alexander et al. Reference Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004), so we might consider how variations of cultural traumas shape street-level bureaucrats’ strategies in their interactions with marginalized people in additional contexts. The implication is that decision-makers are at the inflection point of multiple influences, including, but not solely, the state’s hegemony and resource constraints, which likely influence how vulnerable people access services (Baker Reference Baker2013; Shiff Reference Shiff2021). Future research should consider how moral visions take shape and influence how vulnerable people access services in the aftermath of other contexts of cultural trauma, such as pandemics, authoritarianism, and the intersection of multiple traumas.
Additionally, the strategies of orienting and stalling may provide legitimacy for legal aid providers and the institution of legal aid, but it is unclear to what extent they alleviate the overburdened court system. When cases are not taken to court, it is difficult to track their resolution (Taylor Reference Taylor2025). Further, what is considered “resolved” in dispute resolution remains unclear, especially when there are clear power differences between the parties. Future studies should also consider the significance of divorce, along with “others” who are missing and excluded from ideals of social cohesion. Rwanda’s emphasis on national sameness and the eradication of ethnicity suggests all Rwandans are part of the moral vision. By ridding identities of difference in the name of social cohesion, ambiguity remains in how to assess and correct for inequalities between social groups – as legal aid providers remarked in their intake of cases and deciding the criteria for vulnerability.
In line with this, legal aid providers take on a great deal of emotional stress. Future research should consider how high turnover and burnout among legal aid center staff lead to variations in the moral vision’s salience (Guhin Reference Guhin2016). How long does hope for a better future drive one’s ability to take on more and more responsibilities in their careers? How will the next generation of lawyers’ strategies, whose interpretation of cultural trauma likely differs from those with lived experiences, shape the state’s moral vision? These questions remain necessary to consider as societies continue to rebuild in the wake of atrocity and crises.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for generous feedback and support from the following individuals: Paige Sweet, Maggie Frye, Geneviève Zubrzycki, Rob Jansen, Jillian LaBranche, Juventine Mujawase, John Gasana Gasasira, Nina Naffziger, and the LSR editors and anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the interview participants and key informants who volunteered their time as well as participants of the Gender & Sexuality Workshop, Ethnographic Methods Workshop, and Winter 2024 Professional Writing Seminar at The University of Michigan’s Department of Sociology, and The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2023 Summer Institute.
Funding Statement
This project was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE 2241144) and the University of Michigan’s African Studies Center, International Institute, and Rackham Graduate School.
Conflict(s) of Interest
None.
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