Chapter 8 analyzes the marketing of inkiko gacaca; that is, the RPF’s effort to create demand for its invented tradition. By revealing a series of tactics related to this marketing strategy, the book here sheds light on the manufacturing of consent about the meaning of transitional justice in post-genocide Rwanda. The focus is on the presentation of law in everyday life, with particular reference to select localities.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of Rwandas daring experiment in transitional justice – and of the many misconceptions surrounding it. This introductory chapter describes the countrys pursuit of accountability in the wake of the 1994 genocide as a justice facade and the final institutional design of the countrys so-called gacaca courts as an instantiation of “extremist institutionalism,” one that turned legalism into lawfare.

Chapter 4 reconstructs the rise and fall of chambres spécialisées, specialized chambers lodged inside Rwanda’s professional courts of first instance. These newly created tribunals began their work in late 1996 and drew the ire of many international human rights organizations due to the RPF-led government’s disregard for international civil and political rights. Five years later, the chambres spécialisées had tried less than 6 percent of the more than 100,000 detainees who by then were languishing in the country’s overcrowded prisons and cachots (jails). By assessing, for the first time in any depth, the legal performance (in all senses of the word) of the country’s national genocide courts, the chapter sheds light on the dynamics of contention – and material exigencies – against the background of which a blueprint for the gacaca system was drawn up.

Chapter 3 chronicles the legacies of the 1994 genocide, with particular reference to law’s infrastructure. It gives a sobering account of law’s collapse during the infamous hundred days of slaughter. I then turn to the legal reconstruction and development program that the RPF-led government rolled out with substantial financial, material, and logistical backing from the international community.

Chapter 7 is the last of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially embedded mechanisms and processes by which elites of the Rwandan Patriotic Front maneuvered to create modified arrangements of things past, these chapters excavate the microfoundations of the authoritarian rule of law in Rwanda. This chapter foregrounds the bureaucratic dimensions of the gacaca project. Along with the previous chapter, it gives a detailed account of the economy and ingenuity with which Rwanda’s new rulers devised and waged the strategy of lawfare. It also makes clear, however, that the deformation of Rwandas gacaca courts – their decentralized despotism – was not an inevitable outcome.

Chapter 2 introduces and configures the concept of lawfare. This framework chapter sets the theoretical scene for what is to come. Whereas both legalism and lawfare, in the books conception, serve the standard functions of regulation in a given polity, the author demonstrates that only lawfare is intended qua system to also serve a function otherwise considered the hallmark of warfare. The chapter elaborates defining attributes of – and pathways to – lawfare. It also situates the books theoretical argument about lawfare in existing work on the rule of violence.

Chapter 9 is an investigation of mythico-history, with a particular focus on the narrative construction of dictatorship. It tells a disturbing story of how and why, in post-genocide Rwanda, law became “a dramatically enacted thing.” To this end, the chapter analyzes the RPFs media campaign in support of the gacaca courts alongside its assault on international law.

Chapter 10 shifts from the institutional development of the gacaca courts at the elite level to their institutional effects – real and imagined – at the mass level. Like the next chapter, it speaks to their meaning – in an interpretive sense – in the countryside. The analysis calls on the dramatis personae who appeared in various gacaca proceedings over the years: survivors and perpetrators, witnesses and defendants, inyangamugayo and the ordinary peasants who made up the audiences in Rwanda’s open-air courtrooms. Collectively, they describe a cornucopia of violence. Relying on empirical vignettes from many different legal performances over the years – some of them destructive, others cathartic, yet others profane – the chapter takes the reader into, to use Robert Cover’s evocative phrase, “a field of pain and death.”

Like the preceding chapter, Chapter 12 investigates the relationship between the center and the periphery in the waging of lawfare, with a particular emphasis on resistance to the gacaca project. Although some observers have come to speak of “Rwanda’s Leviathan,” the label causes one to overlook the few – but nonetheless really existing – spaces of everyday resistance to authoritarian rule. To render this resistance visible, the chapter assembles empirical vignettes from the field. These vignettes are about the “the art of not being governed,” as James Scott has memorably put it. To ward off the danger of mistaking enforced compliance with the gacaca project for genuine commitment to it, the chapter gives pride of place to “quiet agency.”