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After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, victims, perpetrators, and the country as a whole struggled to deal with the legacy of the mass violence. The government responded by creating a new version of a traditional grassroots justice system called gacaca. Bert Ingelaere, based on his observation of two thousand gacaca trials, offers a comprehensive assessment of what these courts set out to do, how they worked, what they achieved, what they did not achieve, and how they affected Rwandan society. Weaving together vivid firsthand recollections, interviews, and trial testimony with systematic analysis, Ingelaere documents how the gacaca shifted over time from confession to accusation, from restoration to retribution. He precisely articulates the importance of popular conceptions of what is true and just. Marked by methodological sophistication, extraordinary evidence, and deep knowledge of Rwanda, this is an authoritative, nuanced, and bittersweet account of one of the most important experiments in transitional justice after mass violence.

This collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand the various factors at work in genocidal processes and their aftermath. The strong emphasis on legal norms, legal concepts and legal measures in other studies fails to consider further significant issues in relation to genocide. This book aims to redress this balance exploring social dynamics and human behaviour as well as the interplay of various psychological, political, sociological, anthropological and historical factors at work in genocidal processes. With contributions from top international scholars, this volume provides an integrated perspective on risk and resilience, acknowledging the importance of mitigating factors in understanding and preventing genocide. It explores a range of issues including the conceptual definition of genocide, the notion of intent, preventive measures, transitional justice, the importance of property, the role of memory, self or national interest and principles of social existence.

AbstractThe research activity generating data in times of transition is subject to politicization and needs to deal with widespread distrust due to the legacy of violence or atrocity. This article discusses the main principles of a research design that took into account these hindrances by making prudence its basic tenet. The objective was to generate understanding of the functioning of Rwanda'sgacacacourt process through a heightened awareness in data collection. In doing so, this article calls attention to the importance of a reflective and adaptive research process in times of transitional justice. Two research principles are discussed in detail: immersion and iteration. The latter were adopted to facilitate the generation of context-specific knowledge on both breadth and depth of the transitional justice process. This article demonstrates how a pragmatic stance that draws on a variety of epistemologies and methodological approaches facilitates data collection as well as navigation of the field of study. It will be argued that data collection and the activity of navigating the field while collecting data reciprocally produce knowledge.