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5 - Varieties of Gacaca; or: The Invention of Tradition

from Part IV - The Evolution of Lawfare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2024

Jens Meierhenrich
Jens Meierhenrich
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

Chapter 5 is the first 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 traces the obscure beginnings of the idea of gacaca in pre-genocide Rwanda, then accounts for the modernization of this social imaginary in the late 1990s.

Keywords

gacaca courtsinstitutional developmentmodernizationtradition
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The Violence of Law
The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda
 , pp. 195 - 246
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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