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 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 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.”

Chapter 12 concludes the book and ties its different strands together. It explains why, and when, lawfare came to be seen by leading RPF cadres as a functional equivalent to warfare. The chapter further explains why Rwanda’s present resembles its past to a remarkable degree. More specifically, the analysis demonstrates that the government of threat and care in the twenty-first century was informed by a raison d’état that has driven the imposition of grand institutional designs ever since the precolony. What this concluding chapter offers is a path-dependent argument about the rise of lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda. As such, it illustrate the analytic payoff of taking the study of the country’s gacaca courts out of the context of transitional justice.

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.

Chapter 6 is the second 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 legislative foundations of the gacaca project. Along with the next chapter, it gives a detailed account of the economy and ingenuity with which Rwanda’s new rulers devised and waged the strategy of lawfare. What it also makes clear, however, is that the deformation of Rwandas gacaca courts – their violent legalization – was not an inevitable outcome.

Following the genocide, the Rwandan government adopted a policy that sought to hold accountable all those suspected of participating in the genocide, including minors. Chapter 5 provides a detailed and comprehensive account of how child perpetrators were dealt with in Rwanda in law, policy and practice. It examines how children were held accountable for participating in the genocide, considering whether they were given differential treatment on grounds of their age (and if so, what the relevant age thresholds were). It considers broadly whether Rwanda complied with international juvenile justice standards, including on the minimum age of criminal responsibility, sanctions, juvenile-specific institutions and procedural guarantees. These issues are explored in the context of arrests and detentions, criminal justice mechanisms (both formal courts and gacaca jurisdictions) and administrative measures taken to address genocidal acts.