INTRODUCTION
Part of what makes gacaca such a complex social institution and difficult to interpret is the fact that various sources view it as a response to both pragmatic and more subtle socio-cultural needs in postÂgenocide Rwanda.
Interpreting gacaca entails exploring areas as diverse as people’s material well-being and their capacity to rebuild fractured relationships. The Rwandan government faces serious practical diffiÂculties in rebuilding the nation, particularly processing the backlog of cases of genocide suspects and a lack of material resources, which hamÂper efforts to reduce poverty and to rebuild physical and social infraÂstructure after the genocide. This chapter focuses on the ways in which gacaca is designed partly as a remedy to some of the state’s pragmatic, judicial and economic problems. While gacaca unquestionably has lofty aims concerning reconstructing lives and people’s relationships, it is also driven by these sorts of practical dilemmas that confront most post-conflict societies. Chapters 7-10 focus on the contribution of gacaca to the fulfilment of profound objectives, which relate more to the social needs of discrete communities and Rwandan society as a whole. Alongside gacaca’s hybrid modalities of creating a public, discurÂsive space within legal boundaries, the remaining chapters highlight gacaca’s hybrid objectives, which cover these pragmatic and profound concerns.This chapter examines three pragmatic objectives to which the govÂernment and commentators (and to a lesser extent the population) have linked gacaca: processing the backlog of genocide cases and improving living conditions in the prisons (two objectives that this chapter explores together under the heading of â€?problems concerning overcrowded prisÂons’); and fostering economic development. These objectives are relaÂtively Uncontroversial vis-a-vis the dominant discourse on gacaca described in Chapter 3 because, as this chapter will show, they concern ideas and practices of formal, deterrent justice, which constitutes the priÂmary lens through which most observers view gacaca. Nevertheless, the interpretation of gacaca’s three pragmatic objectives here differs in some key respects from most observers’ understandings of these aims. As in the previous chapter, the analysis of gacaca’s pragmatic objectives comÂprises first an outline of the government’s, population’s and commenÂtators’ views on the particular objective under consideration, followed by an internal and empirical critique of those sources’ interpretations. This chapter contends - in opposition to several of these sources’ interÂpretations of gacaca’s pragmatic aims - that gacaca has generally proven more effective at processing the backlog of genocide cases and improving living conditions in the prisons than fostering economic development.