STRUCTURE AND ARGUMENT

This book is structured in the following way: Chapter 1 situates the ana­lysis of gacaca within the broader study of transitional justice, focusing on a range of key terms, including �justice and reconciliation', which con­stitute the potential aims of gacaca expressed by the sources analysed in this book and explored in later chapters.

Chapters 5-10 represent a normative and empirical analysis of gacaca's objectives and methods, exploring side by side official, popu­lar and critical interpretations of its aims, highlighting the most com­pelling, and analysing how effectively gacaca has pursued those aims in practice.

psychological and psychosocial needs after the genocide, focusing on issues of rebuilding relations between previous antagonists. Finally, on the basis of this interpretation of gacaca’s aims and analysis of its practical efficacy, Chapter 11 summarises the key findings of the book. This final chapter also includes a detailed critique of the dominant dis­course on gacaca and a summary of the key implications of the findings in terms of other societies that adopt community-based approaches to transitional justice and for the future of Rwanda.

This book constructs five main arguments: first, gacaca is historically and currently a highly dynamic socio-legal institution and not, as some commentators have described it, a static, traditional structure readily comprehensible, and acceptable, to all Rwandans. Gacaca is the product of a complex social, cultural and legal evolution during the twentieth century - including crucial political compromises during negotiations over Rwanda’s broad justice and reconciliation strategy - and of the popu­lation’s proclivity to shape gacaca in its own image, often contrary to the original intentions of gacaca’s creators. Thus, gacaca displays what I term �internal hybridity’, as manifested in its traditional-modern features and its combination of legal and non-legal objectives and methods.

Second, we require a more appropriate methodology for interpreting and critiquing gacaca than the current literature employs. In particular, we require a methodology that accounts for the ever-evolving nature of gacaca and for the population’s shifting interpretations of, and par­ticipation in, it. Gacaca operates very differently in practice from how it appears in its governing legal documents. In particular, given that the modus operandi of gacaca is popular participation, involving the community in all facets of the daily running of the institution, it is necessary to account for gacaca’s popular ethos and dynamism in daily operation.

Third, gacaca represents a holistic response to the legacies of the geno­cide, pursuing via popular participation both pragmatic and profound objectives, which refer to interlocking personal, communal and national aims, seeking to rebuild Rwandan society from the level of the individual and local community upward, in concert with more nationwide proc­esses. Gacaca responds to a range of both legal and non-legal concerns. Some of its aims are more feasible than others: one aim explored in this book - facilitating economic development - is not a feasible object­ive of gacaca, while gacaca displays a variable capacity to facilitate the remaining eight objectives, depending largely on community-specific conditions.

Fourth, a more nuanced interpretation of gacaca's objectives highlights crucial flaws in the methodology employed by proponents of the domin­ant discourse on gacaca and in their proposed alternative approach to post-conflict reconstruction, which focuses solely on punishing perpet­rators and deterring potential criminals. Human-rights critics generally analyse gacaca solely on the basis of its legal documents and therefore neglect the importance of popular ownership over, and evolving inter­pretations of, gacaca for understanding its objectives and appropriately assessing its success in achieving them. Consequently, these critics pro­vide an extremely narrow view of gacaca and, in the main, criticise it for failing to achieve ends for which it was never, or at least only partially, intended.

Finally, while it is possible to defend gacaca against most human-rights criticisms, gacaca nonetheless displays significant problems in its daily practice. In particular, gacaca has suffered from difficulties in motivating an often confused, fearful population to engage in an institution whose lifeblood is popular participation. Further challenges to gacaca in many communities include difficulties in recovering the truth about the past, perceptions that gacaca delivers one-sided justice given the absence of prosecutions for RPF crimes, and further traumatisation of many par­ticipants because of the highly emotive and divisive nature of testimony during hearings. Gacaca, I contend, overall has been a remarkable suc­cess, according to the objectives expressed by the sources analysed here, but it has also created major problems in many communities that will require systemic remedies long after gacaca has completed its work.