University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Spring 2011 Contesting Community: Legalized Reconciliation Efforts in the Aftermath of Genocide in Rwanda Kristin C. Doughty University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Doughty, Kristin C., "Contesting Community: Legalized Reconciliation Efforts in the Aftermath of Genocide in Rwanda" (2011). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 333. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/333 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/333 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Contesting Community: Legalized Reconciliation Efforts in the Aftermath of Genocide in Rwanda Abstract In recent decades, national governments and international authorities have increasingly emphasized the role of legal institutions in restoring order after political violence. This study explores how, following the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government created new decentralized grassroots legal forums that aimed to produce community out of a divided population. The legal institutions were designed to enable Rwandans to resolve disputes with the help of locally-elected mediators, based on principles that prioritized collective cohesion over individual rights, combined with state-backed punishment. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in Rwanda between 2004 and 2008 with genocide courts (inkiko gacaca), mediation committees (comite y’abunzi) and a legal aid clinic, this study shows how the discourse of mediation in courts derived from national and transnational processes, and how it shaped people’s experiences across a wide range of disputes. People used the courts’ flexible proceedings both to rebuild inclusive relationships, and to contest belonging and reinforce divisions. The study suggests that state-backed legal forums embedded in daily life can facilitate social rebuilding in the aftermath of violence, while it examines what differences are created as “community” is brought into being through politicized processes, and shows how customary law as a tool of state development can both empower and curtail rights. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Anthropology First Advisor Sandra T. Barnes Second Advisor Steven Feierman Third Advisor Kathleen Hall Keywords Law, Rwanda, Post-Conflict, rT ansitional Justice, Genocide, Africa Subject Categories Social and Cultural Anthropology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/333 CONTESTING COMMUNITY: LEGALIZED RECONCILIATION EFFORTS IN THE AFTERMATH OF GENOCIDE IN RWANDA KRISTIN C. DOUGHTY A DISSERTATION in Anthropology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Supervisor of Dissertation Sandra T. Barnes, Professor of Anthropology Graduate Group Chairperson Deborah A. Thomas, Associate Professor of Anthropology Dissertation Committee: Steven Feierman, Professor of History and History and Sociology of Science Kathleen Hall, Associate Professor of Education and Anthropology CONTESTING COMMUNITY: LEGALIZED RECONCILIATION EFFORTS IN THE AFTERMATH OF GENOCIDE IN RWANDA COPYRIGHT 2011 Kristin C. Doughty iii To Natalie and her brother-to-be, with great love. iv Acknowledgements Out of respect for the privacy of the people from Ndora, Nyanza, Butare, Kigali, and elsewhere in Rwanda whose stories fill these pages, I do not name them here, and have given them pseudonyms in the text. It has been my privilege to learn from them, and I am grateful they shared their lives with me. I hope they recognize their experiences in my re-telling and that I accurately captured the complexity of their experiences living simultaneously with loss alongside hope in the possibility of new futures. Murakoze cyane. Special thanks to David Moussa Ntambara, with whom I first visited Rwanda and jointly conducted research in 2002, and to the Collaborative for Development Action, who sponsored our trip. Moussa’s gracious collegiality and friendship exposed me to the beauty and intricacy of his country, and endured through the years. During my research from 2007 through 2008, I received support from my affiliation with colleagues at the Center for Conflict Management at the National University for Rwanda. Staff of the Legal Aid Clinic and the National Services for Gacaca Jurisdictions provided valuable support and information, as did local authorities in Ndora, Nyanza, Butare, and Kigali. Special mention goes as well to my research assistant, David Karima, who adeptly guided me through the complexities of legal research in Rwanda. Fieldwork for this project in 2007 and 2008 was made possible through a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship, National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, and Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. In addition, it built on summer research grants for work in Rwanda in 2004 and 2005 from the University of Pennsylvania through the Department of Anthropology, the v Browne Center for International Relations, and the Health and Society in Africa programs. My years at Penn were supported financially through the University of Pennsylvania’s William Penn Fellowship and two Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships through the African Studies Center. A gracious thank you to my dissertation committee for their sage advice and guidance over the past eight years: Sandra Barnes, Steve Feierman, and Kathy Hall. I will always be grateful for having made it in under the wire among Sandy and Steve’s final students, where I benefitted from their careers’ worth of accumulated knowledge and mentoring expertise, and for Kathy’s pro-active intellectual and moral support, especially as I found my footing in my early years of graduate work. And thank you to my friends, colleagues, and cohort-mates who discussed, read, and commented on in-process ideas and versions of the included chapters: Crystal Biruk, Christa Cesario, Brian Daniels, Kerry Dunn, Niklas Hultin, Azra Hromodizic, Andi Johnson, Rabia Kamal, Jordan Pickrel, Jennifer Riggan, Christy Schuetze, Teagan Schweitzer, and Catherine van de Ruit. This work also built on conversations with many Rwandan and international researchers conducting fieldwork in Rwanda across a range of disciplinary approaches, and I benefited from their complementary efforts to explore similar questions. My work was improved by all of the aforementioned people’s contributions. Any errors that remain are my own. I am indebted to my family members, who taught me early-on that there are many ways to understand the world, that collective belong is adaptive, that conflict is not inherently dysfunctional, and that disputes can be resolved through a range of mechanisms. My parents, Katherine Conner, Robert Doughty, Cris Doughty, and Marc vi Ross, all inspired me to question and learn from others. They created a strong sense of home and a net of support that gave me the courage to travel far and risk falling. I cannot thank them enough, and I hope they each see their contributions reflected in my work. My parents-in-law, Mark and Ruth Mankoff, have embraced me even as I implicated their son in my journeys. The backing of all six parents has been invaluable to developing this manuscript, as we moved back and forth to Rwanda and balanced working with parenting. Along with my parents, my siblings (full, half, step, in-law), nieces, nephews, and even Ginger, and Mila before her all provide my very real sense of belonging and mutual support. This project, and my intellectual and personal investment in it, has only been possible with the unwavering support of my husband and partner, Josh Mankoff. His faith in the importance of untangling these questions, his intellectual input into my efforts to do so, his flexibility and willingness to join me in Rwanda, and his eagerness to pursue related work in Arusha—as well as countless hours reading every page and taming my computer problems—are key reasons I made it through the PhD marathon with my sanity, health, and intellectual spirit intact. And lastly, Natalie and her brother-to-be are teaching me every day to be a better mother and person, which makes me a more focused and perceptive researcher-scholar. I dedicate this work, with great love, to them. vii ABSTRACT CONTESTING COMMUNITY: LEGALIZED RECONCILIATION EFFORTS IN THE AFTERMATH OF GENOCIDE IN RWANDA Kristin C. Doughty Sandra T. Barnes In recent decades, national governments and international authorities have increasingly emphasized the role of legal institutions in restoring order after political violence. This study explores how, following the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government created new decentralized grassroots legal forums that aimed to produce community out of a divided population. The legal institutions were designed to enable Rwandans to resolve disputes with the help of locally-elected mediators, based on principles that prioritized collective cohesion over individual rights, combined with state- backed punishment. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in Rwanda between 2004 and 2008 with genocide courts (inkiko gacaca), mediation committees (comite y’abunzi) and a legal aid clinic, this study shows how the discourse of mediation in courts