Contesting Community: Legalized Reconciliation Efforts in the Aftermath of Genocide in Rwanda

371 Pages·2014·2.86 MB·English

by  Kristin C. Doughty

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Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations
Spring 2011
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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
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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].
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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.
DDeeggrreeee TTyyppee
Dissertation
DDeeggrreeee NNaammee
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
GGrraadduuaattee GGrroouupp
Anthropology
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Sandra T. Barnes
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Steven Feierman
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Kathleen Hall
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Law, Rwanda, Post-Conflict, Transitional Justice, Genocide, Africa
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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 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.
viii

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 
Rwanda in the Aftermath of the 1994 Genocide ............................................................ 1 
Creating new decentralized legal institutions .............................................................. 4 
Nationwide reconciliation discourse ......................................................................... 11 
Legal Forums, Social Healing, and Collective Belonging ............................................ 17 
Legal forums as rituals of social healing ................................................................... 19 
Legal forums and collective belonging: solidarity and division ................................ 23 
Social healing and everyday violence ....................................................................... 28 
Fieldwork and Methodology ......................................................................................... 30 
South Province ........................................................................................................... 32 
Ndora ......................................................................................................................... 35 
Nyanza ....................................................................................................................... 40 
Methodology .............................................................................................................. 44 
Chapter Outline ............................................................................................................. 46 
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 48 
Chapter 2: Official Narrative of History and Its Implications ................................... 50 
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 50 
Production and Contestation of Historical Narratives in Rwanda ................................ 51 
Pre-Colonial and Colonial Periods................................................................................ 55 
Government Narrative: Colonialists introduced disunity .......................................... 56 
Points of agreement ................................................................................................... 56 
Points of disagreement............................................................................................... 66 
Independence and First and Second Republics ............................................................. 70 
Government Narrative: Continuous anti-Tutsi violence, genocide planning ............ 71 
Points of agreement ................................................................................................... 72 
Points of disagreement............................................................................................... 76 
1994 Genocide to Present ............................................................................................. 81 
Government Narrative: Heroic RPF ended genocide and rebuilt Rwanda ................ 82 
Points of agreement ................................................................................................... 84 
Points of disagreement............................................................................................... 85 
Implications of the Dominant Narrative ....................................................................... 90 
Masking present divisions ......................................................................................... 90 
Legitimizing RPF authority to rule and justifying ongoing policies ......................... 93 
Emphasizing national over transnational dynamics .................................................. 95 
Discrediting the international community ................................................................. 96 
Summary .................................................................................................................... 97 
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 98