6 - Violent Legalization

Summary

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.