Theory & Event

For ten years thousands of local tribunals converged weekly in Rwanda to adjudicate acts of violence that occurred during the genocide of 1994. The current scholarship has written off gacaca as a failed experiment, but I am curious about the moments of burgeoning trust that may have occurred at the margins of the process. I analyze one case to show how the informal aspects of gacaca and the balance between retributive and restorative justice, as well as between deliberative and agonistic conceptions of democracy, should be seen as its contribution to theories of transitional justice.