Producing Expertise in a Transitional Justice Setting: Judges at Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, the Government of Rwanda created courts to hold hundreds of thousands of suspected g enocidaires accountable. Faced with an unprecedented volume of cases, each community elected lay judges known as inyangamugayo to preside over the court proceedings. With no prior legal training, these individuals held trials for a decade, levying sentences ranging from minor fines to life in prison. This article draws from forty-six interviews with former inyangamugayo to make two primary contributions. First, we examine how professional boundaries shifted during a period of upheaval such that laypeople performed tasks typically undertaken by professionals. Second, we highlight the centrality of social capital-and, more specifically, reputations-in the inyangamugayo's election and tasks. In doing so, we illustrate how the inyangamugayo leveraged their reputations to secure the cooperation of fellow community members in adjudicating crimes of genocide.

Developing the African Union Transitional Justice Policy: an assemblage perspective

“…The politics of knowledge production in transitional justice has started coming under increased scrutiny, with a focus on the transfer of knowledge and norms between and within contexts, and on the North-South dynamics and inequalities that shape the global politics of knowledge in the field. Debates around the nature and use of expertise which have emerged from the literatures on knowledge production and transfer, and the norms diffusion literature, have largely discussed expertise in the hands of a select number of international, professional actors (Lefranc and Vairel, 2013;Brehm et al, 2019;Ní Aoláin, 2015;Mouralis, 2013). While the literature has emphasized the preference that the field of transitional justice shows for legalistic, technical and thus apolitical knowledge (Subotic, 2012;Lefranc and Vairel, 2013;Oomen, 2005), it continues to assume that this knowledge is held by a small number of actors who then transfer it to policy-makers and practitioners in contexts of unequal power relations.…”