“Our Goal Is Not to Punish but to Reconcile”: Mediation in Postgenocide Rwanda

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore what is at stake in embedding mediation efforts in legal forums backed by force across a wide range of disputes in postgenocide Rwanda as well as what is at stake in participants’ contestation over the terms of unity. Considering genocide courts, mediation committees, and a legal aid clinic in one analytic frame underscores continuities in both their top‐down social engineering goals and people's experience of the mediation focus across them. Building on Laura Nader's research to analyze the emphasis on harmony in these forums, I illustrate how mediation served as a technique of governance intended to reshape postgenocide Rwanda into a particular kind of community and how exhortations to unity were linked to broader forms of cultural control. I argue that although law‐based mediation was framed as benign and is often promoted by the transitional justice movement on the basis of local culture, its implementation always involves coercion and accompanying resistance. What emerges, I argue, is not the creation of idealistic state versions of national belonging, nor simply coercive silencing, but, rather, a space in which people contest the terms of community and shape new moral orders.