Building on legal anthropology and performance studies, this chapter analyses the Gacaca law talk and performances to evidence the wider context of changes in Rwanda post-1994 due to national and international pressures. The Rwandan government legally mandated Rwandans to actively participate in the gacaca courts from 2004 to 2012 for crimes committed during the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi. Every citizen was required to attend the local level courts to provide testimony and to serve as judge, witness and testifier on a weekly basis. In total, 15,300 courts ruled over nearly two million cases. Based on a 'kaleidoscopic' reading of optical illusions, or a slight shift in perspective to integrate the multiplicity of performances within the gacaca system, we demonstrate the dramaturgic nature of gacaca through gacaca law, policy and practices. Ultimately, such visual metaphors provide important interpretative tools to grasp how gacaca scripts were performed for different audiences with different effects and functions depending on micro to macro politics, and the resulting performances of competing narratives and the variances within the gacaca system.

International criminal tribunals and courts, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), are commonly understood within legal transitional justice scholarship as the primary response to mass human rights violations, not only in addressing impunity, but also in uncovering the truth of what happened and why. This conceptually orientated article aims to deconstruct legal witnessing and memory production at the ICTR in order to critique claims in legal scholarship that international criminal institutions are able to produce a collective memory of mass rights violations. Specifically, the article proposes an original conceptual framework using insights from critical theory, Giorgio Agamben (witness) and Paul Ricoeur (memory), which it is argued extends our understanding of the scope, and limitations, of liberal Western criminal institutions� (in)ability to make sense of past atrocities.

No abstract