In 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. [law, mediation, post conflict, Nader, transitional justice] RESUMEN En este artículo, exploro lo que esta en juego al embeber los esfuerzos de mediación en foros legales respaldados con la fuerza, en un amplio campo de disputas en Ruanda posterior al genocidio, y lo que esta en juego en la contestación de los participantes sobre los términos de unidad. Considerar las cortes, los comités de mediación, y las clínicas de ayuda legal por el genocidio en un marco analítico enfatiza las continuidades tanto en las metas de ingeniería social de arriba hacia abajo como en la experiencia de la gente del foco de la mediación entre ellos.Basada en Laura Nader para analizar elénfasis en armonía en estos foros, ilustro cómo la mediación sirvió como técnica de gobernanza dirigida a reestructurar Ruanda después del genocidio en un clase particular de comunidad, y cómo las exhortaciones a la unidad fueron ligadas a formas más amplias de control cultural. Argumento que aunque la mediación basada en la ley fue planteada como benigna y es a menudo promovida por el movimiento de justicia transicional sobre la base de una cultura local, su implementación siempre envuelve coerción y la acompaña resistencia. Lo que resulta, argumento, no es la creación de versiones idealistas de estado de sentido de pertenencia nacional, ni simple silenciamiento coercitivo, sino más bien, un espacio en el cual la gente debate los términos de comunidad, y estructura nuevos ordenes morales. [ley, mediación, post conflicto, Nader, justicia transicional] A fter completing his lengthy confession in his trial for genocide crimes, a man called Alphonse knelt before the panel of locally elected judges, his bare knees pressing into the packed dirt. He clasped his hands behind his back and bowed his head toward his chest, choking back tears

In this article, I examine post‐genocide Rwanda's gacaca process, in which genocide suspects were tried among their neighbours before locally elected judges. I suggest two limitations in how anthropologists have typically studied post‐conflict legal institutions. Measuring the cultural relevance of law obscures contemporary imbrications of African custom and universal legal principles, and distracts from analysis of the politicized uses of culture. Analysing structural constraints and coercive dimensions, while crucial, can blind us to the very real social work that happens in these forums. Instead, I argue, what differentiated gacaca was how deeply it was contextualized – embedded in daily life, public, participatory, routinized, and based on oral testimony – and this contextualization formed the basis of its situated relevance to people's efforts to shape forms of sociality. People used gacaca sessions to negotiate the micro‐politics of reconciliation, which included debating definitions of ‘genocide citizenship’, guilt, innocence, exchange, and material loyalty. I argue for moving beyond the underlying assumption in critical transitional justice studies that law and reconciliation are mutually exclusive, to acknowledge that the instrumental and often divisive dynamics in gacaca do not merely reflect institutional failures but, rather, reflect the inherent violence of social repair.

On an afternoon in 2007, I sat with several hundred residents in rural southern Rwanda during yet another gacaca (grassroots genocide courts) session, in which suspects from the 1994 genocide were tried weekly among their neighbors before locally elected judges. As the long afternoon stretched with the now-familiar back-and-forth of competing versions of the past between case participants, the presiding judge suddenly interrupted the proceedings. He pointed to a young man standing at the edge of the assembled crowd, and sent him off to fetch a witness who had not responded to the official summons to attend.As I scanned the horseshoe-shaped group of attendees during this enforced waiting that I had come to expect on gacaca day, two women, Alice and Odile, caught my attention.

This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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