Whispering truth to power: The everyday resistance of Rwandan peasants to post-genocide reconciliation

Thomson, Susan

doi:10.1093/afraf/adr021

Cited by 87 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This indicates not the 'government of liberation', as is used in popular political propaganda, but the 'army of liberation'the soldiers who survivors might recall as having rescued them from genocide. The language used by this group, and the manner in which ethnicity was referred to frequently in discussing the past and the present, chimes with other work indicating that despite the RPF's attempts to quell public expression of ethnic categorizations, 20 such categories continue to be highly salient and tied to both remembrance of the past and the organization of social lives in the present (Buckley-Zistel 2009;Thomson 2011b;McLean Hilker 2012). Such expressions of identity were also tied to diverse opinions on reconciliation, in terms of both organized state reconciliation policies and the extent to which local interpersonal reconciliation was felt to be appropriate or possible.…”

Section: The Untangling Of Conflict Remains In Rwandamentioning

confidence: 55%

Unearthing, untangling and re-articulating genocide corpses in Rwanda

Major

2015

Critical African Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper is concerned with the mass graves and exhumed bodies of victims of the Rwanda genocide and war of the 1990s. A government-led programme of exhumation of mass burials and individual graves has taken place over the last decade. The exhumation of mass graves has been undertaken, in the main, by Tutsi genocide survivors who work under the supervision of state officials. Post-unearthing, these bodies are unravelled, and the remnants of soft flesh, clothing, personal possessions and bones are separated from each other. Skeletal structures are fully disarticulated and the bones pooled into a vast collective, for placement within memorials. The outcome of these exhumations is that remains almost always lack individual identity at the point of reinterring. A productive analytical comparison is found in examining exhumations of Spanish Civil War graves, where the fates of individual dead are closely entangled with the lives of survivors. Here there is a clear contrast with exhumations in Rwanda, in the possible re-articulation of identities with specific human remains. But a similarity is also critical: in both cases the properties of human remains, as unsettling materials, garner specific 'affects', which drive forward national political projects that aim to consolidate particular collective memories of conflict, albeit that this kind of 'material agency' is mobilized to very different ends in each case.Le présent article porte sur les charniers et les corps exhumés des victimes du génocide et de la guerre des années 1990 au Rwanda. Au cours de la dernière décennie, le gouvernement a mené un programme d'exhumation des fosses communes et des tombes individuelles de victimes. Des exhumations de charniers ont été entreprises, pour l'essentiel, par des survivants tutsis du génocide travaillant sous la supervision d'agents de l'État. Après déterrement, le corps est démêlé ; les restes de tissus mous, vêtements, effets personnels et os sont séparés les uns des autres. Les structures squelettiques sont entièrement désarticulées et les os regroupés en grands amas pour être placés dans des mémoriaux. En conséquence, à l'issue de ces exhumations, les restes sont presque toujours dépourvus d'identité individuelle au moment d'être redéposés. L'examen des exhumations de tombes de la guerre civile espagnole offre une comparaison analytique fructueuse: le sort de l'individu décédé est étroitement lié à la vie des survivants, et un contraste est manifeste étant donné la possible réarticulation de l'identité pour chaque cas. Une similitude est également cruciale: dans les deux cas, les caractéristiques des restes humains comme matériaux troublants recueillant un «affect» particulier font avancer des projets politiques nationaux qui visent à consolider la mémoire collective des conflits, mais c'est une agencéité mobilisée à des fins très différentes.

show abstract

Section: The Untangling Of Conflict Remains In Rwandamentioning

confidence: 55%

Unearthing, untangling and re-articulating genocide corpses in Rwanda

Major

2015

Critical African Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Where scholarship does engage with this question it tends to focus on resistance by powerful spoilers who fear that they have something to lose from transitional justice processes (Sriram 2012). Th ere are of course important exceptions (Brudholm and Rosoux 2009;Hamber and Wilson 2002;Th omson 2011), but in general resistance is cast as a problem to be addressed or understood in order to ensure that transitional justice can work most eff ectively. We can think here of accusations of lack of political will, blocked transitional justice processes, cultural miscommunication, and bad timing-that is, technical concerns over the implementation of a specifi c mechanism or process.…”

Section: Briony Jones and Thomas Brudholmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Jones¹,

Brudholm

2016

Conflict and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Transitional justice, as a process and set of mechanisms designed to address human rights violations of the past, is a project of transformation. Designed to deal with legacies of past wrongs, transitional justice ideally aims to address their root causes, to adjudicate social and institutional responsibilities, to transform the institutional contexts and power relations that enabled human rights violations to take place, to restore, repair, or facilitate new relationships and to promote national unity and reconciliation. Now an established policy response to the end of civil war, authoritarian regimes or occupation, transitional justice has been the focus of scholarly attention for long enough to have warranted a critical turn, both in terms of the way transitional justice is theorized (Corradetti, Eisikovits, and Rotondi 2015; Hirsch 2012) and the way in which it is implemented and experienced in practice. Examples of such critiques include accusations of imposition of western norms that are not culturally meaningful in some contexts, of the dominance of legal approaches to justice at the expense of the restorative and symbolic, of its instrumentalization by the powerful for the consolidation of authority or privilege, and of limited evidence that it actually has a positive impact on justice and peace (see, e.g., Iliff 2012; Leebaw 2008; Pouligny 2005).

show abstract

“…In Claude's case, like others, participants were very clear that how they publicly remembered the past had stakes for the present, in a state‐backed legal forum with power to reallocate goods or exonerate. Yet Ndora residents were politically savvy and did not mistake their neighbours’ participation in gacaca as signalling conformity, as Thomson argues ‘casual observers’ may do ( b : 451‐6). They recognized the ‘dialectical relationship’ between truth and lies (Ingelaere 2010 a : 54) within their own language, and were well aware that what Moore described as the ‘micropolitics of local social standing’ (: 33) shaped people's testimony in court proceedings.…”

Section: Gacaca's Contextualized Conversationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, while state‐backed legal forums such as gacaca can increase structural violence and provide perverse incentives for instrumentality, we must realize that they do not create these dynamics ex nihilo . The contentious conversations that occurred in gacaca sessions were manifestations of the divisions underpinning Rwandans’ public displays of consensus, often in ‘hidden transcripts’ (Buckley‐Zistel ; Ingelaere : 524; a : 53; b : 282; Scott ; Thomson 2011 b : 445; ; Waldorf : 77). That is, divisive debates over material loyalty and relationships of care, and people's instrumental efforts to position themselves with respect to the government – which are crucial to (re)negotiating forms of sociality – were not uniquely introduced by the legal process that sought to address them.…”

Section: The Violence Of Social Repairmentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and the architecture of social repair:gacacadays in post‐genocide Rwanda

Doughty

2015

Royal Anthropological Inst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Whispering truth to power: The everyday resistance of Rwandan peasants to post-genocide reconciliation

Cited by 87 publications

References 0 publications

Unearthing, untangling and re-articulating genocide corpses in Rwanda

Unearthing, untangling and re-articulating genocide corpses in Rwanda

Introduction

Law and the architecture of social repair:gacacadays in post‐genocide Rwanda

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About