The Violence of Law
The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda

Examines 'lawfare' (a little understood form of warfare) in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship.

Jens Meierhenrich (Author)

9781108425391, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 May 2024

770 pages
23.5 x 16 x 4.8 cm, 1.253 kg

Weaving together on-the-ground observations, political theories, photographic evidence, and historical narratives, The Violence of Law exposes how brutal effects of power can be accompanied by a narrative of victimhood, mobilizing international sympathy.' Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard Law School

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as inkiko gacaca. By dissecting the temporally and structurally embedded mechanisms and processes by which change agents in post-genocide Rwanda manoeuvred to create modified legal arrangements of things past, Meierhenrich reveals an unexpected jurisprudence of violence. Combining nomothetic and ideographic reasoning, he shows that the deformation of the gacaca courts – and thus the rise of lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda – was not preordained but the outcome of a violently structured contingency. The Violence of Law tells a disturbing tale and will appeal to scholars, advanced students, and practitioners of international and comparative law, African studies and human rights.

Part I. Introduction: 1. A justice façade
Part II. A Theoretical Framework: 2. The violence of law
Part III. The Emergence of Lawfare: 3. Bending the law
4. Chambres specialisées: from legalism to lawfare
Part IV. The Evolution of Lawfare: 5. Varieties of Gacaca
or: the invention of tradition
6. Violent legalization
7. Lineages of governmentality
8. The supply and demand of law
9. The marketing of genocide
Part V. The Effects of Lawfare: 10. In a field of pain and death: lawfare in the countryside
11. A cartography of silence
Part VI. Conclusion: 12. The political economy of lawfare.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]