INTRODUCTION

To summarise, gacaca is a dynamic, hybrid institution, borne out of heady ideals, political necessity and compromise, whose complex evolution since 2001 stems from a wide range of popular and state-run factors. All Rwandan sources analysed here express a discernible ethos of popular ownership over gacaca and underline the crucial agency of Rwandans in addressing the legacies of the genocide, articulated foremost through the concept of popular participation as the modus operandi of gacaca. Of the nine expressed objectives of gacaca analysed in this book – clearing the backlog of genocide cases, improving the conditions in the prisons, economic development, truth, peace, justice, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation – only economic development is entirely unfeasible through gacaca. Regarding the remaining themes, based on empirical observations, gacaca has produced highly variable results.

Evidence from jurisdictions around Rwanda highlights gacaca's successes in handling the backlog of cases and delivering retributive justice, facilitating crucial processes of truth-telling and truth-hearing, and providing for positive peace by creating a dialogical space for the resolution of people's past conflicts, which is critical to sustaining more cohesive relations in the long-term. Gacaca has also proven effective in many communities at initiating processes of restorative justice, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation, although these objectives inevitably stretch beyond the time frame of gacaca, given the slow, emotional and interpersonal dynamics concerned. In other communities, however, these objectives are very distant prospects or have in fact been undermined by people's experiences of gacaca.