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Podcast: New Books in Genocide Studies
Episode: Bert Ingelaere, “Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2016)
Description: Rwanda’s homegrown gacaca law has been widely hailed as a successful indigenous solution to the unprecedented problem of the country’s 1994 genocide. In his book Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), Bert Ingelaere complicates this received wisdom by focusing on the way the post-genocide gacaca trials unfolded, rather than on their lofty goals, as framed by the public relations arm of the post-genocide Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government and other interested parties, both internal and external to Rwanda.
The Kinyarwandan word gacaca, derived from the word umucaca, originally referred to a p...