Dispute as critique: Moving beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’

Abstract

From the vantage point of unmaking permanent minorities, ‘post-genocide’ Rwanda seems to have accomplished a transition into a de-ethnicised, de-tribalised and integrated political community. The unmaking of permanent minorities requires, I suggest, an anthropological movement beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’. This is to say, the frame of analysis of the contemporary Rwandan social or political community must not be restricted to people's experiences of genocide. Rather, genocide undergirds, or, even more, continues to remake, the political community in Rwanda, while the social community does not share the experience of genocide. Indeed, the delinking of the ‘post-genocide’ political community from the ‘second generation’ social community requires an anthropological movement towards the everyday of how a political community constitutes itself as integrated. Such a move asks how the ordinary life worlds of common Rwandans are being constituted as de-tribalised, de-ethnicised communities. I examine the rift between the political and the social community in contemporary Rwanda through an anthropological inquiry into disputes. I suggest that peoples’ involvement in disputes and how disputes are tackled in Rwanda provide a window into the social and political aspects of the community. Despite the way in which the Rwandan state tries to curtail inter-community conflict by eliminating a vocabulary of difference, ordinary people use disputes that erupt from their everyday engagements as a way to critique this overarching demand for unity. It is the dispute that puts forth critique as an intervention into the very makings of the unified political community.

Differentiating the social from the political community

From the vantage point of unmaking permanent minorities, ‘post-genocide’ Rwanda seems to have accomplished a transition into a de-ethnicised and integrated political community. As Mamdani aptly observes for the time after political and mass violence in Rwanda, ‘rather than further fracturing the political community along ethnic lines, Rwandans looked to reform it – they sought to detribalize, though without seeking to democratize’ (Mamdani, 2020: 248). The unmaking of permanent minorities requires, I suggest, an anthropological movement beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’. This is to say, the frame of analysis of the contemporary Rwandan social or political community must not be restricted to people's experiences of genocide. Instead, genocide undergirds, or, even more, continues to remake, the political community in Rwanda (Straus and Waldorf, 2011), while the social community does not share the experience of genocide (Sommers, 2012). This social community is often referred to with the notion of the ‘second generation’. I extend this notion to include all those who have returned to the country after the end of the genocide. This includes those who are born or lived in exile and have no immediate or biographical experience of the advent of war and genocide.

The community of ‘post-genocide Rwanda’ identifies as a unified political community, referred to as abanyarwanda. The delinking of the ‘post-genocide’ political community from the ‘second generation’ social community requires an anthropological movement towards the everyday of how a political community constitutes itself as integrated. Such a move asks how the ordinary life worlds of common Rwandans are being constituted as a de-ethnicised community (Eramian, 2018). It highlights the processes within which the ‘second generation’ social community experiences unifying cohesive forces that leave them detached from history or in ignorance of the biographies of their parents’ generation. That generation, present in Rwanda during the time of genocide, was shaped by where they had been and what they had done during the genocide. The ‘second generation’ social community not only experiences the past political and mass violence as inaccessible but also feels insecure about its own responsibilities and roles, as they relate both to the memory work of preventing the repetition of political violence and to the search for a meaningful role in shaping common life worlds into the future (Nsabimana, 2017).

I examine the rift between the political and the social community in contemporary Rwanda through an anthropological inquiry into disputes. I suggest that peoples’ involvement in disputes and how disputes are tackled in Rwanda provide a window into the social and political aspects of the community (Doughty, 2016). I engage in an anthropological inquiry into the emergence of disputes in order to position ordinary people's critique of social community and the narrative of political unity. Despite the way in which the Rwandan state tries to curtail inter-community conflict by eliminating a vocabulary of difference, ordinary people use disputes that erupt from their everyday engagements as a way to critique this overarching demand for unity. Disputes that put forth critique become interventions in the very makings of the unified political community. My analysis of disputes as a mode of community-making makes critique central to the ethnographic encounters with emerging institutional extensions of the Rwandan legal system, known in the Rwandan everyday as kunga abantu (bring people together) or komite z’abunzi (mediation committees) (Organic Law No. 17/2004 of 20 June 2004; Bognitz, 2020a, 2020b).

These are forums led by inyangamugayo (trustworthy people) and open to all the community members who experience issues they wish to formulate as complaints and submit these for mediation. Mediation committees provide for a public space. As ordinary people participate in arising disputes, they contribute to the mediators’ efforts to lay disputes to rest. It is only trustworthy persons, inyangamugayo, who qualify to become mediators and contribute to nation building and future making. Being inyangamugayo and becoming a mediator, reflects practices of navigating between trustworthiness and mistrust as broader societal undercurrents. Mediators reinforce citizens’ identification as Rwandans rather than designating them to the ethnic categories that led to the nation's descent into genocide. Through the institution of mediation, the inyangamugayo of Rwanda mediate values and registers of worth in local forums integrated into the legal system and set forth values for future nation-building.

Although mediation committees are designed to be public, my negotiations for ethical clearances and research permits to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on this community level of access to justice mechanism were outspokenly tedious and lasted several months. I encountered a general mistrust undergirded by misconceptions of the significance of an anthropological inquiry into the everyday lived experience of the participants and their practice of mediation. The National Ethics Commission, with no one with legal or social science expertise on its steering committee, expressed its suspicions in the required hearings reviewing the research project. In hindsight and in light of the ethnographic material presented here, their suspicion no longer seems inappropriate, given that social sciences research in contemporary Rwanda undergirds government rhetoric, development agendas and official narratives of a ‘post-genocide Rwanda’ founded on narrow definitions of victims and survivors.

Eventually, permission was secured for a year-long multi-sited and multi-situated ethnographic fieldwork that lasted from 2012 to 2013 with a much shorter follow-up phase in 2014 and this article is based on what I observed during that research. During my research, selected mediation committees were visited on a weekly basis. Participation in their mediation process had become possible. Over the weeks and months, the presence of an anthropologist, with a good, though not comprehensive command of Kinyarwanda and her research assistant (who was fluent in the language) became less of a cause of excitement or disturbance. Longer conversations and sometimes interviews with mediators, disputants, local authorities and other members of the local community became increasingly frequent. Through the continued and determined presence of the anthropologist in the very localised settings of the actual mediation practice, the initial suspicions raised by government institutions throughout the research clearance phase were indeed rendered insignificant.

Prescribed by normative orderings that are undergirded by law, mediation committees provide a wide spectrum of people – including people who thus far have had no or only limited experience with or exposure to public dispute forums – access to a realm where disputes are settled. This organisational extension has opened up ‘post-genocide’ Rwandan law for the accommodation of everyday issues, complaints and disputes in the social community. In contrast to the inkiko gacaca (gacaca courts) instituted to deal with the genocide (Ingelaere, 2012) – the prosecuting, truth-telling and reconciliatory transitional justice mechanism that defined people as victims, survivors, bystanders and perpetrators (Karekezi, 2020; Mamdani, 2020: 244) – these new mediation committees refrain from similar categorisations (Mamdani, 2001a). The space created by mediation builds on the idea of an integrated political community. I argue that this comes close to what Mamdani (2020: 17) means with ‘all survivors – victims, perpetrators, beneficiaries, bystanders, exiles – are included in an expanded political process and reformed political community’. This also includes the aspect of gender. As in every public institution in Rwanda, mediation committees can only be elected with a representation of at least 30% of female members occupying the bench of mediators.

Mediation has been practised since 2004, which means that mediation committees were formed after the transitional justice mechanism of gacaca courts, active between 2001 and 2012, had already been instituted. People's engagement with and experience of gacaca courts forms the context against which their involvement in mediation committees needs to be considered. I conceptualise ‘dispute as critique’ since, I argue, the instance of engaging in critique is an occasion of institutions engendering critique. The situation of officially initiating a dispute, as happens in mediation, is, at the same time, an instance of disputing past experiences including the many afterlives of genocide and mass violence (see also Hunt, 2016: 2–4). However, the institutional embrace of abunzi (mediation) as a measure to deal with peoples’ disputes has a powerful effect in that, unlike gacaca, it does not evoke genocide-related categorical identities of survivor and perpetrator. Although such identifications can be silently at work during the mediation of a dispute, the situation of kunga abantu, literally of bringing people together, entrusts ordinary people with the task of making community (see also Doughty, 2016). Having said this, we need to bear in mind that abunzi is at work in Rwanda where public evocations of political or ethnic identifications of minorities and majorities are prohibited and prosecuted under the legal framework against genocide ideology and revisionism, as expressed in Law No. 59/2018 of 22 August 2018 (Beloff, 2021; Mugiraneza, 2009).

In the Rwandan context, mediation is not an alternative to the settlement of disputes in court, as is often the case elsewhere. On the contrary, mediation committees are a substantial component of the legal sphere. In fact, mediation is the first level of the legal system. It is neither an alternative to law nor an alternative to any other legal institution currently at work. Yet it incorporates a significant feature of the conventional practice of mediation, namely the active involvement of a third party. Whether this party is neutral or not is secondary to its ambition to lay a dispute to rest and re-establish some sort of relationship between the disputing parties beyond the dispute at hand. And yet, despite being inscribed in the constitution, in law and in the professional engagement of the inyangamugayo (mediators), mediation operates under precariously fragile, uncertain and even repressive institutionalised conditions. It is exactly within this realm of mediation – suspended between the contested ‘post-genocide’ making of law in a context of autocratic modes of governance (Ingelaere, 2009, 2014; Purdeková, 2015; Reyntjens, 1990, 2011; Schabas and Imbleau, 1997; Waldorf, 2006) and the emergence of a forum dedicated to dispute resolution – that a space in which critique can surface has emerged.

Seen from the perspective of law-making, mediation is the decentralisation of court-like and neo-traditional dispute settlement bodies. Seen through the eyes of the actors, however, the institutionalisation of dispute raising and reconciliation, that is, the creation of local forums in which smaller but nevertheless disparate disputes can be negotiated, has a completely different meaning, one which I capture with the analytical concept of compulsory voluntariness. This compulsory voluntariness is a meaningful and unavoidable prerequisite for a series of political and economic shifts that have taken place in Rwandan governance, as well as their translation into local forms of organisation and institutions. Doing work in accordance with this principle determines the everyday of a segment of the poorest Rwandans, many of whom spent up to four days a week labouring voluntarily as demanded by local government representatives (Sommers, 2012). It was this labour, and often the building or maintenance of critical infrastructure, provided through the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme that equipped the poorest in rural Rwanda with comprehensive social protections running alongside decentralisation of state services and access to such services. During umuganda, the monthly voluntary community work, all citizens were required to provide manual labour for ‘national development’, legally stipulated as norm-instituting culture (Article 2: 6; Article 3: 7; Article 9: 10; Article 13: 13; Law No. 53.2007 of 17 November 2007).

Mediation is located at the outside edge of the normative sphere and thus within a context regulated by law. The purpose of this analysis is to examine forms of critique that emerge in situations that are not intended to serve as public platforms for the expression of disagreement (see Bogusz, 2010: 119). I see these possibilities as itineraries for inclusive participation and modes of action in mediation that broaden the range of engagement of the ‘social community’. My analysis situates disputes as a means of bringing critique to the surface. This use of dispute is an indication that even the most intentionally and overtly inscribed purpose of an institution of the legal system can be circumvented: it can be seized and deployed to address a range of equally significant issues, including the expression of critique or dissatisfaction (Goffman, 1961: 180).

The anthropology of critical competencies

In the past few decades, empirically grounded work particularly from within French pragmatic sociology – influenced by the sociology that theorises the role of institutions in society – has led to a pragmatic turn in the social sciences. Pragmatic sociology reminds us that institutions not only depend on agreement and tenacious rule-following of inscribed regulations and norms but also depend on maintaining their reliability and legitimacy when they accommodate circumstances, capacities and competencies that permit critique.

‘[O]nly a social theory that takes the critical capacities and practices of the agents themselves as a starting point can present a viable framework for thinking about both normativity and critique after the pragmatic turn’ (Celikates, 2009: 22, author's translation). The turn suggests a certain plurality of critique. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, who stimulated this debate, call these dimensions of critique the plurality of regimes of justification. Their sociology of critical pragmatism delineates justification as the overall resonating ground for critical capacities that actors seize to make their way through worlds (cité), capacities that are analytically differentiated in terms of varying modes of justification or registers of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).

It is, therefore, worthwhile to pursue the life of institutions not as an end in itself but in relation to critique and everyday encounters with critical competencies in interactions with people. The focus that relates critique to institutions, or that establishes relations between institutions and critique, has thus shifted (Boltanski, 2011; Rottenburg, 2013: 71–72). ‘The individual tends to leave the important decisions to his institutions while busying himself with tactics and details’ (Douglas, 1986: 111). Therefore, institutions are not just muted undercurrents to the perception and doings of people going about their everyday actions. Institutions are more than routines. I thus ask how institutions live with critique in situations of non-conformity: How do institutions deal with the deviant or unintended practices of people who engage with them? What happens when critique is brought to the surface or even inversed and directed against institutions? How do people who have survived political violence make use of institutions to express their victimhood? What happens when the category of ‘“survivor” doesn’t just refer to surviving victims – as it does in the rhetoric of the Rwandan government’ (Mamdani, 2001a: 47), but rather embraces all those who find themselves seizing institutions of disputing, reconciliation and community-making?

The debate on institutions as sites of the social has been rooted in a controversy that reaches from structuralism to pragmatism. The critique of institutions has been located in a critical sociology and anthropology (Boltanski, 2011; Fassin, 2017; Rottenburg, 2013). But institutions as conceptualised by critical sociology are negatively marked by domination: since they are present everywhere, they envelop society and suppress creativity. However, societies depend on institutions, entrusting them with the maintenance of the social order because of their dominance (Boltanski, 2011: 52–53). But what if we turn the question around and ask: What has pragmatism achieved to rehabilitate the significance of institutions, where human capacities and their modes of engagement in action are to be acknowledged? ‘Good pragmatism is respectful of persons and the situations they interact, in the “here and now”, where they commit their capacities for invention, experimentation and interpretation to the search for a form of “living together”’ (Boltanski, 2011: 53).

From dispute to critique

Where there is society, there are disputes.(François Kagabo, mediator, Akagari ka Nyamugali, Southern Province, Rwanda)

When Odette Nyirahategekimana brings her concerns to the mediators, she is obliged to think about herself and what she does in terms of the institution she engages in. Odette is an elderly woman who has lost her family members during the genocide in 1994. She is the only survivor in her family and continues to live on her own. She cultivates her own small plots of land and harvests crops herself for a small subsistence. As a survivor of genocide, she has access to social support and forums for genocide survivors. In such forums, government sensitization and mobilization campaigns serve the specific psycho-social needs and predicaments of survivors of genocide. As my vignette below demonstrates, she stepped beyond this institutional practice and crossed the threshold into engagement with mediators and within which she needs to employ a register of state, law and officialdom. People's practices with institutions shape new forms of engagement and change how people see themselves beyond a specific situation:

Any institution then starts to control the memory of its members; it causes them to forget experiences incompatible with its righteous image, and it brings to their minds events which sustain the view of nature that is complementary to itself. It provides the categories of their thought, sets the terms for self-knowledge, and fixes identities. All of this is not enough. It must secure the social edifice by sacralizing the principles of justice. (Douglas, 1986: 112)

Suspended in the institution of mediation, Odette ceases to be a resentful neighbour in the community and, because of institutional practice, becomes a citizen whose rights have been infringed. She presents herself as a plaintiff in law who claims protection.

Erving Goffman, too, was interested in the meaning of social institutions for their participating members. His focus was directed at the ‘consequences for the self’ when it approaches and engages with these institutions (Goffman, 1961: 187). The institutional arrangements, as Goffman had them in mind, create social facts for involved members.

In crossing the threshold of the establishment, the individual takes on the obligation to be alive to the situation, to be properly oriented and aligned in it. In participating in an activity in the establishment, he takes on the obligation to involve himself at the moment in the activity. Through this orientation and engagement of attention and effort, he visibly establishes his attitude to the establishment and to its implied conceptions of himself. To engage in a particular activity in the prescribed spirit is to accept being a particular kind of person who dwells in a particular kind of world. (Goffman, 1961: 186)

Based on the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Boltanski, I trace critical moments and competencies of critique in institutions situated in the legal sphere (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999; Wagner, 1994). I begin with an approach to institutions that notes that they rely on complex formations of regulations and rule-following, institutions that lay out blueprints that provide their participants with precise modes of action. However, this type of institution and what it does to people should not suggest that practices of critique are prevented. On the contrary, it is in this very process of laying out the rules of engagement in and by institutions that critique comes to the surface, where disagreements find articulation and where contradicting views on the significance of institutions are exchanged or negotiated between people.

As Richard Rottenburg (2013: 72) explains, if we are aware that critique takes place not only outside of institutions but also within them, then critique is already incorporated as an inherent feature in rule-making and rule-following within institutions. Seeing institutions as an enabling ground for critique embraces an interplay between conventions that confirm and express belief in institutions, on the one hand, and critiques of repetitive rule-following and of a disregard for difference, on the other hand. This dialectic is the sine qua non for institutions to be seen to be legitimate and reliable. The way conventions and critique are interlocked is the thread that runs through my analysis of the case study of Odette's dispute and its implications for the institution of mediation committees. It is from the vantage point of an institution enabling modes of engagement in dispute that I intend to shed light not only on the possibility of critique after genocide and mass violence committed in communities of proximity but also on the workings of critique at the very heart of institutions and their imperative for human capacities.

From the vantage point of a rule-centred approach to socio-normative ordering, the ‘dispute acquires a pathological character; it signals a deviance, a malfunction, that the control institutions of a society are essentially designed to put right’ (Comaroff and Roberts, 1986: 5). Once corrective processes are instituted, a dispute has the potential of becoming a constructive and creative process as a social form, a practice of making community, a process of negotiation of values and worth in a given society. But, to speak of a dispute as a social form, a forum is required, publicly accessible, more or less formal, with rules inscribed, by means of which the actors involved come into play (Abel, 1974: 227).

The dispute is a result of disagreements. These comprise processes of slow but gradual accumulation and amplification of problems, complaints and discomforts which are lumped together and steadily added up over prolonged periods of time. Smaller disagreements may be aired as accusations or be vested in silent disappointments. They may be articulated as claims or forged into secret associations between relatives or neighbours. They can be subject to continuous reorganisation, regrouping and replotting of compositions of forms and contents, of involved actors and passive agents. Assessments and permeations of disputes, their duration and accounting for the number of actors involved are imperative for the institution of mediation, its success, reliability and legitimacy. The permeations of the sediments of a dispute demand skilful navigation between the parties who claim, are accused or must defend themselves or their assets. The mediators must bear all this in mind, to sift through the sediments that may endanger a long-term resolution of the dispute. This is the moral incentive that is embedded in the trustworthiness of the Rwandan inyangamugayo. As mediators, they are moral entrepreneurs who are wedged in between the ‘social community’ and the ‘political community’. Entrusted with the settlement of disputes, they have to keep one eye on the past and another on the future.

‘I am the injured party’

Early on a Friday morning in March 2014, Odette as a claimant and the six defendants arrive at the mediation committee of the Gasaka Sector of Nyamagabe District in the Southern Province of Rwanda. Odette's claim can be summarised as demanding a compensation payment for a destroyed harvest. In fact, two years have already passed since the destruction of her harvest. Today, the dispute is scheduled to undergo mediation in the form of an appeal, as earlier attempts at resolution resulted in the local authority failing to satisfy the claimants’ expectations of fairness and justice. The mediators begin by asking the claimant about her general acceptance of the procedure of mediation and her willingness to cooperate with the mediators. Odette expresses her agreement on the condition that the mediation procedure leads to fairness in justice.

A critical concern for the sociology of conventions, according to Nicolas Dodier, is to detect the calculations and strategies of the actors engaged in a situation. Sociological pragmatics aims to understand discourse and action in relation to each other. What is said is subjected to pragmatic and reality tests to establish whether it is acted on and implemented. A critique and the social form it takes – in our case the dispute – can be considered the ‘result of reality tests’ (Dodier, 2011: 97). In Odette's case, the mediators immediately begin to remind both parties of the norm-based conventions that underlie a good mediation of the dispute.

As you all know, you are not coming to the mediation committee to merely dispute but to find a good solution and to restore the harmony between the parties in dispute. So, if you help us in our task to reconcile you, we can find a lasting solution with which you can all be satisfied, since it comes with your support.

Following the mediators’ ambition to foster trust in their undertaking to solve the dispute, they set out to learn about other conflicts that could potentially cast a shadow over the dispute at hand. The mediators explore such a possibility by employing the registers of everyday conversation, asking for news from the place of residence of the parties in dispute and inquiring about the condition of the fields and the harvest, among other registers of everydayness. These questions are also intended to help the mediators define an unequivocal dispute, so that the initially disputed and often uncertain disagreement can be freed from any ambiguity and mediated as a singular dispute (Mather and Yngvesson, 1980–1981: 777). At this point, the mediators appeal to the claimant: ‘In your heart, you know what this is all about’. With this, the mediators initiate the first step into the sedimented layers of the dispute, pointing out to the parties that arguments not related to the dispute at hand have no value in the mediation.

Odette then presents her appeal:

Honourable Panel of Mediators, as you are representing the law, I feel that I am a citizen who must be defended as the Government of Rwanda provides for. It is in that context that you must enforce those laws, and as authorities of course you are mediators, that is why you must defend me, and you should respect [the] applicable laws in protecting me in this situation. If you wish to defend me, you should not accept that, from last year until this day, I am still claiming this amount of money equalling one thousand. That is how I waste my time.

A few days ago, their children returned only to remove my cassava plants. It was on January 14th, and if you want to be eyewitnesses, I can show you those torn cassavas still lying in my field. All this can happen because the local authorities who also represent [the law] are not enforcing the law well. The ones who should be protected by those authorities become victims.

If you wish I can go home, fetch the cassava and even show you their shoes they left in my field as they were playing in it. So how can you defend someone while I am the victim? What I want is justice as I am the one who brought the claim to your attention.

When the claimant is finished, the mediators consult the defendants on their view of the dispute. To everyone's astonishment, they all agree with the original complaint and elucidate the circumstances that had led to that misfortune. Their children had been chasing isenane (edible insects) and had run across the claimant's field, but they had already asked the claimant for forgiveness. The claimant joins into the discussion and agrees that the children were catching isenane, but that in doing so they destroyed her maize and beans plants and that compensation was therefore appropriate. The mediators had already learnt that several defendants had paid 1000 francs for each of their children involved in the chase; others were unable to raise this sum but their requests for reconciliation with the claimant went unheard. The dispute was inevitable and took its course. In addition, the dispute became more entrenched when the claimant categorically rejected the payments and apologies offered and the pleas for reconciliation extended to her.

Now, during the appeal process, the mediators are asking themselves what weight they should attach to the claimant's dissatisfaction, which is growing proportionally to the duration of the dispute. The accused parties, in turn, complain about the claimant's reluctance to lay the dispute to rest. One defendant points to the attempts they made to restore the relationship between the disputing parties: ‘We have already asked her for forgiveness, but the situation seems to be difficult for her’. In the meantime, the mediators make yet another attempt to capture what is at stake in the dispute they feel they can end:

So, we are here to bring people who are divided by a dispute back together, to make them reconcile with one another. What we want to achieve is a good solution. No one disagrees with the cause of your dispute, and even the accused parties pledge for forgiveness. They are ready to commit to acknowledge what went wrong. What is more, they are willing to pay compensation for what has been destroyed and for what was lost. But of course, no one can force you to come to an agreement. But in fact, it is our desire, it is the mediators’ estimation that you may come to an agreement.

Odette refutes her role in extending the duration of the dispute by refusing to accept the guilty pleas of the accused parties. She cannot see how her own actions contribute to the perpetuation of the disputing process. According to her, all responsibility for the problem lies with the defendants. She expresses that she never expected to be involved in a public forum like this mediation and voices her anxiety and doubt about living alongside the accused parties once the mediation has come to an end: ‘Why should we reconcile and for what end?’ She says that she cannot trust the people in her village and again refers to the initial incidents when her harvest was destroyed. ‘The ones who are guilty of the violation of my property, which led to the destruction of my fields and harvest, have missed out to give proof of their truthfulness and worth’. Now Odette hopes for mediation to provide justice since there are laws that protect and defend citizens from misdemeanours.

These people, they have their children who can cultivate for them, who can go and earn money to support them. But me, I am all alone. My name is Nyirahategekimana Odette and you all know me very well indeed. I have no one left in my house. I can no longer forgive. I am very tired, and I am traumatised. I demand justice from you that you can grant me the worth I deserve.

Here again, equivalences are weighed up against each other, they are loaded with worth

For, if it is true that disputes in justice bear fundamentally on equivalence, their principal focus is the inappropriate attribution of things. To criticise is to contest the state of worths in place; it is in effect to demand that things change hands. (Boltanski, 2012: 71).

With her words, the claimant lays out the precarious condition brought about when she was pushed into a dispute that had started in 2012. She repeatedly emphasises her exhaustion, her losses and draws attention to the effect this has had on her body. She ascribes this to the continuous inability of the accused parties to acknowledge the economic loss she endured previously when another harvest of maize and beans was destroyed. Because the dispute has gone on so long, she claims, the guilty parties should now pay double compensation, and she would not grant them an unconditional pardon as requested by the mediation committee at the outset of the appeal proceedings.

To circumvent the mediators’ proposition that the aim of the appeal should be a reconciling compromise, the claimant questions the mediators’ trustworthiness. She takes the suggested compromise as an opportunity to critique their work of mediation in general for future conflicts that are yet to come, not least because an equivalent decision can only be grounded in the impartiality of the mediators. It is this impartiality, she claims, that demonstrates to people that when their rights have been violated, they can entrust their circumstances to mediators and trust that their experiences of injustice would result in an equivalent settlement. ‘If you shall fail and disappoint us all in defending my case, then I think that people will say that you, in fact, do not do anything to lay disputes to rest’.

Odette continues to hold up the dispute at hand, while seizing the very same disputed situation to measure the performance of mediators. In doing so, she draws on the significance of mediation for society as a whole. In her attempt to persuade, she relies on the regimes of actions and registers of worth available in mediation. These are, on the one hand, the regime of justification, which I call reconciliation and see as corresponding to Boltanski's regime of love, and, on the other hand, the regime of decision, close to Boltanski's concept of justice (Boltanski, 2012: 68ff). But the way the claimant engages in her critique disables the two modes of justification usually provided for in mediation. The dispute translates into a narrative of injustice and the plot is furnished with a range of equivalences (grievances, suffering, loss, arguments, positionality, evidence, emotions, rhetoric or the ways of speaking in public), in line with Boltanski's argument that ‘[t]he possibilities of language are exploited to bring equivalences to the surface, either challenging them through the goad of critique or reaffirming them through justification’ (Boltanski, 2012: 70–71).

For a critique to be convincing, there can be no doubt whatsoever about the speaker's point of view; there can be nothing but absolute certainty. Anything else would not be critique, which gathers its strength from the speaker's sincerity, but would only be convention. As we see, Odette does not allow herself to be led astray from her point of view, as captured in Rottenburg's (2013: 70) dictum that ‘critique must operate as an unmasking strategy, which always wants to be right’. My argument draws on the observation that the specific institution of mediation I study lives with critique. I argue that this can only work because of the situatedness of the people who are entrusted with maintaining the institution. They all share the ordinariness of what common Rwandans know, act upon and practice in their everyday. Having said that, the institution of mediation builds on the processual learning of its participants and diversifies as it can only be sustained by the social community. This is at the heart of what Didier Fassin (2017) has equally argued for why critique continues to be of relevance for anthropological inquiry.

The mediators insist on engaging in what they believe is the mutual interest of both parties, a reconciling agreement. Their goal is to put the parties in the foreground and, by emphasising the relationship between them and their neighbourly living, make the cause of the dispute recede. In the end, this cause appears as of only minor importance as the mediation process readjusts that which unites the parties.

For the claimant, however, the dispute represents a reasonable mode of justification for her concern, one that, as the mediation progresses, increasingly takes the form of a ‘dispute as critique’ in its fundamental features. The dispute draws on generally identifiable grievances about the living together of neighbours on the hills and in the life of the community, and its underlying concerns and workings are detached from the dispute as initially defined by the mediators. Odette vividly describes how she is isolated from the everyday in the village, how she was insulted by her neighbours and even denounced. Yet, she adds a third accusation, hoping that it aptly describes her status in her community: ‘Let me tell you, honourable mediators, on 30th of July they threw manure at my house’.

This treatment of Odette resonates with what has been experienced by other claimants who have been referred to as a poisoner (umurozi) or witchdoctor (umupfumu), although in general witchcraft accusations cannot be uttered in public in the Rwanda of today as they would not be considered modern and therefore reasonable by the state (and mediation is an institution of the state). Odette isolation resembles the way people are commonly treated who are more knowledgeable or wiser or have made extraordinary experiences in their lifetimes that the average community lacks. These people are mostly on their own or in one way or the other separated from the ordinary lives of the community. The vulnerability of Odette also comes from her age, gender and loss due to genocidal violence against her and her family. She is a ‘bare life’ in the eyes of the social community who lack understanding of the violence committed in the past and want to move on into the future by all means possible. Through her narrative of self, Odette opens another window of temporality and the abusive experience that marks her everyday. As Odette seeks recognition for her injuries not only suffered in the present moment, but the injuries that remain from the experience of genocide, she aptly addresses her positionality in the community. Speaking of the event of children throwing manure at her house, not only deviates from the dispute undergoing mediation, but also brings the humiliation she experienced back into the public scene of mediation. She speaks of exclusion and victimhood, as she is an elderly woman who, apart from living alone, faces not only the trespassing of younger children resulting in damaged crops, but also the force of united and thriving families in her immediate surroundings who, due to their age and togetherness, cannot relate to her past experiences that continue to resonate in the present moment. Her living condition as an elderly woman seems to be at odds with the everyday experiences and the (absence of) knowledge of people of younger generations in the neighbouring community of the burden of loss survivors suffered during the time of genocide and continue to live with. This lack of knowledge or lack of desire to know about the experiences and living conditions of ‘first generation’ genocide survivors and their social community is now a critical contingency of the ‘second generation’ social community as discussed earlier on.

Beyond the dispute

After several hours of arguing, negotiating and mediating, the dispute moves closer to a conclusion. The mediators make a decision on behalf of the parties. It takes the form of a compromise, determining that half of the compensation payment demanded by Odette is due immediately and that the settled compromise includes only the material dimension of compensation – payment in currency – and no symbolic act of reconciliation or remorse by the defendants. Odette is decidedly dissatisfied with the decision. She approaches the mediators one last time to announce how she intends to proceed further with what she continues to regard as an unresolved case:

Honourable Committee of Mediators, with all Your integrity, Your trustworthiness and Your acumen, I would like to express my gratitude to You. I want to thank you for not delaying my case and reaching a decision in an appropriate time frame, even though the mediation could not be concluded according to my preference. May Imana (the Creator) provide You with the perseverance to fulfil this office. But, actually, I am the injured party, and it seems that, given these circumstances, I will continue to suffer and may eventually be devastated. Now only Imana can bring agakiza (redemption), because this dispute does not seem to be solved by human beings. At least You granted agaciro (worth) to my case. You listened to me. Everything else shall be resolved by Imana.

Odette articulates her dissatisfaction by referring to what she claims is the ultimate mode of justification. The essential role of abunzi as a ‘post-genocide’ institution is not to confine the parties in mediation to an imposed order of the ‘political community’. Rather, it is to negotiate a social community in ‘harmony’, a being together with others, to be achieved in the plurality of the available afterlives of genocide. This, as I have shown, does not imply restricting people to forms of application and fixed interpretations of law, but is marked by negotiation and critique of rights, law, social relations and the ethical order in the community, the authorisation of abunzi, and the right to claim and dispute legal and ethical entitlements. Odette turns to national duties, obligations, religious faith and Imana to return to the negotiated settlement by means of a new register of worth. In her insistence on the urgency of achieving justice, here and now, for genocide against her family committed in the past, she also involves the faith of the whole nation in Imana as the ultimate witness of injustice and deliverer of justice. She evokes Imana to insist on her existential concern and, at the same time, to come closer to an experience of justice being served and the truth being revealed (see Shaw, 2010). Odette signs a written document that captures the decisions taken by the mediators. With this signature, she indicates her consent, even though she does not agree with the outcome. Shortly after she leaves the room, the accused parties hand over the compensation as required by the mediators.

Throughout the dispute, Odette found a way to bring her critique of the ‘post-genocide’ social community, as she experienced it in her everyday, into the public forum of mediation. All the while, the instituted mediation committee was working to realise the political community freed from ethnicised labels and violence. The everyday life world of Odette, however, links her perception of violation to her experiences and unimaginable losses in a past of political and mass violence. She collects all her strength to publicly admit to her life of loss and loneliness: ‘These people, they have their children … But me, I am all alone … I have no one left in my house. I can no longer forgive’. Indeed, her critique of the political community of ‘post-genocide’ Rwanda, built on postulates of unity, reconciliation and Tutsi victimhood, only succeeds in unmasking the divides in the ‘social community’. ¹

What is more, her critique dismantles an assumption that ‘community of survivors’ such as posited by Mamdani is a pathway to unity. Seeing the neighbours’ children ignoring her claims and disrespectful, probably forgetful, of her biography of loss and suffering, Odette's experience with her social community has led her to lose trust in the promises of the political community. Odette's mode of critiquing and her ways to address the experience of dispute and loss exposes the painful and unfinished process of reconciliation. ‘In Rwanda, as elsewhere, this process of reconciliation begins when both groups relinquish claims to victimhood, embracing their identity as survivors’ (Mamdani, 2001b: 47).

This, Mamdani's observation, marks a time during which the promise of a ‘new Rwanda’ still held hopes for the political community. The establishment of institutions such as abunzi could have been interpreted as a forum where a political community beyond the ‘post-genocide Rwanda’ is in the making. An institution based on constitutional and organic law, founded in neo-traditional practices of coming together as abanyarwanda and transforming it into a citizen forum, for critiquing, disputing and indeed the making of community. But transformative possibilities of this forum through practices of critique were missed out as Odette's eloquent engagement exposes.

At the beginning of this article, I asked how institutions sustain critique, how they live with and live up to critique, and how they accommodate the critical capacities of the people they encounter in the everyday. To answer these questions, I have built on Boltanski's endeavour to put competence in an analytical framework

to refer to generative schemas whose presence must be assumed to account for the capacity of actors to produce acceptable critiques and/or justifications en situation – that is to say, their sense of justice or their moral sense. … [T]he sociology of critique undertook to describe the social world as the scene on trial, in the course of which actors in a situation of uncertainty proceed to investigations, record their interpretations of what happens in reports, establish qualifications and submit to tests. (Boltanski, 2011: 25)

In the Rwanda of today, critique is stifled under the cover of preventing the bringing of genocide ideology back into the present moment. Ordinary Rwandans know that the unfoldings and undercurrents of the genocide are not a single story but a very messy and multi-layered experience of a wide range of individuals and groups that cannot be easily captured in their ethnic identities. Odette's engagement in mediation challenges this single story of how an ‘elderly female genocide survivor’ is expected to live in the local community and what she can aspire to. She openly rallies for what Mamdani calls the integrated political community. The permanent minority of ‘Tutsi’ is far from being unmade today, as it is needed to maintain its minority status and ultimate victimhood.

This is what happens in mediation. It is in this light I have presented a dispute, focusing on what an ordinary dispute conveys for the individuals, the mediators and the community. That is why the specific disputed matters move into the background and I have emphasised Odette's rhetoric. When we consider Odette's rejection of her status and livelihood, we can see that there is an attempt to unmake ‘a permanent minority’ within the confines of the institution of mediation. We witness the very making of the community as the participants negotiate their positionalities and identities within it.

It is Boltanski's toolkit that helps me approach Mamdani's argument in a productive way, as Mamdani's political theory remains on the level of statehood and governance (and a significant amount of idealism, I believe). But anthropological and sociological theory built with ethnographic insights – and inspired by the competence of critique as laid out by Boltanski – has the capacity and means to let us enter into the very ordinary lives of how people perceive and live the repercussions of the social and political community. In fact, Rwandans today are least concerned about their ‘ethnic identities’. Because of their past experience of violence, they are striving to come together and sort out ‘who they are as a community’ and who they can actually become.

What the mediators stress is that all the involved parties, including the children, will continue to live ‘side by side’ in the local community. There is no way out of the community. They will continue to work the land and harvest their crops. This is what the mediators tirelessly emphasise. In that way and for the time being, the mediation process, experience, its public design and the conclusion of the dispute remind the involved parties that everybody is a member of the social community, to speak in Mamdani's terms. That is why, in this article, I have argued that the small matters that turned into disputes have the potential to make and remake a community. To study the capacities of people in mediation and its institutionalisation in the ‘post-genocide’ Rwanda can indeed be analysed or theorised in light of Mamdani's bold argument for the ‘community of survivors’, even though it seems ethnographically challenging for Mamdani to prove his point. My contribution herein is that there are mechanisms at play (in today's Rwanda they are impregnated by transitional justice paradigms) that have the capacity to remake the political and social community in even the most difficult settings. As for Rwanda, with its living memory of one of the most atrocious acts of modern violence, there is indeed no way out. Everybody involved, including the new institutions and their representatives brought about under strong international advocacy and travelling models of justice and human rights, learns how to live together again or, better, anew. Everybody in Rwanda today learns how to become and be human again.

The sociology of critique and the anthropology of critical competencies provide a meaningful analytical background to assess whether Mamdani's proposal of building social communities of survivors and perpetrators, natives and colonists will produce the political and social community that he envisions. The challenge that Mamdani puts forth when he speaks about the social and political community is to address the rift created by the past atrocities in the present moment and into the future. However, it is Boltanski's social critique that offers a frame of analysis for mediation as experienced and practised in the new Rwanda of today. Therefore, my response to Mamdani is that we can only find a future in critique against dominant narratives such as that of ‘post-genocide’ Rwanda and through uneasy positionalities of people like Odette. Only in this way can the promise of a social–political community in which everybody is able and willing to live together be it in Rwanda – or in other future communities of survivors and perpetrators – be fulfilled.