In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, in which according to United Nations estimates at least 800,000 individuals were murdered,Footnote ¹ Rwanda underwent a vigorous process of transitional justice.Footnote ² Mostly, this involved the application of criminal law. This application eventuated on a number of levels, including: the indictment of roughly ninety individuals before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), an ad hoc international tribunal created by the United Nations Security Council and based in neighboring Tanzania; tens of thousands of proceedings in specialized genocide and crimes against humanity chambers of the Rwandan national court system (chambres spécialisées); and a vast number of proceedings situated in a reformulated, and state-controlled, putatively traditional system of justice called gacaca (recast into inkiko gacaca, meaning gacaca courts). In my view, there is no state that has implemented more in the way of atrocity prosecutions for mass genocide, ever, than the small country of Rwanda. Domestically, in Rwanda, accountability for the genocide against the Tutsi was coordinated by the Rwandan government, led since 1994 by President Paul Kagame, whose military forces intervened to stop the genocide in July of that year and ousted the predecessor regime.

In The Violence of Law, Jens Meierhenrich—currently professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science—offers a detailed, erudite, and encyclopedic analysis of the gacaca system.

The Rwandan government introduced inkiko gacaca in the early 2000s. The public-facing justification was simple. So many people were responsible for the massacre of so many—with so many languishing in jail—that a system had to be put in place to process justice. So the Rwandan government turned to gacaca, which originates in a customary and traditional form of dispute resolution. Initially gacaca was not meant to deal with mass murder. In traditional form, judges were local elders, all men, and the proceedings were organic and voluntary. Meierhenrich however observes that the Rwandan government revamped this “informal institution” into “a full-blown mechanism of accountability” through standardized and codified national legislation (pp. 8, 252). Customary gacaca thereby became inkiko gacaca.

Meierhenrich’s book is a blistering critique. For Meierhenrich, “the gacaca project evolved into an irregular system of warfare” (p. 28) for which he invokes the descriptor lawfare. Meierhenrich defines lawfare as “a revolutionary strategy of conflict that centrally revolves around the systematic use of legal norms and institutions for political ends, and which is aimed at the defeat of an enemy, real or imagined” (p. 53). Meierhenrich argues that state control over gacaca deformed the system such that it led to intimidation of the civilian population.Footnote ³ He rues the fact that inkiko gacaca proceedings selectively targeted the actions of the predecessor genocidal regime while omitting inclusion of alleged abuses by the current government. One of Meierhenrich’s most trenchant observations involves the state’s discursive reliance on the putatively traditional nature of gacaca to justify its extensive implementation. Meierhenrich adroitly surfaces the fetishization that transnationalists make of “local” or “nativist” methods of justice and the manipulative ability of states to trumpet this localism to starry-eyed foreign experts while discretely promoting rather centralized visions of state power (p. 20, on “legal orientalism”). Meierhenrich flatly concludes that the “weight of the state” in post-genocide Rwanda is “tremendous” (p. 355). He argues that gacaca “morphed into a[] … system of warfare … [that] resulted in transitional injustice” (p. 664).Footnote ⁴

This book furthermore transcends gacaca such that readers can leverage the Rwandan case-study. Indeed, The Violence of Law offers a set of broader insights about transitional justice. Meierhenrich unmasks the violence that, in his view, inheres within transitional justice, its deployment as lawfare to bolster the power of the state, and the harms it inflicts upon people. The Violence of Law indeed is explicitly about the “vices of law” (p. 703). Meierhenrich’s admonitions moreover are all the more germane in light of what I have elsewhere noted as the emergence of increased retributive tendencies within the operation of transitional justice,Footnote ⁵ along with bureaucratized best practices.

I come to this book as someone who, in 1998, worked as a lawyer in the specialized chambers of the Rwandan national courts. “Worked as a lawyer” should not be taken too grandiosely. The Rwandan legal system at the time had been decimated by the genocide. There were hardly any lawyers left. The physical infrastructure was largely annihilated.Footnote ⁶ Hence most of the legal work involved reading through the files (dossiers) that had been prepared for detained suspects, ensuring the correct identity of the detainee and credible linkages to allegations, and bringing some process to gridlock. Jails were chock-full of genocide suspects. The Central Prison of Kigali, where I worked, was crammed to the rafters. I described the conditions as follows:

Meierhenrich offers a comprehensive survey of how gacaca came to be and its many details. He devotes considerable attention to how sentences were severe, while including the possibility for community service (travaux d’intérêt général) on public infrastructure projects. (p. 264). Confessions were encouraged. Lawyers were absent. 170,000 judges—lay persons—became publicly elected (pp. 7, 259). A system was put in place to ensure the representation of women. Attending local inkiko gacaca proceedings was rendered compulsory for every adult citizen (p. 545). A huge number of people provided evidence. Official figures from the Rwandan government state that between the years 2002 and 2012 inkiko gacaca judges had processed “nearly 2 million cases of alleged low-ranking, mid-ranking, and—in the final years—even high ranking génocidaires” at a cost of US $25 per case (p. 7). The volume of prosecutions, as well as the political centrality of the transitional justice project at the time, was such that Meierhenrich casts the process as one “of an entire people awaiting judgment,” riffing off one of the themes of his book, and the cover image, this being Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in which the protagonist is a man who is always awaiting judgment (p. 50). In this regard, Meierhenrich sharply discounts the supposedly meaningful “participatory” nature of the process (pp. 545–66).

Gacaca courts were shuttered in 2012 (p. 7) after the state deemed their work to have been completed. Observers splinter in their views about the merits of inkiko gacaca in Rwanda as a mechanism of transitional justice. Some scholars and journalists, such as Phil Clark,Footnote ⁸ Philip Gourevitch,Footnote ⁹ and Nicola Palmer,Footnote ¹⁰ have noted shortcomings and concerns but overall conclude that measurable good has come out of it. I had commented on gacaca’s potential for “reintegrative shaming,” though subsequently came to temper this vision somewhat.Footnote ¹¹ Other scholars have been sharply critical: many more, in fact, than those who evince a more optimistic perspective. Critics scale a range of themes. These include: the absence of legalism and due process as well as recourse to gacaca to settle “personal and political scores”;Footnote ¹² its retributivism that “accentuates the ethnic divide”;Footnote ¹³ and paradoxically the troubling prevalence of opportunism, clientelism, grants of clemency, patronage, and side-deals.Footnote ¹⁴

Meierhenrich takes the critique even further than most of the critics. His is a cri-de-coeur of despair. The very first words in the acknowledgements to his book are that writing it “almost broke me” (p. xxi). In the next line, Meierhenrich foreshadows that “there is no evidence for hope in this book. Instead, there is violence all around” (id.). All is bleak, despondent, grim, and saturnine. In this sense, The Violence of Law reads as a definitive lament and a mournful elegy. Transitional justice slips into the sepulcher.

Meierhenrich arrived in Rwanda in 2002 (p. 4). He conducted extensive field work and on-the-ground research. Meierhenrich deploys a compelling methodology of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” which he vivifies through visual ethnography (p. 34). Meierhenrich’s opus is compendious, clocking in at 706 pages (excluding the index). The pages are dense. The contents are intellectually expansive and compact all at once. Every single word is carefully chosen. The writing is truly stunning. Despite the book’s length, there is an element of Hemingway’s terseness within a stream of eclectic and widely seasoned thoughts. Meierhenrich offers an intense synthesis of the Rwandan experience and connects it to an immense diversity of literature and sources: social science, humanities, fiction, art, poetry, and philosophy. This book is twenty years in the making. It shows. This is one of the most deeply researched academic books I ever have read in my life. Meierhenrich’s photographs from his trails in Rwanda embellish the written text. His photography phenomenologically enhances all the citations and research and data; in Meierhenrich’s own words, his camera was “a methodological tool” (p. 35) that conveyed “the experience of transitional justice: what it looked like, and, by extension, what it felt like … [w]hat statistics is to others, photography is to me: a way of seeing, a way of showing, and a way of knowing” (pp. 36–37, emphases in original).

This is a very emotional book: as I mentioned previously a piercing cri-de-coeur. Meierhenrich is broken-hearted. He reveals his grief. He owns it. He centers his sentiments. I find this attractive. In the spirit of Meierhenrich’s writing, which is profoundly personal, I write a review that is slightly personal. Indeed, just as writing this book almost “broke” Meierhenrich, so too did I feel that writing a review of such a panoramic, pained, and somber volume would break me.

In the end, though, writing this review stoked some embers of hope in me. I do balk, at least a bit. Is Meierhenrich’s despair with it all too much? Did no good really come out of gacaca? None at all? Was it all abusive? At times, I felt that Meierhenrich may be a touch dismissive of the bewilderingly massive violence of the Rwandan genocide, of the brutal ways in which so many Tutsi were murdered, and of the mobilization of the population in a paroxysm of mass extirpation callously ignored by the international community such that the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA, led by Paul Kagame) was the only entity that ended the genocide. The book orients to the post in post-genocide, yet not on the agony of the pre and the during.

Meierhenrich’s argument is concertedly focused from the start. He knows where he is going and he builds everything around his directionality. Meierhenrich is relentless. His is a “long journey into the abyss of transitional justice” (p. 466). The book does not consider much in the way of competing perspectives. The writings of observers—myself included—who may see things in a more variegated manner tend to be cited with reference to their critiques (p. 357). So, one direction in which this review could have gone is to contest Meierhenrich’s claims about Rwanda, namely, to rebut, contextualize, and parry; or, on the other hand, to concur, validate, and affirm, in other words, to suggest that, whatever gacaca’s dreamy beginnings and potentialities, in the end indeed Meierhenrich’s desolate assessment carries the day.

But this is not where I wish to go, here. Others can do that, elsewhere, if they fancy. To me such an analysis risks becoming a circular discussion.

For me, the greatest strength of Meierhenrich’s book, and why I firmly and unequivocally commend it to AJIL readers, is because of what it offers for discussion of transitional justice generally. Is what happened in Rwanda inevitable? Is it unavoidable that “whenever transitional justice is imposed, violence results” (p. 507)? Here, a slight contradiction arises. After all, Meierhenrich himself notes that the stark deformation he observes in Rwanda’s gacaca courts was not preordained. It was intentional. He presents gacaca as transitional injustice, which implies that there can be such a thing as a just transition. Still, for Meierhenrich, he relies on the “case of Rwanda … to advance a larger argument about the endtimes of transitional justice” (p. 6). So, is what happened in Rwanda inexorable? Is the entire project of transitional justice irretrievable? Are we at the metaphoric endtimes as in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach? And if so, what to do? Go “dancing with tears in my eyes,” as in the music band Ultravox’s 1984 rendition of Shute’s book of Australians awaiting unstoppable irradiation because of nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere? And, if so, other than dancing while lamenting what else?

In short, while I share many of Meierhenrich’s causes for skepticism and doubt, as well as his concerns—and myself have been critical of international criminal law—I feel that, still, there is something to be learned here—warnings, advisories, signposts—to salvage and improve transitional justice at large. I have some hope. Rather than an elegy, I have decided—exercising the individual agency that all readers carry within themselves—to approach Meierhenrich’s august book as a cautionary tale.

One of Meierhenrich’s central arguments is that transitional justice mechanisms can serve as tools for state control and power consolidation. The dangers of lawfare are therefore a central thread. Meierhenrich distinguishes lawfare from legalism, to wit, the systematic use of legal procedure for political ends. (Though, I also think that legalism serves political purposes, in large part the superimposition of courts and trials as the best place to assess individual responsibility for collective violence, which I have elsewhere critiqued.)Footnote ¹⁵ In any event, and returning to the thread, Meierhenrich focuses on “the rule of law[—]and specifically transitional justice[—]as a political weapon”’ (p. 28). This is something that I too have noticed elsewhere. Together with Barbora Holá, in 2024 I published a book on informers in Communist Czechoslovakia.Footnote ¹⁶ To be sure, the Rwandan genocide was not the equivalent of life in Communist Central and Eastern Europe. But some potential for comparative study still exists. The Czechoslovak Security Police relied on an extensive web of informers to break trust in society, harvest and mine information, and surveille citizens. After the collapse of Communist governance in November 1989, transitional justice mechanisms were implemented to reckon with the past. These did not include penal proceedings. On that note, the Czech Republic’s approach differed sharply from Rwanda’s. Czech mechanisms included lustration (purges), restitution, memory institutes that officialized history, and clarity laws that publicly opened the informer files that had been culled by the Communist secret police. In our book, we note that these mechanisms served many goals, one of which was to scapegoat informers so as to deliver comfort to many Czechs whose involvement in and support of the ancien régime may have been more subtle. Scapegoating of informers proceeded through lustration and also the unadulterated opening of the secret police files to any Czech who registered with the archives. The result, we argue, was cruelty, to wit, the use of historical information to exile people in the present. In addition, other goals were the political consolidation of a historical narrative and enhancement of a neoliberal capitalist state. We note, as Meierhenrich does, how transitional justice interventions may sow mistrust and distrust (p. 639). We unfurl the ability of transitional justice to be unleashed for retributive purposes even if penal mechanisms are prima facie eschewed. In the end, we call for transitional justice to return to its original roots of rehabilitation, reintegration, and restoration grounded in human dignity. We hope to offer a way to speak about complicity in the violence of the former state that might minimize, in Meierhenrich’s words, the violence of the new state’s laws. We additionally emphasize an individualized and fine-grained approach to informers. This framework aims to promote dignity, recognize injury, and provide etiological and historical accuracy (particularly as to informer motivations). Could these approaches in the specific context of the harms triggered by informers be applicable more broadly, including to cases of endemic genocide? Perhaps, perhaps not. But I think this is worth a try. Meierhenrich’s book is a crucial discursive nudge in this regard.

Meierhenrich unsettles one of the normative assumptions of transitional justice that fills its imaginary. This normative assumption is that it is intrinsically a force for democratic good. This assumption underpins the space of what is increasingly emerging as an applied transitional justice industry of expertise, consultants, advisors, and transnational actors. The reality, however, remains that political actors may come to deploy the language and institutions of transitional justice in movements other than the ideal-type of “from atrocity to democracy.” Transitional justice mechanisms and vocabularies also may contour transitions from atrocity to a less atrocious autocracy. Or from atrocity to a capitalist state, albeit one that is heavily controlled and centralized. Do these count, too? An even thornier question is the deployment of the vocabulary and nomenclature of transitional justice to legitimize movement from liberal democracy into more authoritarian rule. Language such as lustration, amnesties, pardons of individuals perceived as unjustly detained, the rewriting of history, and the settling of scores through reform therefore infuse transitions of all kinds and all shapes and sizes, including into democratic backslides.

Even in the ideal-type of transition (i.e., from atrocity and abuse to democracy) what kind of “democracy” does the normativity of transitional justice envision? Increasingly, transitional justice mechanisms seem to secure their legitimacy on the basis of promoting a neoliberal market-based capitalism. This has become somewhat of a sine qua non to ensure donor funding. As Marcos Zunino notes, transitional justice mechanisms that stray from liberal legalism and aim toward governance models other than market-based capitalism (toward socialism, for instance) are chided or discredited by donors, transnational civil society, and international experts who wish to see such states move in neoliberal directions.Footnote ¹⁷ This begs far deeper questions about the interplay between the globalist-capitalist political economy, which is becoming increasingly oligopolistic, and the promotion of human dignity. Corporate responsibility is a key cognate theme. Transitional justice, in particular international criminal law, increasingly weds itself to a legal order in which the liability of corporate persons is shielded. A contrarian way forward, on this, would be to spark assertive conversations at the domestic level in the space of contract law, property law, and commercial law.

Here, too, I am not (yet) convinced that transitional justice is doomed and dangerous even in an imperiled world. I think there is still time to invigorate fundamental mindsets. This can be achieved, in part in my view, by downscaling the emergence of transnational best practices that pre-determine what transitional justice should look like. Perhaps a move could arise for transitional justice to de-industrialize. By this I mean for it to focus less on the pursuit of institutional validationFootnote ¹⁸ and more on delivering local results to local stakeholders in processes in which locals exert actual agency and are not consigned to the passive perch of being the fungible beneficiaries of the wisdom of at times distant others. Meierhenrich is wise to intuit the language of “marketing” to describe the promotion of transitional justice operations. Here, his work maps onto the writings of Christine Schwöbel-Patel who in her book Marketing Global Justice examines this phenomenon at the level of international institutions.Footnote ¹⁹ Like Meierhenrich, Schwöbel-Patel engages with the vices of virtue and suggests that an important step in the legal imaginary is to de-enthrall from the putative wonders of international and transitional legal interventions.

Meierhenrich’s book also exposes the problem of selectivity. What counts as human rights abuses worthy of entering into the lexicon of transitional justice? In the Rwandan context, allegations of abuses by the Rwandan government were omitted from official processes. It was the actions commandeered by the cruelly genocidal predecessor government that were included. Those actions, to be sure, called out for redress. The genocide against the Tutsi was unspeakably violent and horrific. Yet, as Meierhenrich notes, this meant that not all of the historical violences were accounted for (pp. 12–14). Such is a familiar refrain throughout all of international criminal law. This refrain dates to the polemical dissent by Justice Pal at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East straight through to more recent prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC), notably in its string of self-referrals in African conflicts—Mali, DRC, Uganda, for instance—in which human rights abusive governments referred the domestic human rights abuses of unsuccessful rebel groups who had lost their revolutions to the ICC. Once again, some justice is better than no justice, to be sure, but mindfulness must be retained of the selectivity at hand.

Meierhenrich’s book also is indispensable when it comes to the siren that it sounds about the violence of law itself. Meierhenrich courageously points to the “dark sides of virtue” (p. 705). Indeed, so much of transitional justice is seen by international lawyers, global civil society, and invested stakeholders as inherently beneficent, as a force for wonderful change, as buttressing all sorts of positive social reform and as being world-saving. Transitional justice is presented as a project of global redemption. Yet this process may obfuscate realities of the use and abuse of victims, their spoliation in the name of justice, their pain and disappointment, the compelled nature of participation (p. 546), and the hurtfulness of mandated forgiveness as being “coercive reconciliation” (p. 603).

Where to begin the checks and balances on all this? For starters, perhaps, to deflate the messianic virtue-values attributed to transitional justice. To de- or un- enthrall, to revert to Schwöbel-Patel’s work. Perhaps transitional justice activists should sit more than they stand. Perhaps not everything needs to be redressed. Transitional justice actors should be aware of their surroundings and the potential of co-optation and abuse. Perhaps greater valence should be given to transitional justice as an organic, messy, and spontaneous process that best emerges bottom-up even if in contestation with state power.

If transitional justice is akin to playing with fire, then perhaps less of it would be better. But I fear that having none of it—to give up entirely—would be far worse.