Few African societies are as researched as post-genocide Rwanda. And most of that attention is devoted to the legacy of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi. Kristin Connor Doughty's Remediation in Rwanda is part of this wider trend but opens important new vistas given the analytical and methodological approach adopted. Doughty looks at dispute resolution as such, thus not only genocide related, and offers a contextualised perspective based on extensive fieldwork. Doughty examines what she calls the ‘harmony legal model’ in which state law, even when punitive, is given performative force in an ideology of ‘harmony’.

The recent attention to grassroots approaches – often through the use of so-called tradition-based justice and reconciliation mechanisms – entails not only a turn toward more culturally appropriate and homegrown solutions but often also implies the decentralisation of the judicial procedure or the reconciliation process to the most remote local level: small face-to-face communities. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a background to, on the one hand, the Rwandan case study and, on the other hand, this global context in which grassroots law is gaining importance.

Such a shift towards ‘the local’ in transitional justice and peacebuilding requires appropriate empirical insights. These follow in the other chapters that seek to collapse dichotomies such as ‘genocide’ and ‘non-genocide’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘war’ and ‘peace’ (p. 94). Chapters 3, 4 and 5 present the ethnographic material derived from the author's fieldwork experience. Each of these chapters is devoted to one legal forum or, what the author calls, ‘techniques of state-backed community building’.

Chapter 3 examines the Rwandan gacaca courts that dealt with the legacy of the 1994 genocide. This court system is probably the best-known instance of such a new model for dealing with a history of mass violence. At the same time, the actual working of this court system remains little understood and its outcomes are contested. The novelty of Doughty's analysis resides in the fact that she considers these genocide courts in the same analytical frame as other legal grassroots forums dealing with non-genocide disputes. Therefore, the author also provides rich empirical evidence of the working of the so-called Abunzi (Chapter 4), committees of mediators, and a legal aid clinic (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 further collapses the distinction between these different forums by focusing on a commonality: the position and work of ‘lay judges’ occupying a liminal position between government authority and deep knowledge of their neighbourhoods.

Bringing the gacaca courts in dialogue with other grassroots dispute resolution mechanisms is a refreshing perspective. At the same time, one might wonder whether the author's instance on ‘contextualized conversation’ (p. 135) and, in general, mediation as the dominant logic of the courts that dealt with the legacy of the genocide is not a bit overstated. Indeed, Remediation in Rwanda rightly calls attention to those lay judges that managed to combine judicial, cultural and religious registers to mend social ties that were viciously ruptured by intimate genocidal violence. But were these type of judges not rather exceptions to the rule? Gacaca’s lay judges had little room for genuine mediation given the rigid legal framework and typical criminal trial procedures guiding their activities. The institutional framework only provided for mediation as an option for property cases, not for crimes against humans. And my own fieldwork and the final statistics on the gacaca courts process released by the government of Rwanda demonstrate that also most of these property cases were settled by adopting typical criminal trial procedures, not by mediating. These statistics also show that the confession and pardon procedure – often evoked to stress the restorative, at times quasi-religious qualities of the court system – was only partially used: most defendants did not confess but were nevertheless convicted. This alone already points to more frictional ‘conversations’ and an adversarial logic animating the space of the gacaca courts.

That said, this book moves well beyond a first generation of overtly legalistic, theoretical and normative studies analysing the legal responses to the Rwandan genocide. This literature often made assumptions about law-in-reality with little understanding of the Rwandan socio-cultural universe and insights regarding the ‘smaller-scale interpersonal interactions that make up ordinary life’ (p. 21). It is the careful attention to these micro-empirical dynamics that sets Remediation in Rwanda apart from earlier studies. Indeed, the book presents vivid evidence of what it means to settle disputes and how these things get done in practice, not only de jure. And the work makes an important call to stop romanticising the ‘local’ and acknowledge the inherent violence of social repair, at the grassroots as well.