Collaborative Research: Enhancing Public Access: Archiving Court Cases to Study Genocide and Transitional Justice

In the twentieth century, genocide killed more people than wars or homicide. Understanding who commits genocide and how to bring justice in its aftermath is therefore vitally important in the twenty-first century. Accordingly, this project will examine unique court data from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to assess the characteristics of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who participated in the genocide, how courts in Rwanda sought to hold these individuals accountable, and how such legal responses to mass violence affected individuals and communities. Because many other instances of mass violence involve civilian participation, understanding the characteristics of people who commit mass violence holds the potential to inform interventions to stop or prevent violence. Courts and related justice mechanisms that hold perpetrators accountable are also implemented in countries worldwide, and understanding how these courts function and the effects they have on people and communities will likewise inform future justice efforts. The project results will therefore be widely disseminated to academic, governmental, and public audiences that include organizations forecasting and responding to mass violence, such as the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, as well as organizations that facilitate legal responses in the aftermath of violence, such as the International Center for Transitional Justice.

This project asks three related questions to contribute to social scientific scholarship on mass violence and its aftermath: 1) Who participates in mass violence? 2) What influences legal responses to this participation? And 3) How do legal responses to mass violence affect individuals and societies? To do so, the investigators examine the case of Rwanda, where as many as one million people were killed in 1994. Rwandans who participated in the violence were later tried in gacaca courts, a community-based justice system that the Government of Rwanda created in the aftermath of the genocide. By analyzing 1.96 million gacaca court case files, this project will assess who participated in the violence, how the gacaca courts responded, and the influence of the gacaca courts on Rwandan citizens and communities today. This project makes three core scientific contributions: (1) Existing studies of genocide stress the normality of perpetrators, though few large-scale studies have empirically assessed the characteristics of those who take part in violent collective action. Gacaca court records constitute the largest dataset of perpetrators of violence to date, allowing for an analysis of the characteristics of the civilians who participated in the genocide. (2) The gacaca court system uniquely blended punitive and restorative justice to respond to civilian participants. Better understanding how these courts functioned is vital to scientific understanding of the law in action, transitional justice mechanisms, and community-based justice. This will include an analysis of the individual and community-level factors that influenced court processes and punishments, invoking questions that are central to scholars of inequality and socio-legal processes. (3) Third, understanding gacaca will inform literature on transitional justice mechanisms, ranging from their long-term influence on participants to their influence on the communities where court proceedings occurred.