Violence, Subject Formation and Humanitarian Discourse in Post-Gacaca Rwanda

NATACHA NSABIMANA, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded funding in October 2013 to aid research on 'Violence, Subject Formation and Humanitarian Discourse in Post-Gacaca Rwanda,' supervised by Dr. Mahmood Mamdani. Wenner-Gren funding enabled a fruitful year of field research in various parts of Rwanda. The project set out with three guiding queries. First, to examine the consequences of the legal institutionalization of Rwandans into the categories of perpetrators and survivors brought forth by the Gacaca trials and the kinds of political communities and lived social realities and subject positions such a process creates on the ground. Second, to explore the specter of violence in the everyday life of post-genocide Rwanda. Finally, the grantee was interested in situating Gacaca in relation to specific tropes of humanitarian reason. Fieldwork examined archival documents pertaining to the courts as well as interviewed participants of Gacaca, local academics and government officials. The findings of this research will help comprehend the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda.