Emmanuel Sarabwe, Peacebuilding from below: Positionality of family and community members in restorative justice in post-genocide in Rwanda

Background of the study
In the last two decades restorative justice has been scholarly discussed to understand its contribution to peacebuilding. The debates focused on its relevance for the restoration of peace as compared to retributive justice and amnesty. Scholars focused on restorative justice at individual, legal or political level with little attention to the level of family and community. This research aims to study restorative justice at family and community levels. Focusing on those levels is relevant because the consequences of violence and the potential to healing reside within families and communities, especially in Rwanda where community and family members are socially, psychologically and economically interrelated and interdependent.  

The aim of restorative justice is building peace after collective violence. Restorative justice is broadly defined as restoring human relationships by involving victims, perpetrators and community members through acknowledgement of transgression, truth-telling, reconciliation, and rituals (Boesenecher and Vinjamuri, 2014:39-40; Ycaza, 2010:13; and Pytlak, 2017:230). Rwanda is among the post-violence contexts in which restorative justice has been applied. During the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda over one million people were killed, over 300,000 women raped, and countless animals and properties were looted or destroyed. Over 120,000 people were convicted for having committed genocide crimes. All this destroyed the social fabric of Rwandans, justifying the relevance of restorative justice for restoring that fabric.

In post-genocide Rwanda, top criminals were judged and punished by the international criminal court for Rwanda (ICTR) based in Arusha-Tanzania, while some countries judged Rwandan genocide criminals living in their respective countries. Genocide criminals living in Rwanda were punished by traditional community courts (Gacaca) based in communities where crimes had been committed. In the latter courts, prosecutions were done in the presence of family and community members who are custodians of related consequences. Gacaca judges were identified among trusted and respected community members including those from genocide survivors’ and non-survivors’ ethnic affiliation and subsequently trained to do the job assigned to them. In most of cases, survivors live and continue to live on the same hills as perpetrators and/or their family members before, during and after the genocide. Once perpetrators are in prison, survivors and their family members continue to live next to family members of perpetrators. Perpetrators ending their punishment in most cases rejoin their families to live in the same neighbourhood as survivors. To avoid painful cohabitation, some perpetrators and/or survivors relocate. 

Despite life imprisonment for some, most of the high rank criminals were punished by up to 30 years of imprisonment, according to the National Report of Gacaca courts (2012), which implies that, now after 30 years of the genocide, these high rank criminals are ending their punishment and are free to go back to the communities where they lived before and to their families,  which often implies living close to survivors. This contextual life creates painful cohabitation between genocide survivors, perpetrators and their respective family members that could be mitigated by the implementation of a restorative justice approach. Ingelaere (2008:50) recognized that living together in post-genocide Rwanda is pervaded with fear, while interactions are unavoidable and necessary as people are interdependent in their daily activities. Furthermore, as Rutayisire and al. (2025) indicate, a release of these perpetrators creates uneasy family dynamics in terms of accommodating them emotionally, normatively, socially and economically.   
It is now 30 years after the genocide, and perpetrators of severe genocide crimes who were expected to be killed due to the death penalty they got or were sentenced for life imprisonment are being released. These perpetrators are going to live close to survivors and their descendants who hardly know them because they grew up when these perpetrators were in prison. Some of these descendants were known by their colleagues as not having fathers. The survivors’ children who were born after the genocide, or who were still very young during the genocide and lost one or both parents and other family members at the time, are now in their adulthood. There are families that risked their lives to rescue Tutsi. The legacy of this rescuing, including what the current generation can learn from it, has hardly been studied. These young people are the generation that is going to take the memory and judgements of the genocide forward. 

Main research objective
The research will explore 1) whether and how the family and the community are becoming agents of restoring peace during and/or after the genocide through resistance to the genocide, reparation, (un)forgiveness and reconciliation and what the outcomes of all this are; and 2) whether there are any lessons to be learned from the families and communities’ actions, including those of the first and second generation, in the peacebuilding process. 
Specific questions
1)    What inspired members of families and communities to resist genocide and how did they resist? How did resistance influence forgiveness and reconciliation concerning family members who might have been killed in other areas than the areas where the resistance took place and what are lessons to be taken from this experience in future violence prevention? 
2)    Why and how do family and community members engage in forgiveness and reconciliation and what are the outcomes of this engagement? What is the difference in outcomes of engagement and nonengagement in peacebuilding processes? 
3)    Why and how do inmates of genocide crimes, survivors and their respective spouses and descendants engage in forgiveness to prepare effective reintegration of those inmates? What is the outcome of this engagement within families and in relations between survivors, perpetrators and their respective families?
4)    What is the meaning of cow(s) loss as a result of killing or looting cows during the genocide? What are social and cultural consequences of this loss? What is the meaning and effects of reparation of cow loss? And what is the effect of cow-related forgiveness and/or reparation in terms of restorative justice?

Research methodology
In this qualitative research, in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs) and participant observation will be used to collect data. Each FGD will be composed of six to ten people. This number gives the possibility to everyone to share views on the theme of the study. The choice for a qualitative approach is based on research objectives and questions. As this research is about people’ genocide related experiences, family dynamics and relational processes, it requires building trust with respondents and flexibility to follow a respondent’s flow of ideas and emotions to get as much in-depth information as possible.