IN THE SHADOW OF PRISON: POWER, IDENTITY, AND TRANSTIONAL JUSITCE IN POST-GENOCIDE RWANDA

This dissertation is a political ethnography of transitional justice in post-genocide Rwanda. It examines power relations in Rwanda's transitional justice program - to date the most extensive criminal accountability system on genocide at the micro level - and how it allows the State to control and structure conceptions of criminality, justice and truth, thereby impacting prospects of reconciliation at the micro level. This study is the first to systematically investigate released prisoners of the Rwandan genocide and to analyze their narratives on violence in Rwanda and their experiences within the transitional justice system Based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis, this dissertation challenges accepted views on the linear contributions of transitional justice to peacebuilding and post-conflict reconciliation and offers a unique examination of power asymmetry in post-conflict justice mechanisms. This study deconstructs the role of the justice system as a tool of political and social control and examines its impact on post-conflict social ordering in Rwanda. Indeed, this study recontextualizes transitional justice as a part of Rwandan power and identity politics and unpacks the official legal narrative on violence and justice in Rwanda and contrasts it with the memories of released prisoners of the genocide. The study finds that the incongruences between the official discourse and released prisoners' narrative frame the debates about which violent acts the RPF regime choses to criminalized and which ones it normalizes in its recasting of episodes of violence in Rwanda. Indeed, this dissertation finds that the Rwandan legal framework forces Rwandans who journey through the legal system to take on simplistic and unitary identities which highlight their assumed criminality but eschew their victimhood at the hand of the State and other identities that define them, which in turn affect their citizenship and potential for true reconciliation.