Doctoral Dissertation Research: From Episode to Everyday: Transitional Justice and Gender Violence After the Rwandan Genocide

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between transitional justice and gender violence after genocide. The project investigates the diverse forms of gender-based violence that emerge and endure in the "aftermath" of atrocity. In shifting the focus from the exceptional to the everyday, the research challenges the basic premise of the transitional justice framework. The research explores how transitional justice fails to deal with, and at times even engenders, the ongoing violence of women's lives after an "episode" of mass violence. One main research question is posed: How do the mechanisms and general aims of transitional justice emerge through women's narratives of gender violence after genocide? Data is collected through one hundred in-depth interviews with Rwandan women receiving assistance from one of two local women's organizations. Interviews explore the extent to which women connect recent and/or ongoing conflicts to the 1994 genocide and legal instruments established in response to the genocide. Findings indicate the extent to which societal healing requires international, national, and local engagement with the barrage of gendered consequences women encounter in a post-conflict society. This research contributes to a more promising practice of transitional justice by illuminating innovative spaces of potential intervention in genocide's aftermath. Given increasing levels of international investment in transitional societies, there is great value for policy-makers in understanding the local impact of global transitional justice efforts. This project contributes to more valid measurement of the concepts in the literatures on post-conflict societies (e.g. reconciliation, rights, justice, forgiveness) by presenting an in-depth account of how ordinary women understand and experience such difficultly defined concepts in their everyday lives. Qualitative data collected for this project will provide new insights into the role of gender and everyday violence in post-conflict reconciliation and social reconstruction.