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Judging Genocide: Emotional Labor During Transitional Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2023

Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira ,
Evelyn Gertz  and
Christopher Uggen
Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States. Email: nzitatira.1@osu.edu
Evelyn Gertz
Affiliation:
a researcher at Facebook in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Christopher Uggen
Affiliation:
Distinguished McKnight Professor in Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
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Abstract

Despite the proliferation of transitional justice, scholars have rarely researched the emotional toll on those who implement transitional justice mechanisms. This article accordingly examines the emotion management techniques employed by eighty-five judges who served in Rwanda’s post-genocide gacaca courts. Most of the intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion management strategies we find are gendered, with men generally emphasizing strength and women underscoring empathy and understanding. Moreover, the dimensions of identity that were most salient during the conflict also shaped the judges’ interpersonal emotion management strategies. Specifically, judges who were not targeted during the genocide focused on regulating emotions tied to punishing defendants, while judges who were targeted emphasized survivors’ emotional catharses. As such, our findings show how conflict divisions and gender norms structure the expression of emotion during transitional justice processes.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 1210 - 1231
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

This research was funded by the US National Science Foundation (Grant Number 1626123). The authors wish to thank John Gasana Gasasira, Eric Sibomana, and Jean-Damascene Gasanabo for their assistance, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their advice.

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