Jens Meierhenrich

• London School of Economics and Political Science

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'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

Chapter 6 is the second of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially e...

Chapter 10 shifts from the institutional development of the gacaca courts at the elite level to their institutional effects – real and imagined – at the mass level. Like the next chapter, it speaks to their meaning – in an interpretive sense – in the countryside. The analysis calls on the dramatis personae who appeared in various gacaca proceedings...

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially em...

Chapter 2 introduces and configures the concept of lawfare. This framework chapter sets the theoretical scene for what is to come. Whereas both legalism and lawfare, in the books conception, serve the standard functions of regulation in a given polity, the author demonstrates that only lawfare is intended qua system to also serve a function otherwi...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

Chapter 12 concludes the book and ties its different strands together. It explains why, and when, lawfare came to be seen by leading RPF cadres as a functional equivalent to warfare. The chapter further explains why Rwanda’s present resembles its past to a remarkable degree. More specifically, the analysis demonstrates that the government of threat...

Like the preceding chapter, Chapter 12 investigates the relationship between the center and the periphery in the waging of lawfare, with a particular emphasis on resistance to the gacaca project. Although some observers have come to speak of “Rwanda’s Leviathan,” the label causes one to overlook the few – but nonetheless really existing – spaces of...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

Chapter 7 is the last of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially emb...

Chapter 4 reconstructs the rise and fall of chambres spécialisées, specialized chambers lodged inside Rwanda’s professional courts of first instance. These newly created tribunals began their work in late 1996 and drew the ire of many international human rights organizations due to the RPF-led government’s disregard for international civil and poli...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as i...

Socio-legal scholars these days devote themselves routinely to the study of international law. It was not always thus. In the late twentieth century, no more than a handful of law-and-society scholars asked themselves how international law worked. Even fewer ventured into the field. John Hagan was one of those who did and the first sociologist to s...

Despite a long and venerable tradition, the material constitution almost disappeared from constitutional scholarship after the Second World War. Its marginalisation saw the rise of a normative and legalistic style in constitutional law that neglected the role of social reality and political economy. This collection not only retrieves the history an...

This book provides an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's classic The Dual State (1941), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel's was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. His sophisticated--not...

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not...

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not...

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not...

This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Carl Schmitt that incorporates insights from law, the social sciences, and the humanities. But it is also an intervention in its own right: it seeks to decenter the study of this most hyped thinker of the twentieth century. Two arguments are advanced. First, the authors argue that...

This chapter offers a longitudinal analysis of Carl Schmitt’s institutional theory. It draws a detailed road map for the period under investigation, examining critical junctures and theoretical turns along the way. Two principal arguments are advanced. First, the chapter departs from conventional analyses according to which Schmitt only embarked on...

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not...

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not...

This text, first published in 1941, provides a comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National-Socialism, and is the only such analysis written from within Hitler’s Germany. Its central thesis is that two states co-existed in National-Socialist Germany—hence, Fraenkel’s invention of the concept of the dual state. This was comprised of a n...

The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) gave rise to the first permanent Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), with independent powers of investigation and prosecution. Elected in 2003 for a nine-year term as the ICC’s first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo established policies and practices for when and how to investigate, when to purs...

Genocide confounds scholars, practitioners, and laypersons alike. Despite the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Popular, moralizing accounts have done their share to hinder understanding by attempting to advance simple truths in an area where none are to be had. This Reader lays the foundation for im...

Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how “active” is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members o...

Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how "active" is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members o...

The authors in this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems explore the everyday lives of international law. More specifically, the authors theorize and investigate select "practices" of the International Criminal Court (ICC), by which I mean recurrent and meaningful work activities-social or material- that are performed in a regularized fashion and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The historian James Young, with his seminal book The Texture of Memory, may have inadvertently started an analytical trend wherein—in the context of the study of collective violence—official memorials and otherwise privileged lieux de mémoire, including memorial museums, are deemed wo...

This chapter analyzes the vicissitudes of memory (Meierhenrich 2006; Olick 1999; Halbwachs 1992; Connerton 1989) in post- genocide Rwanda. It is culled from a larger, long- term project on the transformation of lieux de mémoire (Nora 1984-93, 1989), or sites of memory, that revolves around a historical and spatial analysis of all the genocide memor...

Genocide confounds scholars, practitioners, and laypersons alike. Despite the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Popular, moralizing accounts have done their share to hinder understanding by attempting to advance simple truths in an area where none are to be had. This Reader lays the foundation for im...

This article takes the Nyabarongo river as a lens through which to tentatively reflect on the transformation of lieux de memoire in post-genocide Rwanda in the period 1992–2009. It is culled from a larger, multi-year project on the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memory in Rwanda that revolves around a systematic, his...

Against the background of Japan's long-anticipated implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2007, this article analyses the legislative implications of treaty accession. One of the causes of the accession delay in Japan — nearly 10 years passed between the government's participation in the adoption of the Rome Statu...

In recent years scholars from neighboring disciplines have emphasized the importance of conceptual rigor in designing, administering, and interpreting research in the social sciences. Drawing on this new conceptualism, this article analyzes the much talked about notion of “reconciliation.” In an effort at structuring a useful debate on possible dep...

This article analyzes the administration of lustration—what Arthur Stinchcombe termed the “social basis of constitutionalism”—and its unintended consequences in comparative and international law and politics. It is concerned with the social function of animating ideas in the evolution of institutions. The article demonstrates that in the case of Ir...

Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650–2000, this book examines the role of law in making democracy work in changing societies. The Legacies of Law sheds light on the neglected relationship between path dependence and the law. Meierhenrich argues that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, have an important - and hitherto under...

This article analyzes the promise - and limits - of pro-democratic intervention in international law. It revisits Immanuel Kant’s influential prescription for peace, developed in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), which has served as the foundation for democratic peace theory. This article emphasizes the unintended consequences of pro-...

This review examines the function of conspiracy in international law, with particular reference to the jurisprudence of international ad hoc tribunals. It compares and contrasts the function of conspiracy law in the prosecution of international crimes before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg following World War II, where the co...

The 2003 presidential and parliamentary elections in Rwanda marked the end of the transition from the 1994 genocide, and followed electoral changes introduced by the interim government. The parliamentary elections were notable for being the first time that members of parliament were chosen by direct, universal suffrage since Rwanda gained its indep...

This article inquires into the social function of guilt, especially collective guilt, and the implications thereof for collective violence and collective memory. The focus is on the relationship between collective violence and collective memory in countries that have experienced cultural trauma, defined as a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a...

One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupat...

Silent enim leges inter arma Cicero¹ What is war, as we now use the term? What are the consequences thereof for the meaning of law? Under what conditions is the language of war necessary for capturing the demands on law in times of transition? By examining the evolution of ‘war talk’ and ‘law talk’, and the implications thereof for ‘rights talk’, t...

In June 2002, the Republic of Rwanda embarked on an extraordinary experiment in transitional justice, inaugurating the pilot phase of a new participatory justice system called Inkiko-Gacaca. This article-the result of 8 weeks of research involving interviews with government and nongovernmental organization officials, local judges, and prisoners, an...

This article analyzes the institutional choice of gacaca jurisdictions in post-genocide Rwanda. The invention of the gacaca jurisdictions represents an innovative attempt by the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda to come to terms with the legacies of the 1994 genocide, which claimed the lives of more than five hundred thousand Tutsi and "moderate Hutu....

This article analyzes the promise—and limits—of pro-democratic intervention in international law. It revisits Immanuel Kant's influential prescription for peace, developed in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), which has served as the foundation for democratic peace theory. This article emphasizes the unintended consequences of pro-...

Supervisor: Professor S.N. MacFarlane. Thesis (D. Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 461-510).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Oxford, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-130).