��� This article argues that the gacaca courts represent the darker side of transitional justice in seeking to impose a specific form of justice and reconciliation on its intended beneficiaries –Rwandans who lived through the violence of the genocide. My purpose is to illuminate the formal structures of power that shape individual participation before the gacaca courts to nuance the general consensus that local justice is better than its international counterpart. Analysis of the power dynamics behind Rwanda’s gacaca courts not only illustrates the near-total state control of the process, but also provides a bottom-up analysis that centres the lived-through experiences of violence of those individuals who survived it as a critical, yet largely absent, component of the transitional justice toolkit –of national and international actors alike. While international donors and diplomats recognize that implementing an effective transitional justice strategy is a formidable challenge given the intimacy, scale and sheer brutality of the 1994 genocide, they fail to appreciate adequately the power relations that structure individual participation in traditional justice mechanisms like gacaca –which they praise as a model for other post-conflict societies to emulate in re-establishing the rule of law through trust, truth telling and access to justice for all (UN-OHRLLS 2006: 130). An impressive body of literature heralds the gacaca courts as a viable alternative to punitive, procedural, Western-style justice (for example, Clark 2010; Longman 2006; Meyerstein 2007; Venter 2007). These glowing assessments are based on the idea that gacaca is a local, traditional and restorative judicial mechanism– rather than on the way that the gacaca process, as a key part of a broader regime of state power defined by the post-genocide government’s policy of national unity and reconciliation, actually plays out in the lives of ordinary people. While it is currently fashionable among many scholars of transitional justice to praise locally forged and culturally relative justice as more effective and legitimate, such claims are made without knowing nearly enough about the broader power dynamics that influence local justice mechanisms like gacaca. Without a local-level perspective, grounded in the individual lived experiences of participants in the gacaca processes, the darker side of how the courts work in practice at the level of the everyday person is hidden from view. This is because international academics and journalists laud the outcomes of gacaca–ending impunity and promoting reconciliation –as national policy accomplishments rather than recognizing gacaca as central to a state-run legal system that produces