The Promises of the New Constitutional Engineering in the Post-Genocide Rwanda

Conflict of a magnitude that happened in Rwanda owes its causes to a multitude of factors, and ultimately require multi-dimensional responses, each of which plays a role in addressing the underlying roots of the genocide. A legal response to the problem, the Constitution of Rwanda, was adopted by a referendum in May 2003. This contribution is an attempt to gauge the role of the Constitution in reordering Rwandan society along a new social equilibrium. Seen against the backdrop of the genocide that decimated a tenth of the country’s population, this contribution focuses on the identification of the causes of the genocide and the evaluation of the substantive, procedural and institutional innovations of the Constitution in its attempt to build a new path for post-genocide Rwanda.