When the Western-style judicial system was introduced in Rwanda, it brought not only new procedures but also a way of thinking about conflict. Disputes stopped being problems for a community to heal and became contests for a judge to referee. Someone would win. Someone would lose. Generations later, Rwanda is still living with that shift, even as it builds a justice system that reflects who Rwandans actually are.

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This is the real obstacle facing Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in Rwanda today. It isn&039;t a lack of legal provisions or public awareness. It is a culture inherited, not chosen, that equates justice with confrontation, and authority with a robe and a bench. Until that culture loosens its grip, ADR will remain a technical option on paper rather than a lived instinct.

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The irony is that Rwanda already knows how to do this. Long before Western-style courts existed, communities resolved disputes through dialogue and elders, in processes built around restoring relationships rather than declaring victors. The Gacaca courts proved, in the most difficult circumstances imaginable, that this approach still works: a country processing the aftermath of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi chose reconciliation over pure retribution for hundreds of thousands of cases, and it held together. That is evidence that mediation's principles aren't foreign imports being forced onto Rwandan soil. They are closer to home than the adversarial courtroom ever was.

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So, why does litigation still dominate? Part of the answer lies with the legal profession itself. Lawyers built careers on courtroom advocacy, and a system that channels disputes toward mediation can look like a threat to livelihood. Judges, too, have reason to feel unsettled: ADR quietly redistributes decision-making power away from the bench and toward the disputing parties themselves. Neither reaction is irrational, but both reflect a mindset that treats mediation as litigation's rival rather than its complement.

That framing needs to change, and legal professionals are best positioned to change it. ADR was never meant to replace the courts. It exists to filter out disputes that don't need a judge's authority land boundaries, family inheritance, neighbour disputes so courts can focus on cases that genuinely need formal adjudication. A lawyer who embraces this isn't shrinking their relevance; they're expanding how they serve a client. A judge who refers a case to mediation isn't losing authority; they're exercising it wisely.

The deeper shift has to happen in how ordinary Rwandans understand justice itself. For many people, especially outside the cities, a dispute isn't "settled" unless someone official has ruled on it, an instinct shaped by a century of being taught that authority flows downward from courts and Western-style institutions. But it also means mediation, however cheaper or faster, can feel less legitimate simply because no one "won."

Reversing that perception will take more than a policy circular. What changes minds are the stories people point to years later: a land dispute settled by mediation that neighbours still call fair, a family feud resolved without a courtroom that left relationships intact instead of broken. Government incentives can nudge people toward ADR, but legal education has to do the harder work – training lawyers and judges to see mediation not as a soft landing for cases they'd rather avoid, but as a serious skill in its own right.

None of this is nostalgia for a pre-colonial past. It's recognising that Rwanda's post-genocide recovery was built on the belief that reconciliation and truth-telling could coexist with accountability, the same belief ADR asks of its participants. A society that rebuilt itself around Gacaca has already shown it doesn't need an adversarial culture to deliver justice. What it needs is to permit itself to stop treating the courtroom as the only room where justice happens.

Laws promoting ADR are necessary but not sufficient. Until Rwandans, and the lawyers and judges who serve them, unlearn the idea that someone must lose for justice to be done, mediation will remain a policy aspiration rather than a persistent practice.

Western-style courts changed how Rwanda resolved disputes. It's time to let the adversarial culture they left behind die.

The writer is a legal researcher and mediator.