INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION OCCASIONAL PAPER NUMBER 19 addition of a gender perspective.72 In fact, the National Accord and Reconciliation Act of 2008 incorporated no direct references to women or gender. As Bell and O’Rourke have shown the introduction of quotas for women in peace negotiations has often proved difficult to reconcile with political or ethnic quotas.73 It is nonetheless worth noting that both the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission and the 2010 constitution have played role in recognising the pervasive gender-based issues that need to be addressed in Kenya. As noted above, local mechanisms have increasingly been employed as a facet of transitional justice due to the recognition that criminal justice and truth-seeking processes have been unable to achieve the objectives of reconciliation. Indeed, the former prosecutor of the Special Court of Sierra Leone, David Crane, noted that “our perspectives are off kilter…we consider our justice as the only justice…we don’t create mechanisms by which we can consider the cultural and customary approaches to justice within the region”.79 In general, local justice mechanisms are seen as “culturally embedded”, quicker to implement and more accessible physically to the local population. The support for local justice also stems from the fact that they are lot cheaper to employ, which is critical given the high costs associated with international criminal justice. For example the Fambul Tok (Family Talk) launched in Sierra Leone in 2007 has been seen as critical in facilitating community reconciliation in the aftermath of the conflict. By 2012, 2700 people had testified before 60000 members of their communities in 155 ceremonies.80 Its relevance is particularly stark when compared to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which cost $300 million in the prosecution of just fourteen perpetrators.81 Thus it is evident that there remains many obstacles to women’s equal participation beyond numbers, including gender stereotypes, psychological and traditional barriers, and prevailing inequalities in education, training and resources. A 2015 Women Leading Peace report noted: “A particularly problematic and increasingly criticised trend is the “add women and stir” approach, which assumes that solely the presence of women in high-level peace negotiations is not only necessary but also sufficient to elicit favourable peace outcomes”.74 As Mayesha Alam has remarked, “the essentialisation of women, the assumption and indifference toward treating all women as the same, is frequent, problematic, and counterproductive” in peacebuilding initiatives.75 A recently developed transitional justice framework discussed by the African Union identifies the value of using of indigenous/ ethno-justice mechanisms to facilitate justice and transformation.82 This is often justified by the examples of northern Uganda where Mato Oput has organically been employed by the Acholi people to assist with the reintegration of former Lord’s Resistance Army combatants. In Rwanda, the use of gacacas to address the 1994 genocide is also often cited as a successful example of a large-scale attempt to implement reconciliation on the community level. Of the estimated 120,000 perpetrators arrested in 1994, only 10,000 had been tried in the formal courts by 2006. The gacaca courts were therefore established in 2002 as a means of speeding up the process of adjudication those responsible for genocidal violence. Local Justice and Reconciliation As noted above, much of the literature on gender and reconciliation centres on the role of women in local peacebuilding processes.76 These investigations often reinforce suggestions that women are naturally more peaceful and thus more predisposed to reconciliation. In part responding to failures of achieving top-down approaches to reconciliation, increasing calls have been made to employ local justice mechanisms, which are usually informal and community based, especially in Africa. The scale of violations committed during conflicts in societies where formal justice mechanisms have been depleted has resulted in calls to adapt indigenous and informal justice mechanisms as tools of conflict resolution and peace-building. The gacacas had five stated aims: to enable truth-telling about the genocide; to promote reconciliation among Rwandans; to eradicate the culture of impunity; to speed up the trial of genocide suspects, and to demonstrate Rwanda’s own problem-solving capacity. Overall an estimated 1,958,634 cases were tried before the courts between 2002 and 2012 at a cost of US$40 million. By comparison, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), set up to try those most responsible for the genocide, completed just 75 cases at a cost over US$1.5 billion by the time it closed in 2015.83 However given the nationally led character of the modernday gacacas Bert Ingelaare and others have decried the process as “an invented tradition”.84 He suggests the process at best resulted in a superficial and “thin” reconciliation intended to buttress a governmental version of the “truth”. There has been some well-documented success in the employment of local mechanisms in the promotion of reconciliation, and it is argued these processes have the potential to widen access to justice in the face of mass atrocities, as well to enable women to hold decision-making positions. At the theoretical level, some argue local justice mechanisms are better placed to reconcile by “creating a spiritual sense of belonging to a community, imagined or real”.77 According to Charles Villa-Vicencio indigenous reconciliation allows perpetrators and victims to contribute to a new society since these processes allocate greater involvement in decision-making processes. He argues that making cultural and religious connections between different parties promotes social-cohesion and civic trust. He further suggests that while international justice represents “judicial control and clarity”, indigenous justice represents “cultural resonance and community responsibility”.78 Part of this “invented tradition” involved the inclusion of women in a process that had historically been male-led. Women were specifically included in the gacacas at a number of levels – the Executive Secretary was a woman, Domithile Mukantaganzwa, and a quota system required 7