Phil Clark had an interesting op-ed in last week’s New York Times holding that all transitional justice must be local. For democratizing societies seeking to confront an abusive past, international tribunals are not the way forward. Rather, justice has to be sought close to home. He looked particularly at the case of Rwanda following the 1994 genocide.

The negative case is powerful. International tribunals are always enormously expensive, and to date their outcomes have been meagre. Moreover, as Clark argues, they are based on a model created at Nuremberg and Tokyo immediately after the Second World War, when the key task was bringing to justice individuals ultimately responsible for mass crimes committed by disciplined military machines. Today, however, conflict is increasingly complex, and criminal responsibility is properly examined all the way up and down military hierarchies, and indeed beyond them. Also, conflict is now increasingly intimate, and securing reconciliation in divided societies is a key requirement.

The positive case is much more contentious. Clark notes that in a decade from 2002 to 2012 Rwanda’s gacaca courts, modernized versions of traditional arbitration hearings, prosecuted 400,000 genocide suspects in 11,000 communities. This was, he writes, “the most extensive attempt at judging mass crimes anywhere to date”. In his telling, it succeeded in making everyday perpetrators central to the transitional justice process, encouraged direct face-to-face communication between perpetrators and survivors, and helped deliver both justice and reconciliation.

There is, however, much criticism of these community courts. As Clark writes, they did invite perpetrators to confess, and victims to ask questions and express anger. However, judges elected by local communities had limited expertise, and the processes over which they presided were frequently corrupt, typically falling far below international human rights standards. Beyond the courtroom, there was violence, intimidation and widespread fear of participating in often traumatizing proceedings. Some concede that gacaca courts were the best that could be hoped for in very difficult circumstances. Others argue that they generated neither justice nor reconciliation.

Perhaps the core lesson to take from post-conflict procedures in Rwanda is that there is a limit to what criminal trials can deliver. Justice – maybe, and the more grounded in local context the better. Reconciliation – that could be a step too far, and needs to be sought by other means.