The Forms of Forgiveness
Discover the 2025 awarded project "The Forms of Forgiveness: An Ethnography of Collective Therapies between Survivors and Perpetrators in Western Rwanda", supported by the Louis Dumont Fund for Research in Social Anthropology.
This research focuses on local mental health intervention initiatives in Rwanda. During four months of fieldwork in the Karongi and Nyabihu sectors (Western Province), Basile Mangiante follows the work of an organisation that facilitates group therapy sessions between former genocidal detainees and their survivor victims. The study is structured around three main axes.
Firstly, it examines how the organisation structures and deploys its intervention projects — including fundraising from international donors, the categorisation and criteria for care, collaboration with local authorities, and the training of intermediaries.
Secondly, the ethnography of the therapy sessions seeks to shed light on the practical modalities of care: the therapeutic paradigm, nosography, confrontation techniques, and post-therapy follow-up. The study also aims to describe how individual and collective narratives are shaped — how speech is elicited, directed, and articulated through the therapists’ work.
Finally, the project explores how the association and its therapeutic practices are impacted by ongoing armed conflict in the neighbouring South Kivu region (DRC). It seeks to understand how this broader context influences participants’ narratives and (re)produces forms and situations of vulnerability, particularly among groups living in border areas.
Basile Mangiate
Basile Mangiante is a Master’s student in Anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre and a graduate of McGill University (Montreal, Canada). His current research focuses on psychotherapeutic care for both survivors and perpetrators of the Rwandan Tutsi genocide. He is currently undertaking four months of fieldwork in the western part of the country (Karongi and Nyabihu districts), where he studies group therapy sessions involving survivors and former perpetrators. His research is supervised by Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS–LESC).
