Indigenous Elder Council Deliberation and Justice Perception in Rwandan Gacaca-Style Disputes: A Process-Tracing Experiment on Restorative Psychology Mechanisms

The framework treats restorative psychology mechanisms—voice, accountability, reintegration and communal repair—as intervening processes that mediate the effect of elder deliberation on perceived justice. Because no observational data are used or claimed, the paper reports a design and power analysis rather than empirical estimates. Under a declared variance structure with between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5 and intraclass correlation = 0.64, power was estimated across 2000 design cells for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power, and that the minimum detectable effect declines as cluster count rises. The contribution is a methodological specification that aligns restorative psychology constructs with a credible causal design, together with a set of propositions about elder deliberation that the design is built to test.