Symposium on Art, Aesthetics and International Justice: Justice in Motion – Aesthetics, Complexity, and the Plural Grammar of Legitimacy

[Elizabeth S. Malobais a strategy and systems advisor She serves on the boards of ZanaAfrica and AFEW Kenya, is an Associate Fellow at the Făgăraș Research Institute, and co-founded the Nahari community of African facilitators]

Introduction – Seeing, Believing, and Complexity

“Seeing is believing.” The phrase implies that legitimacy is rooted in what can be perceived—what feels real, witnessed, and emotionally credible. In international justice, visual cues like court architecture, robes, and the figure of Lady Justice perform an important function: they signal that something serious, structured, and morally anchored is unfolding. But in a fragmented and plural world, what symbols—and what performances—still carry meaning across difference?

Art, Aesthetics and International Justice makes the powerful claim that justice is not merely procedural but ritual. This work invites us to move beyond the legalism of international courts and consider justice as a moral and sensory event—something that must be seen, felt, and remembered in order to be believed. I find this argument both compelling and necessary.

This essay responds affirmatively to the book’s core proposition. It builds on the idea that in a complex global landscape, the legitimacy of international justice depends not on uniform rules, but on plural aesthetic forms that resonate with people’s emotions, memories, and cultural frameworks.

To explore this, I draw on African traditions of justice—not as contrasts to Western models, but as contributions to a broader grammar of legitimacy. Justice can be represented not only in statues, but in masks. It can be practiced not only in courtrooms, but in circles beneath trees. It can unfold not only in sentences, but in ritual, testimony, and forgiveness.

Justice, in this view, is not less legitimate when it moves, speaks, or sings. In fact, it may be most powerful when it does.

Philosophical Foundations: Authority, Emotion, Imagination

What legitimizes justice? The long arc of political theory offers varied answers—sovereignty, participation, fairness, moral conscience—but all wrestle with a central tension: how to make justice both durable and meaningful.

For Hobbes, justice was inseparable from order. In the absence of authority, life was violent and insecure. His Leviathan proposed that only a powerful sovereign could create the conditions for law—and therefore justice—through fear and control. Justice, in this frame, is not about morality or emotion; it is about enforceability. But while Hobbes offered durability, he offered little room for shared meaning.

Rousseau, in contrast, saw justice as an expression of the “general will”—a moral consensus forged through civic participation. Legitimacy arose not from power, but from shared ethical imagination. His vision emphasized emotion, belonging, and symbol as integral to law’s authority.

Rawls took this further by turning justice into a design problem. Behind the “veil of ignorance,” we imagine fairness by erasing self-interest. His theory is rational, but also imaginative: a thought experiment that uses abstraction to generate empathy.

Thoreau insisted that legality and justice often diverge. In Civil Disobedience, he proposed that conscience—not law—was the true site of moral authority. His symbolic refusal to pay taxes became a visual and ethical protest, reframing justice as an act of performative rupture.

Each of these thinkers speaks to a piece of what justice requires: structure, imagination, emotion, dissent. The aesthetic lens advanced in Art, Aesthetics and International Justice does not replace them—it completes the picture. In a complex world, legitimacy demands not only systems, but symbols. Not only codes, but choreography. A justice system that seeks emotional resonance must draw from all these traditions—and then move beyond them.

Symbols in Stillness & Motion: Lady Justice and the Mask

If justice depends on perception, then its symbols matter. For centuries, Lady Justice—blindfolded, robed, holding scales and a sword—has served as the most recognizable emblem of legal authority. She embodies impartiality, detachment, and balance. Her power lies in her stillness: a figure above politics, unmoved by emotion, governed only by law. This abstraction offers a kind of universal promise—that justice applies equally, everywhere.

But symbols speak differently across contexts. In many African traditions, justice was not symbolized through still figures but through movement. In societies such as the Dan, Dogon, Mmanwu, Poro, and Sande, masked figures performed justice in the public eye. These masks did not represent justice—they enacted it. Through ritual, rhythm, sound, and presence, they restored balance, mediated conflict, and reaffirmed social values. The authority of the mask lay not in its silence, but in its animation.

These are not competing visions, but distinct aesthetic grammars. One foregrounds distance and abstraction; the other, proximity and embodiment. Both aim to establish trust and legitimacy, but they do so through different senses: the visual stillness of the statue versus the visceral immediacy of performance.

This is the kind of aesthetic plurality that Art, Aesthetics and International Justice urges us to recognize. Justice can be sculpted or danced, displayed or embodied. To serve a complex world, the grammar of justice must be multilingual—capable of speaking through both silence and sound, stillness and movement.

Spaces of Judgment: Courts, Trees, and Circles

Justice is not only seen in symbols or heard in words—it is also felt in space. The architecture of justice, whether formal or informal, frames how we experience its authority. The raised bench of a courtroom, the echo of a marble chamber, the choreography of standing and speaking: all signal hierarchy, control, and solemnity. These spaces produce emotional distance, reinforcing the idea that justice is structured, serious, and elevated above the everyday.

But other spaces shape justice differently. Across many African societies, judgment unfolded not in enclosed halls, but in open clearings, under sacred trees, or within circular gatherings. The space itself—familiar, ancestral, communal—invited presence rather than deference. People knew where to sit, how to speak, when to listen. The layout of these places signalled not detachment, but participation. Justice happened where people lived and remembered, not apart from it.

These physical environments carried affective meaning. The tree was not only shade, but a witness. The circle was not only practical, but symbolic—everyone seen, no one elevated. Legitimacy arose from the setting as much as from the speech. As with symbols and rituals, space was part of justice’s aesthetic grammar.

This spatial sensibility resonates deeply with the vision articulated in Art, Aesthetics and International Justice. If justice is ritual, then its venue matters. The legitimacy of international justice may depend not only on its procedures or outcomes, but on where—and with whom—it is staged.

Restorative Aesthetics: Gacaca, TRC, Mato Oput, Bashingantahe

If justice is to resonate emotionally, it must be more than symbolic—it must be enacted in ways that allow communities to participate, witness, and remember. In this sense, process becomes aesthetic: a performance of accountability and healing. Many African justice traditions, particularly restorative ones, embody this principle—not by replicating formal courts, but by offering something different.

The Gacaca courts in Rwanda, adapted from a precolonial model, brought survivors and perpetrators of the genocide into direct, public encounter. Seated outdoors in village spaces, these gatherings did not emphasize retribution. Instead, they aimed to restore broken moral relationships through testimony, confrontation, and communal acknowledgment. The process was often painful and imperfect, but it was participatory—and emotionally real.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) similarly cast justice as a national act of witnessing. Its hearings, rituals, and storytelling moments invited the public into a process less concerned with punishment than with moral repair. The TRC’s visual and affective elements—the performance of truth, the space for tears, the symbolism of forgiveness—were not peripheral to justice; they were justice.

Other traditions, like Mato Oput in Uganda and Bashingantahe in Burundi, rely on symbolic acts of apology and reconciliation, often grounded in local cosmologies. Their emphasis is not on verdicts but on restoring social harmony.

These forms echo the cyclical, adaptive approach proposed in Art, Aesthetics and International Justice: observe, build, play, repeat. Restorative aesthetics remind us that in complex societies, justice does not always mean punishment. Sometimes, it means reknitting the fabric of relationship—and doing so in ways that are seen, felt, and collectively understood.

Conclusion – Beyond the Blindfold, Toward Justice 2.0

To see justice clearly in a complex world, we must learn to look again. Symbols like Lady Justice have long signified fairness through detachment—but they also risk flattening cultural and emotional nuance. As we’ve seen, other visual grammars exist: masks that animate moral authority, ancestral trees that witness judgment, rituals that restore rather than punish.

Each of these dimensions—symbol, place, process—shows that legitimacy is not only built through law, but through perception, presence, and participation. Justice, to be believed, must be more than declared. It must be felt in the body, anchored in memory, and seen in spaces that matter.

This is where Art, Aesthetics and International Justice makes its boldest intervention: it invites us to think of justice not as a singular system, but as an evolving choreography of forms, rooted in the emotional complexity of human experience. A justice that matches the world’s complexity cannot speak only through codes and procedures. It must also speak in rhythm, colour, silence, symbol, and story.

Justice 2.0 is not a replacement for law—it is an expansion of its sensory and moral reach. If legitimacy depends on being seen, then the work ahead is not just legal. It is aesthetic. And it is plural.