Symposium on Kamari Clarke’s Affective Justice

This week, we are very happy to host a discussion on Kamari Clarke’s latest publication, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback. Kamari will start us off with an introductory post, and then we have the honor to hear from the following renowned scholars during the rest of the week: Sarah Nouwen, Katharine Lemons, Dire Tladi, Edwin Bikundo, Bronwyn Leebaw, Nayanika Mookherjee, Olaf Zenker, Richard Ashby Wilson, Christopher Gevers, Mark Goodale and Sara Kendall. Kamari then wraps up the symposium by responding to the contributions.

From the publisher:

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union’s pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect’s role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram’s circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the “objectivity” of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.

We look forward to an engaging conversation!