Contemporary International Criminal Law After Critique Symposium: embodied justice through praxes of abolition feminisms

[valentina azarova is cofounder, emergent justice collective; cofounder, de:border // migration justice collective; and collective member, Feminist Autonomous Centre for research

alexandra lily kather is co-founder of the emergent justice collective, works to strengthen decolonial feminist, intersectional and abolitionist approaches in international justice]

“I want to do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive”

Saidiya Hartman“Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008): 1–14

“We need to continue imagining the possibility of a free Palestine […] We don’t have the privilege of losing hope.”

Raya Ziada, Pikara Magazine 2024

We are grateful for the possibility to offer reflections on embodied justice through praxes of abolition feminisms, such as transformative justice, somatics, care and grief tending, as part of this symposium’s engagement with abolition and international (criminal) justice. In this piece, we discuss how we approach ‘after critique’ as a liberatory inquiry into how justice feels when it is embodied, and how we have sought to bring embodiment to international  (criminal) justice work. We understand this liberatory inquiry as a tactic away from the places of enclosure (Christina Sharpe) that are carceral and punitive responses to (structural and mass) violence.

Embodiment for healing justice practitioner Prentis Hemphill is

“awareness of being in a body and becoming awake to the textures of our experience […] becoming aware of what we have learned and made habit that we no longer recognize—the things that we practice that have gone under our cognition but which we have embodied. The third part of it is this opportunity to be intentional about what it is that we do, act, risk—how we connect”.

We grapple with the realities of disembodied justice based on juridical systems that reproduce (structural) violence in the name of “international justice” while upholding global dominant hierarchies. We note the immense need for engagement with care in this work, as simply as: “what do you need to feel good or better in this moment?” Even the most successful judgement rendered by a criminal court cannot bring about fundamental and transformative changes in the lives of survivors of structural and mass violence. What does (after) care look like? How then must we change the current world to create meaningful structures of care and threads throughout any justice responses survivors choose to engage in?

We observe, within ourselves and our surroundings, how the abandonment of the body and mind, the internalisation of carceral neoliberal cultures and punitive logics of separation and domination have been normalised in approaches to international justice. By giving in to the belief that carceral responses are a central, if not the “only viable model of “justice”, we mute the invitation to reorient towards transformative justice.

Transformative justice [TJ], as understood by Mia Mingus,

“is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse […] without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence […] a way of “making things right,” getting in “right relation,” or creating justice together.  TJ is an abolitionist framework […] to build alternatives to our current systems which often position themselves as protectors, while simultaneously enacting the very forms of violence they claim to condemn.”

We have sought to make and hold space to reimagine justice and accountability as liberatory acts of love, abolitionist care and collective grief in communities in struggle against oppression – ways of embodying abolitionist transfeminist justice. Manifestations of such spaces include EJC’s support and solidarity offering, a teach-in on reproductive justice as abolition in practice together with Ad’iyah Collective, and various community colearning spaces on conflict transformation, organisational cultures and movement lawyering.

In dominant international (criminal) justice spaces, the turn to ‘critique’ often becomes a defence of/for innocence, and for the inability and unwillingness to ‘let go’ of systems that benefit very few, and are far from being life-affirming. Proactive attempts at transformation within institutions have seldom, in our experiences, offered pathways for collective and transformative “grappling with the structural bias of their institutions” (Burgis-Kasthala & Sander). Instead, those who “complained” became the “complaint” (Sara Ahmed). Neither could such approaches allow for authentic and embodied transformation through making these realities speakable, which, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore guides us, is a way of practicing abolition – that is, “building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”  

To do so, we need not only to name and critique the failures of the dominant institutionalised systems, but to grieve them as our own (see further below on “tending collective grief as a paxis of abolitionist feminisms). To feel them as loss, as well as liberation and healing, from which transformation can spring.

We have sought to hold and share our embodied “ex-titutional knowledges” (Isa Gutierrez Sanchez) – those that guide our ongoing exit(s) from neoliberal cultures and spaces – as a form of collective care and solidarity. Our commitment to embodied praxes is a way of worlding the world that nurtures reorientations of our knowing and being through the body – as opposed to wording the world by “trying to index reality in language to arrive at a place at a perfectly secure place of description or prescription” (Machado de Oliveira 2021, p 46-47).

embodying abolitionist justice

How do we fundamentally reimagine what justice means, what it entails and how it feels in our bodies? We feel/think of embodied justice as an un/learning process that builds community, centres collective care and brings us back to each other – our interdependence – to unknow and let go of old ways of being and knowing, solutions and responses to violences, whether at the interpersonal, communal/organisational or international levels. 

Practicing abolition feminisms is “about how we treat each other […] show up in relationships […] respond to harm caused and how we respond when we cause harm” (Patrisse Cullors). It means “Insisting on the connections between struggles and racism” (Angela Davis 2016). This “feminist work is justice work” (Lola Olufemi 2019). 

We understand Sophie Rigney’s article in the Journal of International Criminal Justice symposium to resonate with practices situated outside current international (criminal) justice systems. It cautiously invites practitioners to “think[] differently about — and [to] work [to]… abolish — our current carceral approach” (Rigney, p 23). What liberatory counternarratives do we need to self-accountably offer in relation to the myriad ways in which dominant juridical processes are failing survivor communities?  

As Burgis-Kasthala and Masseti Placci reflect in relation to the ICJ’s most recent Advisory Opinion on Israel’s continued presence in Palestine, that international legal concepts of responsibility and harm often deny survivor communities autonomy and agency to centre their visions of justice. The ICJ’s (mis)conception of the private / public divide therefore appears to enable Israel – an occupier engaged in the pursuit of sovereignty and denial of self-determination – to exercise public duties and maintain power over (as opposed to with) that leads to the social erasure of Palestinians. 

In this moment, central to this feminist work of justice is the acknowledgment that the colonial violences in Palestine and elsewhere are interconnected, and that bringing all of them to an end is central to any abolitionist praxis. The vision and agenda of justice for Palestine, therefore, is justice for the unspeakable colonial violences enabled and reproduced by the international system and enabled by carceral and punitive responses to such violences.

practicing collective care

Abolition feminist and transformative justice practitioner Mariame Kaba has observed (as Rigney recalls): “criminal punishment systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm is less likely to happen again”. 

Being a practitioner within the international justice space at this moment has meant a necessary reorientation from disembodied towards embodied justice through collective care and organising by nurturing relationalities by tending to ruptures and repair in relationship as sites of care and transformation is a fractal and mycelial approach to abolition that grows “creative justice” (Andrea Ritchie 2023, p 107). We can do so by cocreating and holding safe(r) and brave(r) spaces to practice towards coliberation and justice otherwise – centering collective care and solidarity as we aim to practice care-full, needs-based and life-affirming justice between and amongst us. We are colearning and experimenting with praxes of alternative justice, such as community accountability and transformative justice, where “healing is at the center” (Prentis Hemphill), and where “collective care is the utmost form of resistance to violence” (Saidiya Hartman). These struggles towards personal and collective transformation do not occur without mistakes, hurt or conflict.

At the emergent justice collective, Lisa and Valentina, have designed and held the Support and Solidarity offering for Cultivating Collective Care within the International Justice Space since 2021. In this moment of struggle for accountability through the international (legal) system and collective grief for this system’s repeated failures, this offering is an invitation to co-create space for intentional, transformative community to hold our embodied “ex-titutional knowledges” to reimagine responses to violence(s) and harm. It has been a place of radical tenderness, with ourselves and others, surrendering to each other, and practicing new worlds together

By harnessing the wisdom of our emotions, especially rage and heartbreak, and working with them as a form of power, such spaces enable us to grow and practice together towards liberation.What would it mean to approach refusal(s) as creation of another set of social arrangements so that we might all live otherwise (Saidiya Hartman)? What would it mean to centre embodiment and interdependence to reimagine justice as life-affirming transformation? What are our self-responsibilities to let go of beliefs and ‘solutions’ that reproduce the power of oppressive systems? 

tending collective grief

Bearing witness to colonial genocidal violences, we are present to the disembodied consequences of international criminal “justice work” and its furtherance of carcerality as a form of social control that instrumentalises survivor communities. The ongoing colonial genocide in Palestine is yet another moment of reckoning with how international institutions and normative frameworks are failing to protect life, reproducing instead the violence of (international) law and of militarism. This violence is also unfolding in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Tigray, West Papua, Kurdistan and Kashmir, and many other places. 

We grieve the international justice project and its reproduction of power relations of separation and domination by responding to violence with punitive logics and carceral frameworks: silencing possible visions for life-affirming, transformative justice and accountability.

We recognise the importance of coming together, especially in this moment, to embody grief and find renewed ways of resistance in our struggles that imagine and centre visions of justice and solidarity reoriented towards hope and transformation (Raya Ziada 2024). There is, as Malkia Devich-Cyril and Camille Sapara Barton respectively observe, an urgency to tending grief in social movements. In Devich-Cyril’s beautiful words:

“Something is dying, and we are desperate for something new to be born. Grounded grief is a vaccine against the morbid conditions bred by white supremacy […] Only through the compassion and loneliness and love inherent in grief can we forge a world out of the fire that will not replicate ancient hierarchies”.

Since October 2023, we have been tending to and communing around grief as embodied transformative justice, and resourcing with and through others. Inspired by Tobi Ayé, Healing Justice London, Adi’yah Collective, Erotics of Liberation, Ceri Buckmaster, Camille Sapara Barton and others, we plan to offer a grief space for international justice practitioners to hold space for collective sense-making around the violence and its reproduction by international systems:  a space to bear witness in community; rehearse resilience and coliberation; and recognise our power and privilege and acknowledge our entanglements and complicity in unfolding violences. 

We make space for collective grief as a way to reorient towards resistance to, and transformation of violence in all of its forms, by resourcing our communities to (re)turn towards ourselves and each other in these times of fragmentation and separation. Grief is an embodied praxis of becoming and (be)longing to/for each other, rooted in the wisdom of ubuntu, ‘i am because you are’ (with gratitude to Tobi Ayé for its rememory). By tending to collective grief, as Espinosa Jones and Malkia Devich-Cyril tenderly observe, we nurture a relational culture “of noticing and acknowledgement [] makes truth, reconciliation, reparations and accountability impossible [] grief is the opposite of indifference”.  Grief is part of the healing ‘work’ we need to individually and collectively pursue to authentically reconnect to ourselves to be “intentionally in relation to one another”, “imagine new worlds […and] ourselves differently”, and “come up with new structures of accountability” (Kaba 2021, p. 65).