Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
28 May Affective Justice Symposium: Catching ‘Justice Feelings’–Affective Justice by Kamari M. Clarke
international ‘publics’ (the ‘international community’ and the ‘Pan-African’ community) and empowering ‘international experts’. Of course, to say that these ‘international publics’ employ the same ‘justice making practices’ is not to say they make the same ‘justice’, or do so under the same conditions. Here, the value of Affective Justice’s second distinguishing feature becomes clear, as Clarke uses the theory of ‘affective justice’ to interrogate both ‘the strategies of international justice brokers’ and the African ‘counterresponses’; not in order to tell us what ‘international justice’ is (or should be), but in...
29 May Affective Justice Symposium: Sentiments of Justice, Legalism and Affective Meta-Justice at the Dawn of Postliberalism
the question arises: what are the emerging contours and permutations of specifically postliberal affective-justice assemblages? This descriptive question gives rise, thirdly, to normative conundrums: if Affective Justice rightly highlights the need to take more seriously the sentimentalised nature of everyday justice, to go beyond rationalist arguments about the telling of the truth to also account for the affective truth of the telling, the normative question remains or in fact: intensifies, which deeply felt “truth” one should politically support. Affective Justice masterfully succeeds in (affectively?) winning support for an alternative affective...
26 May Affective Justice Symposium: Politics and Law in Kamari Clarke’s Affective Justice
be addressed if we attend carefully to the book’s major concern, which in my reading is not with affect and not with law but with justice. The justice of Affective Justice is a shifting concept. Its first face is legal justice, which is as fickle as the affect upon which it relies. In the book’s preface, Clarke writes that law provides a “retreat…in the midst of ambiguity and dismay” (xix) rather than a comprehensive and appropriate response to “the poisoned politics of the postcolonial state” (xxi). Law as retreat is...
04 Oct Distant Justice Symposium: A Reply by Phil Clark
[Phil Clark is a Professor of International Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. An Australian by nationality but born in Sudan, Dr Clark is a political scientist specialising in conflict and post-conflict issues in Africa, particularly questions of peace, truth, justice and reconciliation. This is the final post in our symposium on his book, Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics .] I am immensely grateful to Patryk Labuda and Thijs Bouwknegt for organising this symposium, to...
12 Dec The Global Sites of Atrocity Crimes Justice: A New Framework
in the self-proclaimed city of peace and justice. Relations Between Justice Sites Partly structured by and partly structuring these internal and external dynamics, the sites of justice are also affected by their relations to each other as well as to practice sites situated in other fields. Relations between justice sites engaged in atrocity crimes justice can be identified through cooperation and competition between them, but also has a deeper structural dimension. At the structural level, patterns of financing help format the relations between justice sites, global north sites often being...
27 May Affective Justice Symposium: Reviewing Affective Justice
...of the Pan-African liberatory past is actually a deep desire to participate in neo-liberal power” (215). Affective justice can be powerful and political actors can wield affective appeals in ways that unsettle established regimes, yet Clarke characterizes affective justice as a double-edged and ambiguous force—one that can be wielded as a basis for asserting political agency to challenge a prevailing order, yet also constrains, defines, and gives meaning to agency in subtle ways that we cannot necessarily perceive. This account of affective justice is also unsettling on many levels, because...
18 Dec Justice as Message Symposium: The Selectivity of International Criminal Justice
concluding chapter of the book gathers these various threads together to scrutinise the extent to which international criminal justice may be considered to be ‘expressivist justice’. Among the many interesting questions raised by the book is the question of whether expressivism provides ‘a framework to understand how a comparatively limited system of justice … may be socially significant’ (p.7). The selectivity of international criminal justice is raised at various points throughout the book, but it is not addressed as a standalone subject. It is the aim of this post to...
19 Apr Syrian Victims Alter the Justice Landscape
passivity of the international community toward the Syrian conflict and initiated innovative justice initiatives with the aim to counter this reigning defeatism about the impossibility to pursue justice in this context. While most discussions regarding transitional justice efforts in Syria have focused on the work of established NGOs and international institutions, we argue that other forms of civil society activism deserve a further spotlight. Victim groups have opened spaces and approaches rooted in victims’ perspectives of justice, considerably strengthening the truth and justice efforts. Syrian Victims as Key Justice Actors...
14 Sep Transitional Justice Symposium: Transitional Justice as a Touchstone for Normative Accounts
an injustice has been done or systemic injustice exists is to make a claim that demands immediate attention and calls out for a response and rectification. When injustice exists, characteristically not only private citizens but also importantly governmental bodies and institutions are called upon to respond. Contemporary normative theorizing about justice is rarely about justice as such. Rather, particular and familiar kinds of justice are the subject of inquiry. Retributive justice, for example, demands that that perpetrators of wrongdoing suffer. Theories of retributive justice explain why justice in fact demands...
06 Sep Generations of Victim Engagement: Towards an Encompassing Analytical Framework for Understanding Victims’ Roles in Transitional Justice Processes
grassroots justice actors’ driving this expansion of transitional justice to a broad range of contexts is similar to what I referred to as the protagonism and agenda-setting power of the first generation of transitional justice. They are different from it though, in the sense that the element of resistance has become front and centre, not just in terms of using transitional justice as a means to resist injustice itself, but also in terms of re-imagining victim engagement in transitional justice in ways that resist the injustice implicit in narrow and...