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...
25 Aug Symposium on Reframing Transitional Justice: Transitional Justice’s “Unit of Analysis” Problem
merges with the general struggle for justice. Transitional Justice’s Methodological Nationalism I wonder, therefore, whether there might not be other ways in which one might think of transitional justice as transitional, that would neither be simply about a disincarnated and somewhat desultory “never again” nor about the open-ended embrace of justice that should be the shared aspiration of most societies. In that respect, I want to suggest that the hidden stake of transitional justice may be less the temporal move from a past to a future, as commonly understood, than...
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...
24 Aug Reframing Transitional Justice: Introduction to the Symposium
Justice’; Christopher Lamont, ‘Algorithmic Justice: Digital Investigations and Transitional Justice’; Laura Gianna Guntrum, Maike Salzmann, and Christian Reuter, ‘Bridging Justice and Technology: Exploring the Integration of Information and Communication Technologies in Colombia’s Transitional Justice Process’; Daniel Gómez-Uribe, ‘Memory Workshops in Colombia: Co-creative and Inclusive Community Memory Building’. The second front involves boundaries. This book confronts the professed superpower of transitional justice to do more and more in an endless concatenation of addictive additives. While there is cause for optimism, this book also suggests that transitional justice, as a product of neo-liberal...
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...
07 Jul Symposium on Art, Aesthetics and International Justice: Justice in Motion – Aesthetics, Complexity, and the Plural Grammar of Legitimacy
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...