Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...dynamics, the Court has unwittingly become enmeshed in national and regional politics. Clark concludes that, although the ICC describes its work in terms of complementarity between international and national justice responses to atrocity crimes, the ICC’s fundamental distance from African societies has produced negative effects both for the Court and the countries where it intervenes. We have invited several scholars and practitioners to discuss Phil Clark’s arguments and conclusions. Their contributions will be followed by the author’s response. We are grateful to Opinio Juris for hosting this symposium. Phil Clark...

[ Alix Vuillemin is the Executive Director of Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. Rosemary Grey is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney.] This post forms part of the Opinio Juris Symposium on Reproductive Violence in International Law, in which diverse authors reflect on how the International Criminal Court and other jurisdictions have responded to violations of reproductive health and reproductive autonomy. The symposium complements a one-day conference to be held on 11 June 2024,  in which legal practitioners, scholars, activists, and survivors will meet in The...

cohabitants. This much is clear from Nuremberg, and even more so, the contemporaneous Far East tribunals, the combination of which are the template for today’s institutions of international justice. These tribunals are rightly celebrated for their revolutionary role in bringing the purveyors of mass atrocity to justice, and rightly criticized as victor’s justice, ex post facto justice, and racist (especially the Far East cases). Nuremberg’s primary lesson and legacy is of accountability. But its flaws also constituted a teaching moment in the drive toward fairness.  Established a half century later,...

that Oliver Wendell Holmes issued on New Year’s Day, 1901, as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Justice Breyer called it a “great case on attempted murder.” Perhaps it is—the question was when extensive preparation followed by abandonment constitutes an attempt. Not surprisingly, Peaslee doesn’t have anything to do with Congress, the treaty power or chemical weapons—which might have been Justice Breyer’s point, i.e., that cases such as Bond’s are the stuff of textbook state criminal law.) There are at least two obvious difficulties in going down this...

are radical, while others are conservative, and legal responses are constructed according to the essence of the change. This post discusses these two grounds and explores their contribution to the development of the scholarship on transitional justice and human rights discourse throughout the last two decades. It also seeks to offer further thoughts and elaboration for future research. Transitional Justice theory is based on the premise that the acknowledgment of past injustices contributes to the consolidation of sustainable peace and democracy (Arthur, 2009). Thus, it lends a distinctive framework for...

Pre-Trial Chamber can review it (Article 53(3)(b)). The only job of the PTC when the Prosecutor requests the opening of an investigation is to determine jurisdiction and admissibility. And the “interests of justice” fall under neither of these categories. As I will explain in my next post, I completely reject the PTC’s approach to the “interests of justice” — for reasons Dov touches on. But I disagree with the idea that the PTC acted ultra vires by second-guessing the OTP’s belief that the interests of justice did not counsel against...

...to a miscarriage of justice for the victims of these “phantom” crimes. The decision of the Appeals Chamber has been commented upon and dissected on various themes including that its arguably gendered assessment of questions of liability increases “the risk of impunity for SGBV crimes.” It is in Darryl Robinson’s book, Justice in Extreme Cases, that we get a glimpse of a different basis of analysis – that of the encounter between criminal law theory and international criminal law. Specifically, Robinson explores the deontic constraints of a system of justice...

place after the end of the Second World War, international criminal justice has been associated with ‘victor’s justice’. Proponents of ICL have for long struggled to demonstrate that the discipline is more than power politics disguised under the depoliticised image of the liberal trial. It is often argued that ICL has come a long way since its early days and that the ‘progressive internalization’ of the norms of international criminal justice in the international arena is an incremental, rather than a rapid process. Consequently, one is left with the perception...

administrative architecture of international criminal justice and explore an active and direct role for regional inter-governmental organisations (RIGOs). This requires rethinking the field’s approach and ‘de-globalising’ international justice. While there is quite some commentary on regionalisation of international justice (see for example Jalloh and Burke-White), the role of RIGOs remains underexplored. A Shifting Playground? Accountability for international crimes has, so far, been administered either nationally by states or globally by international mechanisms. In both instances, the primary administrative actors have been: directly affected states, with or without support from inter-governmental...

or colonial injustice are intimately linked to power. It is important to see how known histories of injustice shape not only the narrativization of injustice but also the way that power is brokered in that process (also see Clarke, Affective Justice , forthcoming 2019). If we consider the way that the distant justice approaches by ICC agents might lead to forms of subversion that produce forms of political protest, it is useful to consider some points that Clark misses, such as how the idea of the establishment of an African...

a power to create ideas, a power to shatter shibboleths, and the might to engage. But the power of books also reflects in the powerlessness of authors. A book, after all, is a journey that takes on a life of its own. The push and pull of author and work, and the kinetics as between authors, becomes a force. This especially is the case in a book such as Informers Up Close, in which we ourselves write about stories that others have written about others, deeply personal biopics, such that...

assumption that states are rational actors. The book aims to speak to all those interested in international law, from skeptics to traditionalists and everyone in between. The message a reader takes from the book, however, is likely to depend on his or her perspective. For traditional scholars of international law the book seeks to advance the claim that much of the discipline can be explained with a small number of fairly conventional (i.e., rational choice) assumptions. Sticking with a parsimonious set of assumptions allows us to develop tractable theories of...