Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

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...

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...

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...

...there was little more than a report via text, for example X user @910solu reported on May 26, 2022, that “Jungle justice still going on.” The user posted a video of himself driving past a jungle justice scene. Meanwhile, the reports of jungle justice reported on X spiked in February 2023, the month when Nigerians went to the polls for their general elections. 2. Verification The verification of the incidents of jungle justice rested on the information that was available in the public domain; each incident received a grading based...

...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...

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...

Charnovitz for taking the time to read the book and provide their reactions for this symposium, and Opinio Juris for hosting it. Here we provide a brief response to their comments. Hafner-Burton and Victor focus on the relationship between political science scholarship and legal scholarship, and see in an empirically grounded economic approach a way to reconcile the disparate focuses of the two disciplines, where in the past scholars in the two disciplines seemed to have trouble communicating with each other. We agree with their sentiments. Political scientists and law...

...Special Court for Sierra Leone (Cambridge, 2020). I wish to take this opportunity to heartily thank these A-list of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners, who took time out of their busy schedules to read and comment on my work.  The reviews, as posted during this online symposium over the past couple of weeks, moved from the (more) general to the (more) specific. Authors in the first group commented broadly on the book, and in several instances, also highlighted key issues of particular relevance (Prosecutor Stephen J. Rapp here and here, Mr....

quest for criminal justice. What Barrie Sander has called the “anti-impunity mindset”, is responsible for an increasingly narrow understanding of justice as prosecution and punishment, with all the costs and harms that entails. As I have argued elsewhere, this alliance between criminal justice and the anti-impunity norm has largely been developed by progressive groups, such as feminists and human rights advocates, who have increasingly used punitive approaches to address their challenges. But, as many others have also argued, if the development of this strong alliance was inevitable in order to...