Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
01 Oct Unlocking the Road to Justice in Syria
Syrian civil society organisations (CSOs) and victim groups embraced transitional justice to push back against the prevailing justice defeatism. As such, transitional justice did not offer a blueprint for justice as much as it became a generator of innovation and disruption, kindling the inspiration to continue pursuing justice and resistance even in the face of international deadlock and the regime’s survival. Syrian justice actors have continued to creatively rethink transitional justice concepts and mechanisms to advance justice. Particularly when the original international zeal to push for accountability for the crimes...
25 May Affective Justice Symposium: International Justice in Africa–Not All That Simple
...Clarke’s book almost a decade later made me better understand this physical reaction and memory. Justice and injustice are not just products of legal and political reasoning and enforcement. They are felt. Clarke argues that such feelings are produced: by education, by experience, by history and social structures, and by rhetoric. Alliances form around different understandings of, and different feelings about, justice and injustice. As the title reflects, she primarily focuses on two different groups: international criminal justice advocates and Pan-African justice supporters. Roughly summarised, she argues that the former...
17 Aug States of Justice Symposium: Quo Vadis? A Review of Oumar Ba’s ‘States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court’
...the Court may have on the conceptualisation of justice for atrocity crimes. Oumar Ba’s book is an important plug in understanding how state behaviour affects how international criminal justice is applied and received. States of Justice: the Politics of the International Criminal Court aims to explore three issues: how states respond to norms of international criminal law; to what extent presumed weaker states have instrumentalised the ICC in addressing their political and military interests; and what lessons are apparent from the mechanisms of international criminal justice in regard to the...
19 Aug States of Justice Symposium: States of Justice, Cascade Scientism, and Snow White in The Hague
in the legitimacy of the norms of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations’. In cascade logics, more prosecution is evidence of more justice. We must believe that prosecution is interchangeable with justice. For this to work, we must understand that the ICC embodies justice. By extension, those who cooperate are on the side of justice and those who don’t are ‘damaging to the wider effort to establish the ICC as an effective institution and to entrench the anti-impunity norm’ (Mills & Bloomfield, 2018, p.102). The mechanism through which justice...
28 May Affective Justice Symposium: Commentary on Kamari Clarke’s Affective Justice
Alberto Fujimori in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta cases, and the Peruvian Supreme Court overturned the pardon. The relentlessly pro-immunity platform in Affective Justice searches for a legal basis to absolve heads of state for committing mass crimes when no such basis exists. Then there is the wholesale erasure of pro-ICC African voices. Clarke and her team conducted an impressive number of interviews (200) with “thought leaders” in and around the African Union (p. xviii). The overwhelming majority of opinions reported in Affective Justice are hostile to the ICC...14 Mar Bradley Book Symposium: Response to the Commentary on International Law in the U.S. Legal System
[Curtis Bradley is the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law at Duke Law School.] I want to give my sincere thanks to the eight contributors who commented on my book this week as part of the Opinio Juris online symposium: David Moore, Jean Galbraith, Julian Ku, Kristina Daugirdas, Bill Dodge, Mark Weisburd, Mike Ramsey, and Ingrid Wuerth. Each of these contributors offered valuable feedback on aspects of the book, and I am extremely grateful for their insightful observations. The book covers a wide range of topics concerning the role of...
14 Sep Transitional Justice Symposium: An Introduction
case in these periods following political repression. What we see in this ”global” phase of transitional justice is precisely the danger of disconnecting justice from context and politics. The recurring debate about politics and legality in transitional justice may well be in the spirit in which I wrote the book that is the subject of this symposium. It is also the spirit in which many generations of scholars are working all over the world on these critical questions from whom I will be honored to hear in the coming week....
22 Apr International Justice System v. People’s Tribunals: A Fictional Hierarchy
Hans Kelsen pointed out that “the most illustrious thinkers have failed” to answer the question of what absolute justice for which “[hu]mankind is longing” is (p. 24). He then concluded: “I must acquiesce in a relative justice and I can only say what justice is to me… justice, to me, is that social order under whose protection the search for truth can prosper. ‘My’ justice, then, is the justice of freedom, the justice of peace, the justice of democracy-the justice of tolerance.” Therefore, before and above the question of the...
26 May Affective Justice Symposium: “Recontextualizing Justice through Affect, History, and Biopolitics”
[Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS) at the University of Lausanne and also Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. This is the latest post in our symposium on Kamari Maxine Clarke’s book, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback.] Kamari Maxine Clarke’s superb ethnographic and critical study of the place of the International Criminal Court (ICC) within African history and politics demands a fundamental reevaluation of the meaning of “justice” against...26 Oct Holding the UP Law Faculty in Contempt Would Be a Grave Mistake
President wants the Chief Justice replaced. One of the counsels of the Faculty is closely related to the President while another is an appointee ? No wonder there is call for resignation of all justices because that would please the incumbent President, and consequently counsels engaged in behavior that elicited a show cause order for contempt. If counsels invoke freedom to criticize, so do I. The attacks calling for the resignation of ALL justices and for the impeachment of these justices is destroying a vital institution of the country. Let...