Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

courts, commissions of inquiries, prosecutions, and trial verdicts at the heart of the justice agenda, obscures the troubling aspects and outcomes, and the normative foundations of “international justice.” Norms and institutions are perverted in the pursuit of narrow interests, at the detriment of “justice for victims.” Ultimately, the story of hope and progress that international criminal justice tells itself may indeed just be reflective of, what  Mégret termed “the feeling that the [ICC]’s ultimate constituency is nothing but itself.”  Maybe someday the Court will revisit its “archive of teleology and...

sense. Colleen Murphy considers the line between transitional justice and everyday justice or injustice; transitional justice raises hard cases that any general theory of justice may also have to address. Dany Celermajer raises issues about the time frame of transitions and the implications for transitional justice, as does Manal Totry -Jubran. I wrote Transitional Justice in the context of dramatic regime changes, at the time appearing to be decisive and in bold strokes-from authoritarianism to democracy, crudely or broadly speaking. But could political transition be a long process of nevertheless...

organizing and hosting this symposium. I am delighted that such a fantastic team of commentators has agreed to contribute, including new voices and authors who have shaped the field or inspired the very idea of this book. Justice as Message started originally as a project about justifications of international criminal justice, which was part of habilitation process at  Humboldt University’s Faculty of Law. It was gradually trimmed down to its core, namely an explanation of the various ways in which norms, institutions and agents convey social meaning and speak or...

[Dire Tladi is a Professor of International Law, at the University of Pretoria, a member of UN International Law Commission and its Special Rapporteur on Peremptory Norms of General International Law (Jus Cogens).] I am grateful to Jennifer for inviting me to contribute to this symposium on her book Existing Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes. When she first asked me to participate in the symposium in August of this year, my response to her was: “I took a while to respond because I...

...therefore not fail to be of benefit to scholars of international law generally, international criminal law and African studies. The monograph is arranged in a unique manner. From a section on Regimes of International Criminal Justice; States of Justice; Outsourcing Justice; the International Politics of Justice; The Limits of State Cooperation; The Court Is the Political Arena; to International Justice in a World of States, the author does an excellent job on flow and chronology. Each of these chapters engages with the scholarly literature and debates on the four themes...

the power of its authority in the cooperation of state parties. Yet, empirical scrutiny reveals an absence of traditional mechanisms of force and sovereign power, which renders the study of the ICC’s force so fascinating. It is also this absence in African circuits that makes various Pan-Africanist responses critical to understand. In weighing various Pan-Africanist responses, we sense there is something else at play that Affective Justice seeks to uncover and illuminate. When I began fieldwork for Affective Justice in 2012, I was building on more than a decade of...

limits of what is possible continue to vex us all, captured in the janus faced image of justice that so distinctly pervades Ruti’s book. Transitional justice (book and idea) will be with us for a long time because both are needed to marshal the deep-seated need for acknowledgment, settlement, remedy and resolution in violent and repressive societies. Transitional Justice deserved all the recognition it gets at its twentieth anniversary and some of us are very glad to have had this book with us on our own transitional and justice journeys....

[Arnaud Kurze is an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.] Introduction “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have,” James Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street over half a century ago, describing his childhood memories in Harlem and events that painstakingly scarred his memory, including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’s deaths (Baldwin 1972, 149). The question of delivering justice is still at the heart of contemporary social unrest not only in the United...

...bottom-up approaches to address victims’ grievances. In the past few years, the Afghan civil society has adopted the language of “victim-centred justice” to avoid the negative connotations associated with the term “transitional justice” and move beyond the “peace v justice” narrative. The terms “victim-centred justice” allow for a broader interpretation of “justice” to include criminal justice and other mechanisms. Giving justice a broad definition is particularly important in a context such as Afghanistan where victimhood is highly complex. Afghans have been victimised under different regimes and suffered from a wide...

[Owiso Owiso is a Doctoral Researcher in Public International Law at the University of Luxembourg. This is the latest post in our symposium on Phil Clark’s book, Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics .] A distant ICC ‘orbiting in space’ as rogue regimes make merry This post makes a few observations on Phil Clark’s book Distant justice: The impact of the International Criminal Court on African politics. Clark provides compelling insight into the political intrigues of the so-called ‘self-referrals’ by the Democratic Republic of...

violence has been fueled at least in part by the persistent impunity gap, with recent atrocities allegedly committed by many of the same actors implicated in past abuses. To be sure, victims’ access to justice also depends on capacity within the international justice system. There are more grave crimes than the system can address.  But the mobilization around Ukraine demonstrates that where there is a will, there is a way. The absence of similar responses to other situations not only deprives victims of access to justice, but also threatens its...

[Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director, Transnational Law Institute, Washington and Lee University.] Dear Christine, I really liked engaging with your fabulous book, Marketing Global Justice. It’s cleverly edgy and full of insights. You unwind international criminal justice as a transnational business venture. As with all commodity trading and product hawking, well, advertising is indeed key. I was reading your book at the same time as The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal’s eulogy to his friend Vladimír. Those guys spent a lot of time...