Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

prior to many other projects: my book “strips away preconceptions and mystification” with a view to setting the scene for social justice projects and instrumental and empirical analyses. For instance, although the book engages in some empirical analysis, it doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive or a champion of sophisticated methods. Similarly, the book describes and explains international law and lawyers’ fragmented reality but does not take the next step of providing a normative framework for assessing which approaches are better or worse. Good scholarship is often completed in layers. As...

[Kirsten J. Fisher is Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.] Barrie Sander’s Doing Justice to History: Confronting the Past in International Criminal Courts is a significant piece of work on the way history is constructed through contestation in courtrooms and the judgements rendered from those proceedings. While there is much to say about this work, I will focus my thoughts on what this book contributes to the expressivist literature on international criminal law. Not unintentionally, this is an important work for those of us who...

[Xabier Agirre Aranburu is Head of the Investigative Analysis Section at the Investigations Division of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The views expressed herein are those of the author alone, and do not reflect the views of the Office of the Prosecutor. 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.] Phil Clark has written an ambitious book, attempting to address many issues across eight of the situations investigated...

states with experience deploying transitional justice processes to address the repressive policies and practices of the past. The United States is not a complete stranger to transitional justice, although these mechanisms have been more often employed at the local level or to address discrete incidents and injustices. A quick look at history points to the various circumstances in which transitional justice mechanisms have already been employed in the U.S.: the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to address the separation of Native children from their families as...

approaches are per se better suited to achieve reconciliation than retributive mechanisms. I will then explore certain means to improve the connection between international criminal justice and reconciliation. 1. Links between Reconciliation and Retributive Justice Retributive justice mechanisms, such as international criminal courts and tribunals, are often criticized for their limitations, namely their emphasis on perpetrators, their individualization of guilt and focus on the past, and their risks. This includes detachment from local context and emphasis on universal justice models and standards. Restorative mechanisms of justice, including victim-centred and less...

...the way justice is used in Arts. 53 and 55) as context, object and purpose that informs the ordinary meaning to be accorded to "justice" in 17(2)(c). If it goes that route, then justice must mean a kind of justice that will guarantee the rights of the accused and foster lasting respect for international justice. In other words, it could use it to permit the ICC to proceed with the Saif Gaddafi case if it finds that the Libyan prosecution is a kangaroo court that does not comply with minimum...

blowing up the pipeline, someone reading Thomas Bernhard, someone madly theorizing. The book inhabits a few of these personae (or the personae inhabit the book) and both Isobel and Zina get to the nub of it when they say that the book is about the “life lived” or the lived lives of international lawyers. [The other nub is there in Simon Stern’s disentangling of my foray into 18th century sentimental literature where he describes my book as “an incitement to think more seriously about the formal aspects of international law’s...

to judge a book by its cover, I 100% pre-emptively decide I like a book if it has (what I consider) a good title and Sander’s book has a very good title. It links justice and history in a way that makes the book’s subject clear, but which also makes it clear that justice and history are co-constitutive. Second, the book is ambitious. Sander works with both primary and secondary materials. He analyses pre-trial and trial documents, and judgments from six different ICCTs (IMT, IMTFE, ICTY, ICTR, SCSL and the...

...practitioner interest in TJ, I have remained sceptical. In previous articles, and a recent book, I argued that if it truly wishes to address justice issues that are at the heart of the ‘conflict’ being waged on Palestine, TJ work must speak without obfuscation. Its aim must be to spotlight zionism’s ongoing western sponsored settler colonial aim, a process that has reached its brutal genocidal zenith, rather than call for limited ‘justice’ interventions that are devoid of context. In retaining some hope, and avoiding throwing the baby out with the...

during fieldwork conducted in Colombia in August 2023. Eight research participants were interviewed, including Nasa experts in Indigenous justice and members of the ordinary justice system. Nasa Indigenous Justice Unlike other examples of TGJMs around the world (see, for example, South Africa in Penal Reform International 2001: 21-37), the Indigenous jurisdiction in Colombia stands out as an institutionally recognised, permanent, and autonomous system. A core component of the pluralistic arrangements of the 1991 Constitution, systems of Indigenous justice offer an alternative framework for accountability for serious human rights violations in...

itself as the processes of norm formation, symbolization and attributed meaning – all of which require an interdisciplinary perspective, helpfully adopted by Justice as Message. My further query is whether the theory of justice seen through the lens of symbolic expression can explain even more fundamental categories that operate within the field of international criminal justice. Is it possible to identify a pattern informing norm creation and procedural expression in international criminal justice that captures our imagination? How can one approach the underlying assumptions informing the evolution of international justice?...

[Dr Sithembile Mbete is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Pretoria.] In his book States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court, Oumar Ba masterfully engages the politics of international justice by examining how weaker states have used the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests in a manner that belies the ‘justice cascade’ argument made in the international law and international relations literature. In an international system in which states remain the main actors, pursuing justice for atrocity...