What Sort of Global Justice is 'International Criminal Justice'?

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Megret
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Justice

From Moral Entrepreneurs to Moral Advocates

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-124
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Sociology Of Punishment ◽  
Moral Entrepreneurs

A sociology of punishment for international criminal justice enables attention to the norms, morals, and values at play in the motivational dynamics of penal reforms. At the same time, these cultural forces must be analysed against the background of social organization and structure, indeed, as to what enables people to think and feel in certain ways and to promote policies in accordance with their sensibilities. As such, this chapter explores international criminal justice as a field replete with cosmopolitan sensibilities, but also of lifestyles, qualifications, and restraints. Finding that international criminal justice is perceived as a cosmopolitan expression of social justice, the first part conceptualizes human rights NGOs working in international criminal justice as global moral entrepreneurs and shows how they use humanist discourses to promote global justice-making through law, turning them into advocates of international criminal justice. Balancing claims to authority in the field, the NGOs have to navigate between being ‘insiders’ as experts and ‘outsiders’ that can claim moral authority. The analysis draws on scholarship inspired by Bourdieu and is put to work on transnational fields, enabling attention to what is often downplayed in studies of international law, namely class. As such, the chapter inquires into whose imaginations of global justice become part of its materiality, finding that advocates of humanity predominantly belong to a class of transnational western professionals.

Africa Against Global Justice? Stakes for Building a Political Sociology on the Future of International Criminal Justice

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-230
Author(s):  
Sara Dezalay
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Weak Field ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
African Continent ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Over Time

This chapter challenges current debates in global justice and the fight against impunity. Shifting the lens from the symbolism of global justice towards the structural conditions that have shaped international criminal justice as a field over time can help reposition the Habré success story not simply as an anomaly in a context of wider backlash against the International Criminal Court (ICC), but rather as a reflection of the structure of global justice as a weak field. The chapter then discusses the need to study systematically the evolution of legal markets on the African continent. In this, the project to institute a criminal chamber within the African Court of Justice and Human Rights has perhaps been too promptly dismissed as overly ambitious due to the lack of resources and state support within the African Union (AU). Interestingly, this project includes not only the crimes under the purview of the ICC, but also various other trans-border crimes such as trafficking, corruption, and the illicit exploitation of resources. The prominence taken in recent years by Africa as a new ‘mining frontier’—and with it, as a new haven for US and UK multinational corporate firms—underscores the timeliness of opening research paths on these ongoing transformations across the continent.

International Courts and Tribunals

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Findlay
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Rome Statute ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Positive Development ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Formal Institutions ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Political Interference

Despite political interference and jurisdictional partiality, the formal institutions of international criminal justice are positive development for global governance in their existence alone. The unique aims for global justice enunciated in the Preamble to the Rome Statute are a manifesto for how humanity expects to be protected from atrocity, and where responsibility should lie. As the example of rape in war demonstrates, translating these noble aspirations into trial practice and justice outcomes is often sullied by discriminatory externalities common in domestic criminal justice and exacerbated as the degree of victimization escalates. The lasting measure of the courts and tribunals is not successful prosecutions but rather the satisfaction of legitimate victim interests.

Penal Imaginations of Global Justice-Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-154
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Sociology Of Punishment ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter analyses the cosmopolitan penal imaginary building on western domestic penality, delving into the relationship between human rights sensibilities and criminal justice mentalities in the ‘fight against impunity’. Through the fieldwork in Uganda and Rwanda, the chapter describes asymmetries between the international and national criminal justice systems. It shows how international criminal justice circulates transnationally between different geographical sites via human rights NGOs and is closely linked to human rights expertise, and how human rights NGOs turn international criminal justice into issues about social justice. Applying a sociology of punishment perspective, the chapter brings out the similarities and differences in ‘penal imaginations’ between domestic and international criminal justice, and argues that international criminal justice both echoes the national and departs from it. For example, while international criminal justice relies upon retributive and expressive undertones, it makes no appeal to punitive sensibilities: a fact that can be understood in light of the close relation between international criminal justice and human rights NGOs. Yet, it is argued that human rights NGOs rely too strongly on punitive answers, and that amnesties can be just a matter of pragmatism in situations of profound violence. Thus, while the ICC has both retributive and reparative aims, the situation in northern Uganda demonstrates how international criminal justice became an impediment to peace. Moreover, the chapter reveals how a lot of practical issues had simply not been ‘thought of’ when setting up the ICC, such as acquittals and asylum-seeking witnesses.

Sovereignty and Solidarity

2019 ◽  
pp. 186-215
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Sociology Of Punishment

As apt for analysis that positions penality at the centre of social organization, the final analytic chapter cultivates a Durkheimian approach to global justice-making, and argues that international criminal justice reinforces a social imaginary of cosmopolitan solidarity embodied in the notion of humanity. Durkheim’s emphasis on how solidarity in modern society is based around a notion of individualism, and of law and punishment as modes of social integration, make his insights particularly equipped for sociological analysis of the global as a site of crime, justice, and solidarity; in short, to the integrative functions of international criminal justice for the making of global moral order. However, rather than something ‘given’, the moral order embodied by ‘humanity’ reflects a dominant moral order, and one that is actively constituted. The chapter thus demonstrates how agents of international criminal justice argue their cases and punish in the name of humanity. Using the Rome Statute as a ‘crowbar’ for penal aid and rule of law promotion in the global South, international criminal justice is intertwined with rule of law promotion and penal aid in contexts of ‘failed’ justice, where cosmopolitan values are supposed to spread through the notion of ‘positive complementarity’. Global justice-making through international criminal justice is thus a multiscalar project, and one which, albeit solidarist, is coercively and deliberatively implemented. In this manner, a sociology of punishment for international criminal justice reveals some of the ways in which moral, personal, and social order is constituted globally.

Corporations before International Criminal Courts: Implications for the International Criminal Justice Project

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOANNA KYRIAKAKIS
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
African Union ◽  
Criminal Courts

AbstractThe debate over whether the International Criminal Court should have jurisdiction over corporations has persisted over the years, despite the failure of the legal persons proposals at Rome. For its part, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon determined that it has jurisdiction over corporations for the purpose of crimes against the administration of the Tribunal, albeit not for the substantive crimes over which it adjudicates. Most recently, the African Union has adopted a Protocol that, should it come into operation, would create a new international criminal law section of the African Court of Justice and Human and People's Rights with jurisdiction over corporations committing or complicit in serious crimes impacting Africa. In light of the enduring nature of the proposal that international criminal institutions should directly engage with the problem of commercial corporations implicated in atrocity, this article explores the possible implications for the international criminal justice project were its institutions empowered to address corporate defendants and prosecutors emboldened to pursue cases against them. Drawing on the expressive goals of international criminal justice and concepts of sociological legitimacy, as well as insights from Third World Approaches to International Law, the article suggests that corporate prosecutions, where appropriate, may have a redeeming effect upon the esteem in which some constituent audiences hold international criminal law, as a system of global justice. The article's thesis is then qualified by cautionary thoughts on the redemptive potential of corporate prosecutions.

Advocates of Humanity: Human Rights NGOs in International Criminal Justice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Object A ◽  
Sociology Of Punishment

Advocates of Humanity offers an analysis of international criminal justice from the perspective of sociology of punishment by exploring the role of human rights organizations in their mobilization for global justice through the International Criminal Court. Based on multi-sited ethnography, primarily in The Hague and Uganda, the author approaches the transnational networks of NGOs advocating for the ICC as an ethnographic object. A central objective is to explore how connections are made, and how forces and imaginations of global criminal justice travel. By analysing how international criminal justice is arranged spatially, and as such expresses social, political, and cultural relations of power, Advocates of Humanity shows how international criminal justice is situated in particular spaces, networks, and actors, and how they structure the imaginations of justice circulating in the field. From a sociology of punishment perspective, it compares the ‘penal imaginations’ of domestic and international criminal justice, and considers the particularly central role of victims as a universalized symbol of humanity for the legitimacy of international criminal justice. With clear global asymmetries emerging from the work, Advocates of Humanity provides descriptive as well as explanatory understandings of criminal punishment ‘gone global’, analysing its social causation while examining its cultural meanings, particularly as regards its role as an expression of ‘the international’ will to punish. To whom is it meaningful, and why?

Networks of Global Justice-Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-97
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Civil Society Participation ◽  
Core Member

The chapter analyses how the NGOs organize in order to promote the ICC, and in doing so, engages networks as an empirical and conceptual feature of what makes the global. In doing so, the grounded and contextualized method of ethnography enables recognition of ‘friction’, of awkward disconnection and unevenness in the transnational networks of global justice-making. The first part examines the networked structure of NGOs at the ICC, and the centrality of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) and its core member NGOs. Against the structural inequalities and disconnections of transnational networks, the second part shows how the CICC manage to claim a role as reflecting the global civil society in international criminal justice by largely controlling the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of civil society participation in the politics around the ICC. At the same time, they stimulate the idea of the ‘transnational’ as a particular space for political engagement by operating as mediators between different geographical scales (local, national, regional, global), and by using law as the lingua franca between NGOs, states, and the ICC. Through representing ‘humanity’ in global justice-making, human rights NGOs serve an important role in international criminal justice as providers of moral authority. Animated by these claims to authority and representations, the final part of the chapter critically examines NGO participation against these claims, finding that they are too embedded in the field of international criminal justice to claim a position of being beyond that of externality, and of vested interest.

Spaces and Places of International Criminal Justice

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-67
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Global City ◽  
The Internet ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
The North ◽  
The Hague

The chapter draws on spatial sociologists to critically map out ‘where’ international criminal justice takes place, and how it is shaped by a multiplicity of scales, geographies, and sites. First, the chapter focuses on how international criminal justice is visibly and materially located, recognizing The Hague as a hub in the global networks of global justice-making—a ‘global city’ of justice-making. Yet, it is related to and dependent on other spaces, such as those where the crimes were committed. Uganda is one of these sites. There however, ‘justice’ is almost invisible and, from a view from The Hague, at a standstill. The disconnect between the metropole and periphery of global justice-making is also apparent in the virtual spaces of international criminal justice, as the chapter moves on to identify and discuss social media as a crucial space of global justice-making. While the internet is a major ground for debate, international criminal justice is promoted and legitimized globally through social media. Delinked from the nation state, the chapter suggests that social media is but one strategy of building constituency for international criminal justice. Another is the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) meetings that work as an annual ritual of international criminal justice invoking cosmopolitan images and justifications, yet in a space of increasing political friction. The chapter’s spatial analysis teases out the north-south and the metropole/periphery divide in international criminal justice, while situating the transnational networks of NGOs as part of its geography of power.

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