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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Victimological Imaginations

2019 ◽  
pp. 155-185
Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
International Crimes ◽  
Global North ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

The figure of the victim is the sine qua non of the fight against impunity for international crimes. Engaging the victimological imagination of international criminal justice, the chapter shows how victims are represented, and how justice for victims is imagined. The first part focuses on imaginations of ‘justice for victims’, and argues that the ICC represents a form of hybrid justice by incorporating ‘restorative’ and ‘transformative’ rationales for justice. Unlike ordinary courts, the ICC incorporates what can be thought of as both ‘punitive’ and ‘reparative’ arms. Part of the latter is the Rome Statute’s provisions for victims’ rights to participation and reparation. However, a closer look at the implementation of these processes reveal a conspicuous discrepancy between ideologies and realities. The second part of the chapter situates victims as a source of moral authority, and one that is claimed in representational practices by both human rights NGOs and international criminal justice generally. The chapter explores suffering as a type of ‘currency’, both on an individual level for victims’ advocates, as their source of ‘purpose’, and on a broader cultural level as the source of ‘global’ moral outcry. The chapter demonstrates how the victim is culturally represented through imaginations from the global North and becomes universalized as a symbol of humanity, of which the gendered and racialized victim of sexual and gender-based violence provides particularly powerful victim imagery. In this way, the image of the victim of international crimes is characterized by her essential ‘otherness’: it is humanity that suffers.

International Criminal Justice History Writing as Anachronism

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Frédéric Mégret
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Individual Accountability

This chapter focuses on the extent to which the contemporary project of international criminal justice cannot easily lay claim to what it imagines to be its past, because that past, despite superficial similarities, often exhibited fundamentally different concerns. It highlights three areas in which international criminal justice today is arguably dramatically different from how it was understood up to the 1990s. First, international criminal justice was for a long time much less obsessed with the criminalization of international law prohibitions specifically, and much more interested in the transnational dimensions of the criminal law. Second, it was much less committed to a strict model of individual accountability under international law and much more willing to see the state as the central pivot of international criminal responsibility. Third, it was intimately linked to peace projects whereas it has become intimately associated to the fight against atrocities and mass human rights violations.

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.

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