Victimological Imaginations

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.

From Moral Entrepreneurs to Moral Advocates

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

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

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.

Locating International Criminal Justice

The chapter introduces the research aims, conceptual framework, and methodology of the book. Departing from the story of the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a global civil society achievement, and previous research into how global and local civil society disagreed on their support for the ICC’s intervention into the conflict in northern Uganda (where the latter pointed to how it jeopardized ongoing peace talks) the chapter lays out the central aim of the book: to explore how the role of international human rights NGOs in international criminal justice yields empirical insight into the meaning of punishment at the global level of analysis. It identifies three separate yet interrelated sets of analytic questions guiding the inquiry: (i) What are the roles of NGOs in international criminal justice? (ii) What characterizes punishment ‘gone global’? and (iii) How is international criminal justice constituted by and of ‘the global’? The chapter situates the analysis through a brief background section on the development and institutions of international criminal justice, and contextualizes the ICC’s intervention in Uganda. It delineates the theoretical orientations for the study’s conceptual framework and contribution to a sociology of punishment for international criminal justice, drawing on a range of literatures across criminology, sociology, international relations, and international law. It then describes the organization of the book and its relation to the research strategy, before addressing the study’s methodology of a multi-sited network ethnography, its empirical data, and ethical considerations.

Towards a Sociology of Punishment for International Criminal Justice

The final chapter situates some of the book’s major findings within contemporary resistance towards international criminal justice as global justice. It addresses how current pushback against international criminal justice is not only part of the story of the breaking of the universal and the move towards a multipolar, or a multiregional, system of international relations; pushback is also a result of the unevenness, tensions, and disconnections as revealed throughout the book’s analysis. Criminal justice has materialized transnationally with transnational agents and with ideas of criminal justice as part of a narrative of civilization circulating between borders. Therefore the book concludes by sketching out some key orientations for a sociology of punishment beyond the nation state.

Networks of Global Justice-Making

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

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.