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Scales of Justice: “International Standards” and “Local Ownership” at a Hybrid Tribunal
Abstract
This paper argues that a politics of scale plays a fundamental but uninterrogated role in internationalised criminal justice processes such as hybrid tribunals. Scale discourses—producing specific notions of “the international” and “the local”—are so naturalised in these endeavours that their regressive effects remain unacknowledged. Following Annelise Riles’ ground‐breaking analysis of the politics of scale in colonial law, and feminist critiques of scale discourse in accounts of globalisation and conflict, we think critically about “the international” and “the local” in a postcolonial and post‐conflict justice context. Using the case of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), we specifically examine the operation and effects of discourses of “international standards” and “local ownership”. We argue that denaturalising scale in international criminal justice would serve a wider project to decolonise international law and address the specific forms of disenfranchisement currently enacted by dominant “scales of justice”.
Across the world, non-state actors are documenting international crimes and creating archives for accountability purposes. In this article, we consider how archives and their records are ‘pressed into’ legal service. At a time of wider archive creations, we suggest the archives pertaining to the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) provide insights as a compelling ‘post-accountability’ case of the continuum of archival processes. By examining four Khmer Rouge archives, we demonstrate how records are activated in legal processes across different spacetimes, and how the records themselves ‘(im)press upon’ on the legal process. In these processes, different actors seek to control the narrative of the past through archival holdings. We find that entrepreneurial justice, especially in the crucible of a legal process, can create fierce competition between actors over the economic and social capital inherent in record-keeping that is ultimately detrimental to understanding and pluralising the past.
Debates over localisation in transitional justice and peacebuilding have been characterised by the assumption that more equitable relationships between local and international actors allow for more effective and just interventions. Critical scholarship has in turn cautioned over the use of reified conceptions of the ‘local’ and ‘international’, emphasising each as contested sites. Through a network analysis of transitional justice event data in Cambodia, we ask: what are the roles and influence of Cambodian actors, and what might their positions tell us about the relationships between international and local groups? We find that event data shows strong local representation within the transitional justice community. However, representation is not synonymous with influence. Our data demonstrates an uneven distribution of network positions within both local and international groupings. This illustrates the need for greater attention to the role of individual biographies that advantage certain individuals to shape transitional justice interventions.
The Common European Asylum System aims to establish common standards for refugee status determination among EU Member States. Combining insights from legal and political geography we bring the depth and scale of this challenge into sharp relief. Drawing on interviews and a detailed ethnography of asylum adjudication involving over 850 in-person asylum appeal observations, we point towards practical differences in the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics of asylum appeal processes as they are operationalised in seven European countries. Our analysis achieves three things. Firstly, we identify a key zone of differences at the level of concrete, everyday implementation that has largely escaped academic attention, which allows us to critically assess the notion of harmonisation of asylum policies in new ways. Secondly, drawing on legal- and political-geographical concepts, we offer a way to conceptualise this zone by paying attention to the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics it involves. Thirdly, we offer critical legal logistics as a new direction for scholarship in legal geography and beyond that promises to prise open the previously obscured mechanics of contemporary legal systems.
Since 2006, the United Nations and Cambodian Government have participated in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid tribunal created to try key Khmer Rouge officials for crimes of the Pol Pot era. In Hybrid Justice, John D. Ciorciari and Anne Heindel examine the contentious politics behind the tribunal’s creation, its flawed legal and institutional design, and the frequent politicized impasses that have undermined its ability to deliver credible and efficient justice and leave a positive legacy. They also draw lessons and principles for future hybrid and international courts and proceedings.
The commission of mass atrocities — genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes — inevitably generates clarion calls for accountability from a range of international actors, including civil society organizations, governments, and United Nations bodies. These demands often center on an appeal that the situation be taken up by the International Criminal Court (ICC) via a Security Council referral or action by the Prosecutor herself. Although the ICC is now fully operational, its jurisdiction remains incomplete and its resources limited. Furthermore, the ICC is plagued by challenges to its legitimacy, erratic state cooperation, and persistent perceptions of inefficacy and inefficiency. Originally envisioned as a standing institution that would obviate the need for new ad hoc courts, it is now clear that the ICC cannot handle all the atrocity situations ravaging our planet. As such, there is an enduring need for the international community to create, and enable, additional accountability mechanisms to respond to the commission of international crimes when the political will for an ICC referral is lacking, the ICC is inappropriate or foreclosed for whatever reason, or only a fraction of the abuses or perpetrators in question are before the ICC. This contribution analyzes the accumulated experience with international, hybrid, and internationalized judicial institutions prior to and since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1994. This paper assumes the continuing utility of such mechanisms as tools to provide accountability for mass violence amounting to international crimes, particularly in situations requiring an alternative or supplement to the ICC. It thus focuses on practical elements of institutional design, with particular attention to the origins, structure, jurisdictional limitations, financing, and procedures of the hybrid courts, dedicated chambers, specialized prosecutorial cells, and other accountability innovations established to prosecute atrocity crimes at the domestic level with some measure of international support, expertise, and/or personnel. From this historical and comparative analysis, the paper develops a taxonomy of models and a “menu” of elements that can be mixed and matched as new accountability mechanisms are under consideration for historical, current, and emerging atrocity situations, such as Syria, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, North Korea, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Libya, Burundi, and even the July 2014 downing of Malaysian Air Flight 17 (MH-17) over rebel-controlled Ukraine.
Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationship of justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book’s eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The introduction makes an important contribution toour understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book’s chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law.
Human rights are now the dominant approach to social justice globally. But how do human rights work? What do they do? Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this book examines human rights in practice. It shows how groups and organizations mobilize human rights language in a variety of local settings, often differently from those imagined by human rights law itself. The case studies reveal the contradictions and ambiguities of human rights approaches to various forms of violence. They show that this openness is not a failure of universal human rights as a coherent legal or ethical framework but an essential element in the development of living and organic ideas of human rights in context. Studying human rights in practice means examining the channels of communication and institutional structures that mediate between global ideas and local situations. Suitable for use on inter-disciplinary courses globally.
Since 2006, the United Nations and Cambodian Government have participated in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid tribunal created to try key Khmer Rouge officials for crimes of the Pol Pot era. In Hybrid Justice, John D. Ciorciari and Anne Heindel examine the contentious politics behind the tribunal’s creation, its flawed legal and institutional design, and the frequent politicized impasses that have undermined its ability to deliver credible and efficient justice and leave a positive legacy. They also draw lessons and principles for future hybrid and international courts and proceedings.
Since the end of the Cold War twenty years ago, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of international and transnational institutions for which “justice” has become a central ideological ordering principle, an implicit goal, or, in the case of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a formal basis for institutional action. At the same time, there has been a corresponding rise in the prevalence and cross-cultural resonance of justice as a framing discourse, a transnational normativity that gives shape to, but is not coextensive with, the modalities of international law, human rights, and preexisting cultural and moral imperatives. The problem, we might say, of justice is of course an old one indeed: Its complexities have formed the staple of debates within political philosophy for centuries if not millennia; within both theology and international law the centrality of justice has made it an iconic, if shifting, symbol that has at times come to represent the particular system itself. Justice has served as the illusive endpoint of any number of political and social teleologies, the utopian goal toward which movements of ideas and people have been hurled with sometimes tragic, sometimes heroic, consequences. More recently, however, the withering away of the logics of the bipolar postwar system provided an opening for the actual building and implementation of both international and transnational systems that had existed as either idea or unrealized possibility, including the international human rights system, the interrelated system of international criminal law, and the more diffuse networks of transnational actors that came to constitute what Eleanor Roosevelt, the chair of the commission that produced the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called the “curious grapevine.
By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make explicit the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies - all practices that detail the ways that justice, as a social fiction, is made real within particular relations of power. © Kamari Maxine Clarke 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This paper examines how establishing a new legal institution shapes understandings and practices of citizenship. It does so through a study of the creation of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CBiH) between 2002 and 2014 and, in particular, its emerging jurisdiction over war crimes trials since 2006. International sponsors of this institution herald the establishment of the Court as an important step toward achieving justice for the crimes committed during the 1992–1995 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). But alongside its legal function, intervening agencies have emphasised an allied objective to use the Court to consolidate state structures and foster a civic sense of Bosnian citizenship. Using qualitative data, this paper argues that the creation of the CBiH illuminates a series of divergent understandings of citizenship. In particular, while the court seeks to convey a concept of liberal democratic citizenship, this is only achieved through the enrolment of civil society actors operating across BiH territory. Rather than heralding a series of ‘grassroots’ alternatives to official scripts, these social agents see the value of a universal understanding of justice structured around equality and rights, but often failed to see this expressed in the activities of the Court. The paper concludes by reflecting on the relationship between law and citizenship, where the imagined sense of universal jurisdiction is undermined by social concerns relating to the barriers that prevent access to justice.
A hybrid judicial tribunal was inaugurated in Phnom Penh in 2006 to try those most responsible for the mass crimes perpetrated during the period of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, 1975–79. Since the inception of the tribunal, there has been regular friction between the international and national sides, some of which has led to considerable animosity. In 2012 the international Co-investigating Judge resigned after only a few months in office, claiming that he had found himself in a hostile environment and had been unable to carry out his duties. Impasses of this kind arise in the specific social context in which security has come to be configured and managed in Cambodia, in part with the complicity of foreign powers. Greater appreciation of the historical background and social context that frame the lives of court staff would enable us to have more realistic expectations of future hybrid tribunals.
The use of local knowledge in and for development is a relatively recent phenomenon, entering the realm of development theory and practice from the mid-1970s, yet it has become a key part of the rhetoric and practice of development agencies and academic research. The conceptual and historical background to local knowledge in development, including its roots of ‘Western’ engagement with ‘other’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledges, is key to understanding their more contemporary application in development practice. As local knowledge has entered the development orthodoxy, so a more critical approach has emerged, with particularly important contributions from Geographers, as to the use, application, and conceptual understanding of how knowledges are interpreted and adopted within development. This critique has highlighted the dynamic, political, and spatial nature of such knowledge, and problematises the notion that they are fundamentally ‘good’ for local development. For Geographers, and those working in development studies, there remain important questions about local knowledge, including how such knowledges are constituted by relationships and networks that go beyond the local, how such knowledges are ‘learnt’ and (re)produced in time and space, and how the knowledges of still marginalised actors in local communities can be taken account of.
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Research is increasingly recognised as a generative and performative practice that contributes to shaping the world we come to live in. Thus part of the research “process” involves being explicit about the worlds we want our research to contribute to and reflecting on how the concepts we use might help or inhibit this agenda. This paper is based on our commitment to strengthening the contributions that grassroots renewable energy initiatives might make to a climate changing world. However, to detect the potential of these initiatives, familiar concepts of scale and markets have to be recast. This paper uses insights from the academic literature and research into grassroots renewable energy initiatives to show how scale and markets can be rethought, thereby making it possible to detect some of the ways that grassroots renewable energy initiatives are helping transform ways of living and working, and building hope in a climate changing world.
This article explores how devolved outreach work for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia works to govern the past as it acts to reshape and reframe potentially ambivalent and conflicting memories of political violence. The article specifically examines an example of outreach targeting a former Khmer Rouge community that has been situated as a key party in Cambodia’s attempts to realize ‘justice’ and ‘reconciliation’. The article analyses the sites and crucibles of memory that outreach work for the court utilizes in licensing a particular reading of Cambodia’s experiences of war and genocide. First, the article shows how museum and memorial sites and technologies produce acquiescent, ambivalent and resistant effects among outreach subjects. Second, the article then considers the consolidation and contestation of memory at a public forum event, noting the ways in which outreach attempts to disarm and reconstitute memorial accounts that conflict with the officially sanctioned reading of Cambodia’s past political violence. Whilst acknowledging the unique characteristics of the case, I argue that it is illustrative of the various ways in which Cambodians might question the legitimacy of the Extraordinary Chambers.
Over the last ten years, scholars in human geography have been paying increasing theoretical and empirical attention to understanding the ways in which the production of scale is implicated in the production of space. Overwhelmingly, this work reflects a social construc- tionist approach, which situates capitalist production (and the role of the state, capital, labor and nonstate political actors) as of central concern. What is missing from this discussion about the social construction of scale is serious attention to the relevance of social reproduction and consumption. In this article I review the important literature on scale construction and argue for enlarging our scope for understanding scale to include the complex processes of social repro- duction and consumption. I base my critique on a short case study which illustrates that attention to other processes besides production and other systems of domination besides capitalism can enhance our theorizing and improve our attempts to effect real social change.
This paper focuses on wide-ranging governmental discourses that enable new ways of shaping social and economic affairs in the field of development. Directing particular attention to the Millennium Development Goals, we refer to these discourses as developmentalities. As a form of governmentality produced through these Goals, developmentalities draw on the turn of the century to recast certain development problems and offer reformulated solutions to these problems. We argue that they rely on three forms of neoliberal rationalities of government—information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks, and their calculative practices, to shape global spaces and new capacities for individuals and social groups. Our analysis is based on extensive policy documents, reports, and development initiatives affiliated with the United Nations and other organizations, as well as insights derived from in-depth interviews and conversations with United Nations policy and research personnel from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
This chapter argues that international tribunals minimize the need to accurately determine the defendant’s guilt by routinely ‘balancing away’ defence rights vis-à-vis other values that are deemed more important, such as ‘combating impunity’ or acknowledging the suffering of the victims. It identifies four different types of such balancing: foundational, procedural, institutional, and systemic. Foundational balancing concerns the (mis)use of the sources of international law. Procedural balancing primarily involves de-emphasizing the importance of defence rights by elevating the (assumed) rights of other actors in the system. Institutional balancing relates to the structural position of the defence at international tribunals. And systemic balancing focuses on how the collective nature of international crimes requires international tribunals to rely on substantive doctrines that make it more difficult to accurately assess the criminal responsibility of individual defendants. Those four types of balancing, this chapter suggests, relegate defendants to the margins of the trial process, significantly increasing the likelihood of unjust verdicts.
The International Criminal Court emerged in the early twenty-first century as an ambitious and permanent institution with a mandate to address mass atrocity crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. Although designed to exercise jurisdiction only in instances where states do not pursue these crimes themselves (and are unwilling or unable to do so), the Court's interventions, particularly in African states, have raised questions about the social value of its work and its political dimensions and effects. Bringing together scholars and practitioners who specialise on the ICC, this collection offers a diverse account of its interventions: from investigations to trials and from the Court's Hague-based centre to the networks of actors who sustain its activities. Exploring connections with transitional justice and international relations, and drawing upon critical insights from the interpretive social sciences, it offers a novel perspective on the ICC's work. This title is also available as Open Access.
In April 1979, a mission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers made a solidarity visit to Cambodia in the immediate aftermath of Khmer Rouge rule of the country. One of the mission members, John H. E. Fried, a former advisor to the United States' military trials at Nuremberg, was moved to subsequently advocate for United Nations recognition of the then ostracised Cambodian state. The crisis of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the political justifications made by early visitors there, illuminate late Cold War cultures of progressive international law scholarship and activism through their constitutive affects and material practices. While legal investigation of Khmer Rouge crimes is now largely understood through the frame of ‘transitional justice’, this paper rejects such a framing. It argues instead for attention to Cambodia's early experiences, in which left legal activism – calling for Nuremberg's lessons to be applied to the violence perpetrated in Vietnam and Cambodia – played an important role. For scholars interested in post-1979 Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum historical visitor books, recently digitised, promise insight into the multiple actors, motivations and understandings of international ‘early responders’ to evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes.
Cambridge Core - Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Edge of Law - by Alex Jeffrey
This book examines the creation and operation of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is a hybrid domestic/international tribunal tasked with putting senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge on trial. It argues that the ECCC should be considered an example of illiberal transitional justice, where the language of procedure is strongly adhered to but political considerations often rule in reality. The Cambodian government spent nearly two decades addressing the Khmer Rouge past, and shaping its preferred narrative, before the involvement of the United Nations. It was a further six years of negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations that determined the unique hybrid structure of the ECCC. Over more than a decade in operation, and with three people convicted, the ECCC has not contributed to the positive goals expected of transitional justice mechanisms. Through the Cambodian example, this book challenges existing assumptions and analyses of transitional justice to create a more nuanced understanding of how and why transitional justice mechanisms are employed.
Is there a point to international justice? This book explores this question in Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge revolutionaries committed genocide and crimes against humanity in an attempt to create a pure socialist regime (1975-1979). Due to geopolitics, it was only in 2006 that a UN-backed hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“Khmer Rouge Tribunal”), commenced operation, one of a growing number of post-Cold War transitional justice interventions. The Justice Facade argues that there is a point to such tribunals, but it is masked by a set of utopian human rights and democratization ideals. Instead of projecting this transitional justice imaginary onto post-conflict peacebuilding efforts, we need to step behind the justice facade to examine what tribunals mean in terms of everyday life and practices-such as the Buddhist beliefs and ritual interactions with the spirits of the dead that are critical to Cambodian victims and survivors. In making this argument, The Justice Facade focuses on civil society outreach efforts to “translate” the court in terms meaningful to Cambodians, the majority of whom are rural villagers, as well as the experience of Cambodian civil parties who testified. This ground-breaking study of transitional justice and demonstration of the importance of examining “justice in translation” is of critical importance not just to those working in the field of transitional justice and law, but in related fields such as development, human rights, anthropology, and peacebuilding.
This report examines the spatiality of court processes, connecting interdisciplinary work that has considered the physical processes of trials with geographical work that has deepened our understanding of the substance and properties of the material world. The specific focus of this discussion is the built materiality of courts, tracing the emergence of work on the nature of trial spaces, court architecture and the arrangement of courtrooms. Rather than a review of progress in an already-defined intellectual field, I am bringing together an interdisciplinary set of works with the aim of tracing the future pathways for work on the geography of trials.
Whoever commits an action which the law declares to be punishable or which is deserving of punishment according to the fundamental idea of a penal law and the sound perception of the people, shall be punished. If no determinable penal law is directly applicable to the action, it shall be punished according to the law, the basic idea of which fits it best. Introduction Criminal law features prominently in the traditional debate surrounding legal positivism and its limits. There is no better testimony to this than the seminal Hart-Fuller discussion which explored the question of the legality of post-Second World War prosecutions in Germany and was a core point of contention between them. It is therefore of particular interest to address the question of positivism in international criminal law (ICL). The main argument put forward in this chapter is that the principle of legality, as positivised in ICL, is more than just a substantive rule of this field of international law. It has theoretical and methodological implications, notably in the relation between law and morals and on the debates that are at the heart of this volume in the intellectual project of post-modern international legal positivism. More particularly, this chapter will address two specific issues: How the principle of legality affects the theory of sources of ICL and how it affects the rules of interpretation of ICL.
This book engages with a traditional yet persistent question of legal theory - what is law? However, instead of attempting to define and limit law, the aim of the book is to unlimit law, to take the idea of law beyond its conventionally accepted boundaries into the material and plural domains of an interconnected human and nonhuman world. Against the backdrop of analytical jurisprudence, the book draws theoretical connections and continuities between different experiences, spheres, and modalities of law. Taking up the many forms of critical and socio-legal thought, it presents a broad challenge to legal essentialism and abstraction, as well as an important contribution to more general normative theory. Reading, crystallising, and extending themes that have emerged in legal thought over the past century, this book is the culmination of the author's 25 years of engagement with legal theory. Its bold attempt to forge a thoroughly contemporary approach to law will be of enormous value to those with interests in legal and socio-legal theory.
Memories of violence, suffering and atrocities in Cambodia are today being pulled in different directions. A range of transitional justice practices have been put to work in the name of redressing, restoring and renewing memory. At the centre of this stage is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid tribunal established to prosecute the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, under which 1.6 million Cambodians died of hunger or disease or were executed. This book unpicks the way memory is reconstructed through appeals to a national memory, the legal reframing and coding of memories as crimes, and bids to locate personal memories within collective biographies. Analysing the techniques and interventions of the ECCC, as well as exploring the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the book explores the relationships in which Cambodian communities navigate memories of political violence. This book is essential for understanding transitional justice in Cambodia in, and beyond, the courtroom. Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia shows that the governing logic of transitional justice interventions - that societies are unable to 'deal with' memories of atrocity and violence without some form of transitional justice mechanism - neglects the complexity of memory and remembering in post-atrocity contexts and the agency of the subjects to which such mechanisms are addressed. Drawing on documentary sources, legal transcripts, interviews and participant observation data, the book situates transitional justice processes in Cambodia within a wider context of social and cultural memory politics, examining (old and new) conflicts of memory that have emerged between the varied accounts and uses of the past that exist in Cambodia now. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars in sociology, human rights, law and criminology.
Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance. The concept of assemblage has captured the attention of critical social scientists, including those interested in the study of policy. Despite ongoing debate around the implications of assemblage thinking for questions of structure, agency, and contingency, there is widespread agreement around its value as a methodological framework. There are now many accounts using assemblage-inflected methodologies of various sorts as analytical tools for revealing, interpreting, and representing the worlds of policy-making, though few are explicit about their methodological practice. In this paper, we identify a suite of epistemological commitments associated with assemblage thinking, including an emphasis on multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty, and then consider explicitly how such commitments might be translated into methodological practices in policy research. Drawing on a research project on the development and enactment of homelessness policy in Australia, we explore how three methodological practices – adopting an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing labours of assembling – can be used to operationalize assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research.
This article highlights and interrogates the significance of dominant representations of international crime and international criminal justice. It positions international criminal justice as a discursive, as well as practical, global project and is concerned, in particular, with the relational and ethical implications of the way in which international crime and justice are thought about, spoken about and portrayed. I argue that dominant representations of international crime and international criminal justice serve to map the international as a site of crime, justice and community. A key contribution of this article is to explicate the uniquely ‘crimino-legal’ nature of this site or sphere, by illustrating its criminological, legal and spatial characteristics. I then reflect on the ethical and relational limits of this arena of sociolegal engagement, as well as emphasising the importance of continued academic attention to the representation and imagination, as well as practice, of international criminal justice.
Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.
How geopolitics prevented international recognition of the Cambodian genocide until the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in 2006.
The creation of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), often referred to as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, has given new impetus to Cambodia's transitional justice process. The case of Cambodia illustrates how relatively strong and proactive local civil society organizations can support and complement the work of an internationalized criminal court. Working primarily at the intersection of the Court and Cambodian society, these actors have assumed various roles in support of the ECCC process, some of which normally fall under the responsibility of a court. This Notes piece explores the main roles Cambodian civil society actors have played at the ECCC and offers some preliminary observations following the completion of the Court's first trial.
This article explores the implications of understanding war crime trials as hybrid legal spaces. Drawing on twelve months of residential fieldwork in the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, it examines the circulation of evidence, the choreography of the courtroom, and the nature and possibilities for legal observation. Analyzing hybrid legal geographies foregrounds the material and embodied nature of trials, illuminating the forms of comportment, categorization, and exclusion through which law establishes its legitimacy. Rather than emphasizing separation and distance, the lens of hybridity illuminates the multiple ways in which war crimes trials are grounded in the social and political context of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. Consequently, this analysis traces the disjuncture between the imagined geographies of legal jurisdiction and the material and embodied spaces of trial practices. In conclusion, we argue that the establishment of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the tensions that emerge when an institution of trial justice is used to strengthen the coherence of a postconflict state.
This Article looks in detail at whether the Special Court is, at present, succeeding or failing, drawing lessons along the way both for the system of international criminal justice generally, and more specifically for U.N. enforcement of the law of war. In Section II, this Article suggests a method for measuring success and failure in an international criminal tribunal. It suggests that there are a number of identifiable performance standards which should guide our assessment, each linked to a stakeholder group: the international community, the affected population, and the defendants. In Sections III-V, this Article assesses the Special Court's early performance from the perspective of each of these stakeholder groups, against these performance standards. In Section VI, it assesses the implications of these trends, suggests ways that negative consequences might be avoided or at least minimized, and points to longer-term implications, particularly for the U.N. involvement in the enforcement of the law of war. This Article concludes that a hybrid tribunal, like the Special Court, engages with a range of dynamics affecting the humanitarian community and complex peace operations that the ad hoc tribunals have avoided, but which produce unexpected effects in the context of criminal justice. Those dynamics are not presently taken into account either in the design and resourcing of the Special Court, or in stakeholders' expectations of what it can achieve. Careful consideration of these challenges is required lest “hybrid” tribunals upend the maxim “no peace without justice,” preventing peace by pursuing justice.
Orford provides critical readings of the narratives that accompanied military interventions and shaped legal justifications for the use of force by the international community during the 1990s. While humanitarian intervention seemed to promise a world in which democracy, self-determination and human rights would be privileged over national interests or imperial ambitions, she argues that a far more circumscribed, exploitative and conservative interpretation of the ends of intervention was adopted during this period. The book draws on a wide range of sources, including critical legal theory, feminist and postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic theory and critical geography, to develop ways of reading directed at thinking through the cultural and economic effects of militarised humanitarianism. It concludes by asking what, if anything, has been lost in the move from the era of humanitarian intervention to an international relations dominated by wars on terror.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was established in 2004 through an agreement between the United Nations (UN) and the Cambodian government, as a means to address the crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The ECCC is one in a row of international judicial institutions set up in response to gross violations of human rights, known as 'hybrid' courts, encompassing both national and international elements in their structure, composition and jurisdiction. Hybrid courts, allowing for a higher degree of participation by national actors, are expected to be better placed to give long-lasting effects in the societies in which mass atrocities have taken place. This article examines that claim with regard to the ECCC, and explores the value added by participation by various national actors in the judicial proceedings. After giving an overview of international standards of judicial independence, it provides an analysis of concerns that may be raised with regard to the judicial independence of the ECCC. This article argues that some aspects of national ownership may be promoted at the cost of lowering international standards of justice, and may cause an overall lack of ownership or accountability of the proceedings.
A significant challenge facing international war crimes tribunals is to reach out to and to communicate their work to the local populations concerned. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to analyze and to explore the Outreach programmes of three particular courts, namely the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). It will argue that notwithstanding the important and creative Outreach work being undertaken by these courts, more resources must be invested in their Outreach sections if they are to achieve their ambitious objectives, not least the goal of contributing to peace.
In this article, the author analyzes the following paradox: to convey an unambiguous historical “truth” to its audience, the trial will have to silence the accused. But in such case, it ends up as a show trial. In order for the trial to be legitimate, the accused must be entitled to speak. But in that case, he will be able to challenge the version of truth represented by the prosecutor and relativise the guilt that is thrust upon him by the powers on whose strength the Tribunal stands. His will be the truth of the revolution and he himself a martyr for the revolutionary cause.
I explore how the increasing professionalisation of international development has enabled the expansion of the neoliberal agenda of development agencies and, at the same time, the co-optation of so-called “alternative” approaches onto this agenda. The focus is on the key figure of the development “expert” as an agent involved in consolidating unilinear notions of modernising progress. First, there is an examination of the post-war production of the development expert and the reproduction of systems of expertise and forms of authority that they articulate. Research with former UK colonial officers who worked in the post-independence development industry is subsequently drawn upon to exemplify the continuities and divergences from colonial rule to contemporary discourses of development. Then, there is a demonstration of the co-optation of potentially critical discourses, focusing upon the creation of professionals and the exclusive forms of knowledge that surround the practice of participatory development. Finally, in the conclusion, I argue that increasing professionalisation within the development industry supports the neoliberal development agenda and that there remains a need to identify how critical discourses can be effective within it.