Abstract Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has critically engaged with the concept of trauma, interrogating its role in political processes such as commemoration, post-conflict reconciliation, and identity formation. Together this scholarship has called for a rethinking of trauma in order to more accurately represent the social and political dynamics of the concept. However, while offering insights into the politics of trauma, this literature remains distant from the concept's original discipline—psychiatry. This article contends that Frantz Fanon, as a psychiatrist and political revolutionary, presents a unique viewpoint from which to problematize the relationship between psychiatry and politics as it continues to structure trauma (and trauma scholarship) in the present day. Drawing on Fanon's sociogenic psychiatry, it argues that both Fanon and contemporary approaches to trauma are constrained by an exclusive, Eurocentric psychiatry. Subsequently, it contends that a rethinking of trauma is insufficient. Rather, a decolonization of psychiatry is required. Three themes in Fanon's practice—the universal, morality, and gender—demonstrate the necessity of engaging with psychiatry's positionality within the contemporary sociogenic principle. Here, international political sociology provides for an analysis of trauma attentive to the relationship between society, health, and power.

In December 2015, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda delivered its final verdict in Butare, bringing the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to a close after 21-years. Despite the important role that the tribunal played in confirming international criminal justice as a key transitional justice mechanism, and tool of international peace and security, there has been little retrospective analysis of the court’s history. This article draws on a Bourdieusian field analysis to address the absence and makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates that over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s history the tribunal’s conception of justice shifted from a weak form of restorative justice to a more traditional form of retributive justice. Second, it reveals that this shift was the result of a ‘settling’ on the law and, more importantly, UN Security Council interventions. This legalisation and politicisation of trial practice saw a shift in the field from prioritising moral authority to legal and delegated authority.