Embodiments and frictions of statehood in transnational criminal justice

Abstract

Outside of criminology, dominant conceptions of postcolonial statehood in the Global South as ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ have long been criticized. In criminology, however, the theoretical outcomes of this critique have been scarce. In this article we therefore ask how ideals and practices of transnational criminal justice are informed by and productive of specific (Global North) conceptions of statehood. Exploring encounters between transnational and local criminal justice in the context of international state-building in Mali and Liberia, we observe frictions in which statehood divergences and global hierarchies become apparent. Through penal aid, we argue, a particular kind of penal statehood is produced wherein the options of how to perform penality are increasingly limited by the embeddedness in global power asymmetries.

Justice Sites and the Fight against Atrocity Crimes

“…The unequal distribution of such goods is underlined by the fact that many digital tools developed in international criminal justice are rooted in, or financed by, global North sites of justice (Clarke and Kendall 2019; Tenove 2019; Richmond 2020; Vecellio Segate 2021; Sandvik and Lohne 2021). More generally, whereas digitization has created new ways of organizing social labor across borders, it seems to have also reproduced or even exacerbated divides between the global North and the global South (Kwet 2019; Norris 2020), something that is also tangible with regard to transnational crime control (Stambøl and Solhjell 2021). Such endogenous dynamics can be studied using ethnographic methods (Latour 2010), some of which have been deployed to understand work in and around the international criminal courts (Anders 2014;Campbell 2014;Eltringham 2013Eltringham , 2014.…”