Immigration trials and international crimes: Expressing justice and performing race

Abstract

This article examines the performative collisions between the wrong of genocide and the invocation of this international crime as a means to secure carceral control of borders. Drawing on courtroom observations, legal transcripts and the media coverage of an immigration trial in the United States, the article explores the performative relationship between international criminal law and immigration law. It argues that this relationship helped to construct and racialize the category of the ‘criminalized migrant’ while establishing the perceived ‘civility’ of criminal law as a primary means of enacting domestic border control. While race was never made explicit in the trial, it emerged in a fractured but significant way, as the horror of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi reinforced the wrong of violating immigration law.

Performativity, Pragmatism and Border Control Technologies: Democratising the Ontologies of Border Criminology

“…Thus, Southernising border criminology will benefit from explicit theorisation of the relationship between the social and material structures of global hierarchy on the one hand, and the political agency of Northern and Southern state actors, IOs, migrants and new digital technologies on the other. Recent scholarship on border control and transnational criminal justice has indicated the value of doing so through the framework of performativity (Franko 2021;Palmer 2021;Sausdal and Lohne 2021;Singler 2021;Stambøl 2021); below, I demonstrate the strengths and a potential shortcoming of this perspective with reference to the bordering practices of Nigerian federal authorities.…”

Situating ‘law’ as ‘culture’ in scholarly discourse on the International Criminal Court: a reflection on Fraser and McGonigle Leyh's Intersections of Law and Culture at the International Criminal Court

“…They reflect a growing interest in ethnographically – or empirically – informed work on international criminal justice more generally. As Nicola Palmer (2021) has argued, a deeper understanding of the operation of international and transnational criminal justice can be gained through greater engagement with the ethnographies of penality and the rich traditions of criminology that have developed through scholarship on national criminal justice systems. The ethnographic work Palmer has in mind looks not only to the experience of communities affected by international justice mechanisms, but also at the construction of knowledge by those who observe these mechanisms.…”

“…The ethnographic work Palmer has in mind looks not only to the experience of communities affected by international justice mechanisms, but also at the construction of knowledge by those who observe these mechanisms. In this way, Palmer (2021) emphasises the importance of paying attention to the 'othering' work of law (and legal scholarship) and the need to turn the Western ethnographic gaze to its own ways of knowing the social world of international criminal justice. Understanding 'law and culture at the ICC' must, then, be as much about cultural exegesis of the discourse of those who comment on the ICC as it is about examining the 'culture' of affected communities.…”