Third World Approaches to International Criminal Law

Abstract

A pattern of affording impunity to local power brokers throughout Africa pervades the application of international criminal law (ICL) in Africa. The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Uganda is a notorious but representative example, although similar analyses can be made of the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Libya. In Uganda, only members of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have been indicted for international crimes, even though the United Nations, international human rights groups, and local NGOs have documented years of abuses perpetrated by government troops and local auxiliary units, often against the same populations victimized by the LRA. The ICC is thereby implicated in the power structures and political arrangements of a repressive state that both combats the LRA and often brutalizes the civilian populations of northern Uganda. Inserting itself into Uganda, the ICC becomes a partisan player in the endgame of a civil war that extends back over a generation, and is itself rooted in ethnic and tribal animosities cultivated through 19th century Euro-colonial benedictions of favor. Here, the ICC and the war it adjudicates become surprising bedfellows, repurposed by local elites for the consolidation of domestic power.

The Nation and the State

“…The transnational corporate culture which works to reduce nature and humans to "raw materials" for plunder, and to monopolize profits and control, has refused to respect or recognize legally protected state borders or "interstate" boundaries. For example, in the Lakota Nation, perhaps one of Chimni (2006Chimni ( , 2007aChimni ( , 2007bChimni ( , 2011, Khosla (2009), Badaru (2008), Gathii (2008Gathii ( , 2011Gathii ( , 2019, Michelson (2008), Michelson et al (2008), Odumosu (2008), Al Attar and Tava (2010), Seck (2011), Al Thomson (2011), Al Attar (2012), Eslava and Pahuja (2012), Natarajan (2012), Gathii et al (2013), Haskell (2014), Achiume (2016, Kiyani (2016), Kiyani et al (2016), Natarajan et al (2016Natarajan et al ( , 2019, Ugochukwu (2016), Ramina (2018aRamina ( , 2018b, Murphy et al (2019), Frisso (2019, Okafor et al (2019), and Stone (2019).…”

International criminal justice in an age of perpetual crisis

“…49 blind spots, political motives and rhetorical tropes emerge from the ways in which international criminal justice mechanisms navigate the racial and socio-economic cleavages that persist between North and South? 50 The symposium sought not to be reflexively critical, but rather to 'identify possibilities and alternatives to that which it problematizes, and new avenues of exploration for scholars working outside of the TWAIL tradition'. 51 The symposium's invitation for further interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue should be echoed and replicated throughout the international criminal justice discourse.…”

Book Review: Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law

“…If international law “is an integral part of our exploitative and oppressive reality,” as TWAIL and Marxist scholars contend, can it be deployed in pursuit of emancipation “without reinforcing the very legalism which needs to be undermined” (Knox, 2010: 228)? While one response is legal nihilism (Rasulov, 2008: 277), even those most critical of international law “do not necessarily advocate for [its] abandonment” (Kiyani et al, 2016: 917). For one, engagement with international law is inescapable, given that every act is “enmeshed in juridical relations and will have inevitable juridical consequences” (Knox, 2010: 223–24).…”