Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Description

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 is made real.

Kamari Maxine Clarke is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University and senior research scientist at the Yale Law School. Her areas of research explore issues related to transnational religious networks, legal institutions, international criminal law, the interface between culture and power, and its relationship to the modernity of race and late capitalist globalization. Recent articles and books have focused on religious and legal movements and the related production of knowledge and power, including Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities and Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Her forthcoming titles are Testimonies and Transformations: Reflections on the Use of Ethnographic Knowledge and Justice in the Mirror: Law, Culture, and the Making of History. Professor Clarke has lectured in regions in the United States, Canada, South Africa, England, and the Caribbean on a wide range of topics. She is the director of the Yale Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis.

'... this book is the first serious attempt to engage with the wider anthropological and political dimensions of the ICC's jurisdiction and power ... a worthwhile read as it is an excellent dissection of the cases, current scholarship, and perceptions relating to the topic.' Journal of Law and Society '... relevant and important ... invite[s] us to think more carefully about the purpose of transitional justice - stated and implicit - and about the interaction of international and local culture.' Rachel Kerr, International Journal of Transitional Justice '... the theoretical scope is ambitious, the data are fascinating, and the analysis is incisive. These qualities make the book a must-read in the anthropology of human rights and humanitarianism.' Niklas Hultin, American Anthropologist