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This article considers the way genealogical approaches to religion have not been able to take into account how the production of knowledge, including religious knowledge, affects global politics. Specifically, it is concerned with the production of expert testimony, which is used to provide the evidentiary basis for a new industry of civil and human rights claims and protections. I explore how genealogical approaches to religion offer a way to see that the constructs we understand to be religion were produced and rendered legible through the formation of contemporary constructions of knowledge and power. I demonstrate that—through these approaches—in order for religious protections to be acknowledged in legal domains, they also need to be rendered visible and legible to the law. Ultimately, I argue that the production of these knowledge practices into portable knowledge packages enables courts to assess issues that have resulted from the migration of ethnic and religious groups; but they also tell us a lot about the limits of genealogical approaches in understanding fully the complexities of Black Atlantic religious practices.

This essay explores Siba Grovogui's publication of Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions as a way to ponder how histories of international relations are told. Clarke considers Grovogui's central point concerning the relationship between Western intellectual anxieties and postcolonial methods and modes of thought. One domain for interrogating the contemporary significance of the work is the call for new ontologies and interpretive humility. This commentary examines these new ontologies through the rethinking of ways that agents engage in particular political projects through an examination of the way that particular forms of meaning production are invigorated through communicative forms that can involve critical shifts to the moral order. Finally, the essay examines the shifts related to the formation of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine and the related aesthetic modalities that are changing the way mainstream adherents understand new democratic forms of participation. This example represents an attempt to consider what this means for the way we understand the transformation of contemporary democracy and how Grovogui's work has set the stage for these transformations.

This article is about the ways that the notion of the African perpetrator and notions of ‘culpability' are mediated through a distinct colonial–postcolonial continuum. These different assessments for assigning and comprehending guilt result in what I term an ‘ICC impunity gap’. Epitomising this gap is the case against Kenya's William Ruto and the recently dropped case against Uhuru Kenyatta, whose indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC) cohered with and confirmed the image in the international imagination of the perpetrator – an image of an African commander whose actions are in need of international judicial management. I consider the historical and juridical frames through which Kenyatta and Ruto were indicted and the resultant disjuncture in recognition by analysing the historic circumstances surrounding the violence that erupted following the 2007 presidential election alongside legal arguments made by the ICC about ways to determine culpability for mass atrocities. Though not new to leg...

This introductory essay aims to offer a framework through which to make sense of the controversies arising from International Criminal Court (icc) intervention in Africa. One such controversy is related to the deployment of the powers to refer and defer icc cases central to Article 16 of the Rome Statute for the icc. The manner in which the unsc has employed this power has led critics – particularly on the African continent – to conclude that a range of geopolitics has undermined the judicial independence of the icc. The essay argues, therefore, that the drafting history of Article 16 of the Rome Statute shows the workings of the political origins of the law and the manner in which foundational inequalities were woven into the very fabric of the Rome Statute. Following theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin who have conceptualized law as violence and who have taken seriously the ways in which violence and inequality live on through the law, the authors argue that not only can contemporary ontologies of international criminal law not escape the politics of its making, but if we are to adequately address the conditions of violence in the postcolonial African state there must be an ontological shift in the way we conceptualize law. They propose a rethinking that acknowledges root causes of violence and that take seriously politically adumbrated histories of violence that continue live in the armature of the postcolonial state. Considering how and when political settlements are relevant and rethinking how complementarity and cooperation might work more effectively are key to the conceptual framework.

This essay explores the ways that new judicial formations centered on the Caribbean Court of Justice provide a space for understanding the workings of various legal rights brokers as central to a project of Caribbean regionalism. It examines the intermediary spaces in which legal brokers—predominantly nationals of countries in the region—are reconstructing legal regimes through which new spaces of Caribbean regional unity are taking shape. The development of such formations further accentuates the need to understand the particularities through which new regionalisms underlay old forms of social organization and, thus, are becoming relevant in the ways regions are being reinscribed in increasingly international spheres of engagement. The agents engaged in such spheres of international and regional governance are transforming juridical structures in the Caribbean. These changes are taking place not simply through the workings of national institutions, such as schools and cultural life, but also through the circulation of assemblages of judges and lawyers, leaders, international nongovernmental organizations, and consultants who provide a certain level of expertise toward regional integration. What characterizes this formation is not just its judicial structure but the politicians, experts, and judges who function in the advancement of a particular social cause. The mobility of these actors and the products of their knowledge mark an important change in the political organizing that has accompanied and facilitated the massive decentralization of capital accumulation worldwide. What distinguishes this Caribbean-basin form of regionalism from earlier forms is its dream of membership in the international community and its brokers' circulation on the world stage. These brokers, experts of sorts, travel from region to region. This article interrogates how to make sense of the emergence of these cosmopolitan brokers in relation to locations historically imagined as the Caribbean.

The African focus on the International Criminal Court (ICC) rule of law movement is far from incidental. It has everything to do with the identification of particular crimes as of gravest concern to humanity, crimes which, when viewed in political terms, foster cooperation by the majority of state parties. This article explores the workings of a global elite of liberalist lawyers and policy makers engaged in establishing what particular types of violence are considered part of an international moral and political agenda. I argue the ICC's emphasis on "command responsibility," conceptions of "justice," and human rights overlooks colonial history and its continuing postcolonial effects and the geo-political implications of resource competition.

Samples of illicit amphetamine seized by Police and Customs in England and Wales are routinely submitted to the Drugs Intelligence Laboratory at Aldermaston. Solvent extraction is used to separate synthetic impurities from the amphetamine and common cutting agents. The gas chromatogram provides an impurity profile. Around 4000 samples have been analysed in the past 4 years. These profiles have been subjectively classified into 10 major groups. Comparison of Police and Customs seizures has shown that, during 1993, nearly all amphetamine in the UK had been imported from The Netherlands.

Introduction. Understanding the multiplicity of justice Mark Goodale and Kamari Maxine Clarke 1. Beyond compliance: toward an anthropological understanding of international justice Sally Engle Merry Part I. Justice and the Geographies of International Law: 2. Postcolonial denial: why the European Court of Human Rights finds it so difficult to acknowledge racism Marie-Benedicte Dembour 3. Proleptic justice: the threat of investigation as a deterrent to human rights abuses in Cote d'Ivoire Michael McGovern 4. Global governmentality: the case of transnational adoption Signe Howell 5. Implementing the International Criminal Court Treaty in Africa: the role of NGOs and government agencies in constitutional reform Benson Chinedu Olugbuo 6. Measuring justice: internal conflict over the World Bank's empirical approach to human rights Galit A. Sarfaty Part II. Justice, Power, and Narratives of Everyday Life: 7. The victim deserving of global justice: power, caution, and recovering individuals Susan F. Hirsch 8. Recognition, reciprocity, and justice: Melanesian reflections on the rights of relationships Joel Robbins 9. Irreconcilable differences? Shari'ah, human rights, and family code reform in contemporary Morocco Amy Elizabeth Young 10. The production of 'forgiveness': God, justice, and state failure in postwar Sierra Leone Rosalind Shaw Part III. Justice, Memory, and the Politics of History: 11. Impunity and paranoia: writing histories of Indonesian violence Elizabeth Drexler 12. National security, WMD, and the selective pursuit of justice at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1946-8 Jeanne Guillemin 13. Justice and the League of Nations minority regime Jane K. Cowan 14. Commissioning truth, constructing silences: the Peruvian TRC and the other truths of 'terrorists' Lisa J. Laplante and Kimberly Theidon Epilogue. The words we use: justice, human rights, and the sense of injustice Laura Nader.

In the midst of the expansion of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its African-based prosecutions, Africa has witnessed rapid religious recomposition in recent decades marked by new scales of religious organization, new directional flows of influence, assertive new theologies, and intensified public presences. This chapter focuses on the ways that different forms of religious ethical value are central to both the human rights principles shaping the rule of law movement and to key revivalist Muslim commitments in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Here I examine a particular West African–Islamic politicolegal trajectory and situate it within the recent expansion of the rule of law. At the heart of this chapter is an inquiry into what new tensions are emerging at the intersections of “religious” and political projects. How, I ask, do current radical religious contestations within African polities – or between religious doctrines and secular legal codes – inform wider theoretical and legal debates on the ambiguous conceptual groundings of the “secular”; on rights and duties; and on the presumptive norms of liberalist citizenship central to its production of individual personhood? How does a different rendering of obligation and authority produce a politics of incommensurability that is beyond liberalist recognition? THE ICC: A MOVEMENT IN THE MAKING In liberalist circles until the mid-twentieth century, the international notion of “rights” was predominately associated with domestic issues and rested on the nation-state as the grantor and protector of rights.

The global reach of international law is now becoming relevant to the micromanagement of daily life. In postcolonial African states, everyday actions and their meanings are being opened up by the expansion of national jurisdiction into international jurisdiction. In relation to these changing technologies of managing shifting regimes of power, this article explores the ways that the spectacle of the rule of law is linked to the spectacle of capitalism. By examining the workings of victim and witness testimonies in the Special Court of Sierra Leone, I examine the ways that spectacles of law and articulations of suffering displace the realities of root causes of violence and the ways that these spectacles parse criminal responsibility. From rebel leaders spreading violence to the plunder of natural resources to child soldiers at once both victims and perpetrators, I detail the discursive crafting of the “African warlord” and the consequent specter of the victim by showing how law and justice are anchored in processes and concepts that often mask their normative underpinnings. Through its focus on victims’ justice and not on the consumerism that fuels production, the Special Court of Sierra Leone serves not only as the author of new legal tenets of criminal responsibility, but also as a key mechanism of power through which the law obscures the conditions that affect its making. As such, like other spectacles of power, the law is able to make its labor invisible, while displacing human action and replacing it with spectacular performances that affirm the rule of law that gains its force. It obscures its making not just through the staging and performances of rites, but also through the narrative strategies that consolidate an affective regime of suffering within which contemporary humanitarianism gains its power.