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Individuals formerly involved in armed groups are positioned in the victim–perpetrator binary by legal systems and societies. Media participates in this process and influences the relationship between law and society by reproducing or challenging legal and social designations. We assess the relationship between the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecution of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier in Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and media representations of Ongwen. We conduct a content analysis of 779 Ugandan, African, and international newspapers' English-language articles published between January 2005 and October 2022. We find that media coverage focuses on Ongwen's adult roles in the group, including as an LRA leader, largely reproducing the ICC's portrayal of the accused. A minority of articles acknowledge a more complex status and increase in frequency once Ongwen's ICC trial is underway. An important faction challenges the ICC's narrative, with non-Africa-based media presenting a more complex depiction of Ongwen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I aim to rise to the bait thrown my way by Greta Olson where she posits (From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, p.121) that law-and-affect scholarship is anti-narrative, and provocatively imagines that I would shake my head and chuckle, asking what one is to do with the questions asked by scholarship on emotion and affect in actual legal practice. As one spending most of her time in judicial practice I am not only firmly convinced of the importance of narrative in law, what is more, I often have to steep myself in the legal effects of emotion and affect and ask what consequences they should have for the people involved. I will therefore consider the trial as a performance, i.e., a show trial in the positive sense that as a performance shows and tells that it has read well what is brought before the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complications which played out in ascribing an identity: victim, perpetrator or both, in Lord's Resistance Army's (LRA) child abduction victim turned Warlord, Dominic Ongwen, calls for the rethinking of the international criminal justice system. While law operates in black and white, politics is fraught with and at times thrives in proverbial grey areas. In order for justice to be done, the International Criminal Court's (ICC) geography and logic must be shifted epistemologically from the Global North to the sites where these atrocities were committed. The Roman-Dutch law logic, which largely informes the ICC's jurisprudence, makes little existential logic to the thousands of the victims of the LRA's over three decades of operations spanning over four countries. I argue against the token involvement of victims of human rights abuse by advocating for the deployment of local justice systems such as mato oput, as they not only resonate with the victims but also with the perpetrators, both herein termed survivors. Had mato oput been instituted first, the victim turned perpetrator complexity would have been addressed as the agent would have been cleansed, pardoned, and reintegrated into the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community first responded to child soldiering by embracing within law and policy a narrative that saw child soldiers largely as passive victims. Empirical work with child soldiers has since revealed a more complex picture of children's agency and actual experiences. From this work, a more recent narrative – which I call the political actor narrative – has taken shape within scholarly work on child soldiers. While the former narrative may be wrong to universalise the condition of all child soldiers as passive victims, the latter narrative is limited in what it can tell us about how child soldiering affects moral character development. I argue that we have good reason to seek a more comprehensive narrative that mixes elements of the passive victim and political actor narratives into a new narrative that provides resources for character-based normative analysis, and I show how virtue ethics provides the conceptual resources to do this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O presente artigo analisa o caso de Dominic Ongwen, membro do grupo armado Lord's Resistance Army, que fora recrutado ainda enquanto criança para o grupo no contexto do conflito armado de Uganda e que cometera a mesma violação sofrida no passado a outrem, sendo, por isso, acusado no Tribunal Penal Internacional. Assim, no plano macro, avulta-se a influência do passado imperial/colonial Europeu no direito internacional e como isso conduz a criação e sustentação de hostilidades. E no plano micro, tem-se o fito de compreender à luz da subalternidade gerada por tal sistema, o fenômeno do aliciamento coercitivo de crianças soldado na luta armada e as suas consequências na sua psique, apontando, ao cabo, para a necessidade de revisitar o ciclo vicioso de ilegalidade e imperialidade que forma e caracteriza ordenamento internacional para uma análise mais precisa do caso e das próprias regras do Tribunal. Nessa toada, metodologicamente, este estudo de natureza aplicada seguirá o método hipotético-dedutivo de abordagem, estabelecendo-se a relação entre o pensamento de Gayatri Spivak com o caso do ugandês, perpassando pela construção do TPI e das regras acerca do envolvimento de crianças soldado em meio a hostilidades – pontos esses que serão explorados pelo método descritivo e explicativo e cujas referências serão obtidas a partir dos procedimentos bibliográfico e documental, seguindo um recorte qualitativo, porém, sem o condão de esgotá-las.

En febrero de 2021, la Corte Penal Internacional condenó a Dominic Ongwen, antiguo niño soldado y posterior comandante del Ejército de Resistencia del Señor (LRA), por 61 cargos de conductas constitutivas de crímenes de lesa humanidad y de guerra, cometidas entre 2002 y 2005 en el Norte de Uganda. En este artículo reflexiono sobre los crímenes que la Corte le atribuyó y sobre su condición de víctima-victimario. Me ocupo principalmente de escrutar los dichos y los silencios de la sentencia desde una perspectiva de género y feminista. Defenderé la tesis de que el caso abre una veta de reflexión sobre las paradojas de la pulsión punitiva de la lucha feminista internacional y sobre la dificultad para superar binarios radicales en el derecho penal internacional.

This article examines transformations in the marriage-slavery nexus in Northern Uganda from the late nineteenth century to the present. By historicizing the forced marriage of abducted girls in the Lord's Resistance Army, the article contributes to explaining why the interpretation of these circumstances has been so disputed in Uganda and internationally. It starts by examining different interpretations of the relationship between Dominic Ongwen and his forced wives. The Ongwen case is then contextualized in the history of female captivity and conjugal violence in Lango and Acholi societies. It is argued that enslavement in the form of wartime captivity was not irreconcilable with marriage in Northern Uganda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that this history influences contemporary Lango and Acholi perceptions of these phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an implication of this view is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trial of former Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court (ICC) comes at a critical moment for the Court. Its almost exclusive focus on Africa has made the ICC a de facto regional transitional justice body, but this approach is now facing a backlash from African states, threatening the Court's very viability. The Ongwen trial throws into relief the dilemmas of the ICC's Africa strategy and shows how difficult it is for the ICC to contribute to justice and peace on the continent. Specifically, there are four narratives concerning Ongwen's capture, his individual agency, the LRA's politics and the Ugandan government's responsibility that the ICC relies upon to justify its prosecution of Ongwen and its alignment with the Ugandan government. All these narratives face rupture during the trial. However, there seems little chance that coherent counternarratives that could anchor alternative visions of justice might emerge from the trial either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reality of child soldiers who join rebel forces once they reach adulthood presents complex legal questions in the face of contemporary international criminal law principles which, on the one hand, afford protection to all children, and on the other, unequivocally call for the prosecution and punishment of those who are guilty of committing serious crimes. Currently, the case of Dominic Ongwen before the icc raises contentious issues, including whether or not international criminal law permits the consideration of factors, such as the impact of the experiences as a child soldier on future conduct, when he is prosecuted for allegedly committing crimes during adulthood. This article specifically examines whether Ongwen's experiences as a child soldier could serve as a possible defence and/or as a mitigating factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]