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This chapter introduces perspectives within an emerging anthropology of emotion, affect, and the law, which traces how embodied emotional responses are mobilized socially and politically to reinforce the moral legitimacy of particular legalistic and technocratic solutions to the problem of violence in Africa. Taking the particular case of Dominic Ongwen, a convicted commander of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army who was brought before the International Criminal Court for a range of crimes against humanity, we see the beginning of a trend to demonstrate methodologically an interrelationship between micro processes and macro and historical processes. This happens through a study of the emotive and affective processes that go into the making of individual ‘perpetrators’. But we also see that part of that process involves the necessary connection to the longue durée that makes such racial depictions immediately believable. Through an examination of both the psychosocial and complex historical and political conditions that underscore inter-generational trauma in postcolonial contexts, we see how the intersection of emotion, affects, and law has played out in the study of law and anthropology.

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.

In 1995 and 1996, Verena Stolcke (1995) and Aihwa Ong (1996) were embattled over the legitimacy of the concept of citizenship—a debate that was preceded by those writing about the complexities of Latino/a as well as Caribbean transnational migration (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Sutton and Chaney 1987) and the resultant complexities of hybridity and borderlands (Anzaldua 1987). The debate that followed in Current Anthropology in 1995 propelled the discussion further. It clarified what was at stake in reconceptualizing the classification of national belonging and pushed scholars to contend with power through the ways people resignify meaning and produce new forms of socialities outside of and in relation to the statecraft. This engagement called into question the prevailing literature that presumed an omnipotence of the state; it shifted the gaze to an engagement with other long standing formations—migration from the South to the North, dispossession, refugeeism, pan-Africanism and various forms of internationalism—that produced new forms of exclusions as well as innovative possibilities for reimagining the locus of social and political authority. It was about the complexities of power— its circulation and its centrality within and beyond the state. The stakes were high in this debate and the issues were made more difficult by the fledgling globalization literature which had begun to articulate social changes in relation to the demise of the nation state and shifts toward imagining new possibilities (Appadurai 1996; Sassen 1991, 1996, 1998, 2006).

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.

Africa and the ICC: Realities and Perceptions comprises contributions from prominent scholars of different disciplines including international law, political science, cultural anthropology, African history and media studies. This unique collection provides the reader with detailed insights into the interaction between the African Union and the International Criminal Court (ICC), but also looks further at the impact of the ICC at a societal level in African states and examines other justice mechanisms on a local and regional level in these countries. This investigation of the ICC's complicated relationship with Africa allows the reader to see that perceptions of justice are multilayered.