Justicecraft Imagining Justice In Times Of Conflict

This book is about the making of justice. Despite the growing scholarship on transitional and transformative justice, contested struggles for justice in times of political change fail to get the nuanced attention we think they deserve. It seeks to understand how the making of justice is a craft and how this process of craft making is itself a source of political change. The authors introduce a new and novel conceptual framework of justicecraft which sheds light upon political change by unpacking five key elements—the skills, knowledge, labor, affect, and materiality—involved in contested struggles for justice. Justicecraft illuminates the stories and struggles for justice, enabling a greater understanding of accompanying social, political, and cultural shifts in society which unfold during times of conflict. By framing justice as craft, the authors offer a more fluid understanding of how people are producing justice on the ground—and identify the means, the instruments, the language, and claims involved in the process. Each chapter applies the framework of justicecraft to diverse global case illustrations of struggles against past, present, and future injustices and wrongdoings and draws out the key elements embedded in these processes.

"The situation in Syria poses an acute-some might say existential-challenge to the international community's commitment to justice and accountability. It also marks the abject failure of the international system of peace and security erected in the post-World War II period. The Security Council has been almost entirely incapacitated by the propensity of Russia to wield its veto against nearly every coercive measure of any consequence, including legal accountability, that might be imposed on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. As a result, other actors, within and outside of the United Nations, have endeavored to find inventive ways around this geopolitical impasse. This forced creativity has generated a number of innovative institutions, legal arguments, and investigative techniques aimed at advancing justice and accountability for Syria, wherever possible. This book catalogues the many obstacles to this pursuit of justice for Syria and analyzes ways today's justice entrepreneurs have worked to find paths around them. The book's subtitle-Water Always Finds Its Way-reflects this idea that the quest for justice is inexorable. Just as water eventually finds its way through cracks and around obstacles, even if at a trickle, so too will justice. Virtually every international crime that forms part of the international penal code-a mélange of customary international law and treaty provisions-has been committed in and around Syria. The Syrian people have witnessed and been subjected to deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks; the misuse of conventional, unconventional, and improvised weapon systems; industrial-grade custodial abuses in a vast network of formal and informal prisons; unrelenting siege warfare; the denial of humanitarian aid and what appears to be the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war; sexual violence, including the sexual enslavement of Yezidi women and girls trafficked from Iraq and the sexual torture of detained men and boys; and the intentional destruction of irreplaceable cultural property. Thousands of Syrians are missing, many of them victims of enforced disappearances. Even children are not spared. The long-standing taboo against the use of chemical weapons has been repeatedly flouted in ways that constitute a double violation of IHL: the use of a prohibited weapon to target civilians. And, the sectarian nature of the violence has raised the specter of genocide against ethno-religious minorities. Indeed, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced in 2016 that ISIL was committing genocide against a number of minority groups in Syria and Iraq. Violence in the region has contributed to the biggest exodus of refugees since World War II"--

Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.

International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance provides a comprehensive study of compliance with legal obligations derived from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's (ICTY) Statute and integrates theoretical debates on compliance into international justice scholarship. Through the use of three models of compliance based on coercion, self-interest and norms, Christopher Lamont explores both the domestic politics of war crimes indictments and efforts by external actors such as the European Union, the United States and the Tribunal itself to induce compliance outcomes. He examines whether compliance outcomes do or do not translate into a changed normative understanding of international criminal justice on the part of target states.

Builds on micro-level critiques of transitional justice to debate a more comprehensive alternative at the level of theory and practice.

“Important and lucidly written...The American Revolution involved not simply the wisdom of a few great men but the passions, fears, and religiosity of ordinary people.” —Gordon S. Wood In this boldly innovative work, T. H. Breen spotlights a crucial missing piece in the stories we tell about the American Revolution. From New Hampshire to Georgia, it was ordinary people who became the face of resistance. Without them the Revolution would have failed. They sustained the commitment to independence when victory seemed in doubt and chose law over vengeance when their communities teetered on the brink of anarchy. The Will of the People offers a vivid account of how, across the thirteen colonies, men and women negotiated the revolutionary experience, accepting huge personal sacrifice, setting up daring experiments in self-government, and going to extraordinary lengths to preserve the rule of law. After the war they avoided the violence and extremism that have compromised so many other revolutions since. A masterful storyteller, Breen recovers the forgotten history of our nation’s true founders. “The American Revolution was made not just on the battlefields or in the minds of intellectuals, Breen argues in this elegant and persuasive work. Communities of ordinary men and women—farmers, workers, and artisans who kept the revolutionary faith until victory was achieved—were essential to the effort.” —Annette Gordon-Reed “Breen traces the many ways in which exercising authority made local committees pragmatic...acting as a brake on the kind of violent excess into which revolutions so easily devolve.” —Wall Street Journal