ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of history in the construction of the discipline and the power relations that underpin it by reading the formal exclusion of the transatlantic slave trade from the category of crimes alongside the construction in some international legal discourse of the slave trader as archetypal international criminal. It argues that this Janus-faced nature of international criminal legal discourse has operated contradictorily in different registers of international criminal law. The chapter offers a reflection on some of the power relations underpinning the construction of international criminal law as a discipline. The piracy analogy therefore works both in exclusionary and inclusionary ways. The chapter argues that these inclusions and exclusions contribute to a state of affairs in which international criminal law is relieved from the material consequences of recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as an international crime. On occasion, prize crews carried out disciplinary violence against recaptives.
