ABSTRACT
This chapter considers progress narratives about victims in international criminal law. It highlights some of the criticisms of these narratives that have emerged and suggests a series of overlapping narratives about recaptives and victims. The framing of ‘imagined’ victims could look very different if victims were thought of as the law’s creditors that are individuals to whom international law is indebted in various ways, rather than the law’s beneficiaries. The depiction of recaptives as creditors fails to conceive of legal personhood free from property relations, even if it subverts them in its constitution of the subject. Any justice outcome will of course inevitably involve compromise, but thinking of victims as creditors shifts the starting point for its determination. Critically thinking of victims as creditors also requires an alertness to the ‘moral’ and ‘material’ benefits of international criminal justice, where they lie and how they relate to each other, and it emphasises that obligations flow from this interconnectedness.
