Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Book
Book
The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals
DOI link for The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals
The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals book
The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals
DOI link for The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals
The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals book
Get Citation
ABSTRACT
This book analyses how international criminal institutions, and their actors – legal counsels, judges, investigators, registrars – construct witness identity and memory.
Filling an important gap within transitional justice scholarship, this conceptually led and empirically grounded interdisciplinary study takes the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as a case study. It asks: How do legal witnesses of human rights violations contribute to memory production in transitional post-conflict societies? Witnessing at tribunals entails individuals externalising memories of violations. This is commonly construed within the transitional justice legal scholarship as an opportunity for individuals to ensure their memories are entered into an historical record. Yet this predominant understanding of witness testimony fails to comprehend the nature of memory. Memory construction entails fragments of individual and collective memories within a contestable and contingent framing of the past. Accordingly, the book challenges the claim that international criminal courts and tribunals are able to produce a collective memory of atrocities; as it maintains that witnessing must be understood as a contingent and multi-layered discursive process.
Contributing to the specific analysis of witnessing and memory, but also to the broader field of transitional justice, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in these areas, as well as others in legal theory, global criminology, memory studies, international relations, and international human rights.
Introduction Chapter
- Introduction
- Defining Transitional Justice
- Context
- Research Data and Method
- Structuring the Argument
Chapter One: Memory, Witnesses and International Criminal Institutions
- Introduction
- Origins of the Practice of Transitional Justice: Nuremberg and the Exceptional use of International Law
- The symbolic representation of Nuremberg and Human Rights
- Eichmann: Law and the Need for Witnesses to Remember
- A Discourse of Transitional Justice Scholarship: From International Justice to Local Justice Via International Norms
- International Criminal Tribunals and Courts: Witnesses and Testimonial Evidence
- International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Defining Legal Witnesses
- Conclusion - International Legal Institutions: Spaces of Memory Construction
Chapter Two: Conceptualising the way Legal Witnesses Remember Mass Human Rights Violations
- Introduction
- Law and the ‘Grey Zone’ of Witnessing
- Bearing Witness
- The Grey Zone: Law, Ethics and Legal Witnesses
- The ‘Muselmann’: the lacuna of law and justice or legal witnessing as ‘Judgment’
- Theoretical lens: conceptualising legal witnessing
- Memory: Individual and Collective Components
- Manipulated Memory
- From Agamben and Ricoeur to an original conceptual framework: analysing the way legal witnesses remember at the ICTR
- Discourse and Legal Archives
i The ICTR’s ‘Black Box’: Opening up the archives
- The legal production of knowledge
- Bringing together the theory, ‘Black Box’ and the analysis
Conclusion
Chapter Three: The Discursive Battleground of Legal Witnessing, Or, The Active Witness and Their ‘Right to Truth’
- Introduction
- Nowhere and Everywhere: The Discursive Reach of the Witness at the ICTR
- ‘Bears in a China Closet’: The discursivity of investigations and indictments
- The Right to Truth: Who’s Speaking?
- Mass Atrocities and the Right to Truth
- Victims-Witnesses
- The discursivity of the ‘witness’ vs the right to truth: universality, agency and collective legal stories
- Conclusion
Chapter Four: Memories of Violence and the Limitations of Law
- Introduction
- Law, Genocide and Legal Memories of Mass Violence
- The ICTR and the crime of Genocide
- Genocidal violence: Layers and fluidity of events, actions and agents
- Beyond Law: The Plurality of Violent Memories
- Discursive restrictions of witness memories
- The ‘Grey Zone’ of legal witnessing
- The plurality of memory
- Conclusion
Chapter Five: Critiquing Liberal Legality and Collective Memory
- Introduction
- Legal Actors as Memory Producers
- Testifying in the ‘Interests of Justice’
- The discursive practices of Disclosure
- Producing a Legal Memory of Rape and Sexual Violence
- Liberal Legality and Collective Memory: A Critique
- A critique of advocacy for a legal collective memory of atrocities
- Plural vs Collective memory
- A Conceptual Alternative
- Conclusion
Chapter Six: Fragments of Legal Memories
- Introduction
- Legal Archives: Plurality, Self and ‘Others’
- Plural Fragments of Memory
- Intergenerational Transmission of Legal Memories: Words and Images
- Legal Memory: The Empirical Potential and Challenges of the ICTR Archive
- Conclusion
- Epilogue - An Atrocity Archive: Sensory Expression of Past-Present-Future
Conclusion
- Introduction
- Why Conceptual Insights Matter
- Contribution to Knowledge
- Framing the Books Contributions
- Future Research Directions
Bibliography
Appendix
- Appendix One: Case Studies
- Appendix Two: List of Data
