Preservation and its limits (ICC, pt. 6)

A final approach is available that tends to postpone the difficult calculus of political judgment, and I’ll call it preservation. People who recognize the severe limitations of promoting and professionalizing nevertheless strategically defer, during an initial period of institution-building, what political analysis is supposed to be about: critical distance for the sake of judgment of outcomes in context. On the preservative view, the ICC is a fledgling cause that needs to be sheltered from the ordinary conditions of inquiry.

Professionalism and its limits (ICC, pt. 5)

In the face of all this complexity, interim political judgment about what the goals are and whether they are being served is obviously as difficult as it is necessary. But along with promotion, there are two other ways of talking about the ICC I promised to cover. Trailing promotion, the other main form of discourse about our new institution is the professional or professionalizing approach, which follows from the work the ICC gives lawyers as vocational experience, from summer internships to careers in the system.

The political contexts of international criminal justice (ICC, pt. 4)

So let’s bracket, at the outset, whether the ICC successfully provided retributive justice in the one guilty verdict so far, or even presume its success in any future ones, and then proceed to apply the political framework. In the main part of my talk, I want to consider the political environment for assessing the ICC’s meaning so far, considering possible ends and outcomes in connection with the larger political landscape.

Promotion and its limits (ICC, pt. 3)

As time passes, this framework will have to supersede the extraordinary predominance of what I will call promotionalism in the world at large and at meetings like this one. The promotional idea presents the creation of the ICC as a moral achievement in spite of and against politics—or at least political interests narrower than those of humanity as a whole.

For a political theory of the International Criminal Court (ICC, pt. 2)

When asked whether the French Revolution had succeeded, a recent Chinese premier is said to have responded that, after two centuries, it’s still far too soon to tell. That makes it rather unwise to draw any sort of balance sheet on the International Criminal Court at this early stage. Anyway, for the ICC—for the French Revolution for that matter—time isn’t the main difficulty. There is also the thorny matter of what criteria to apply to the assessment in the first place.

Four ways to talk about the ICC: politics, promotion, professionalism, and preservation (ICC, pt. 1)

This week I’m posting as a series of blog posts a talk I’ve hastily drafted for an interesting event at Yale Law School assessing the first ten years of the International Criminal Court. This still informal version has some things in it that the talk itself did not. For what it’s worth, my thoughts follow—with thanks to Kevin Heller and Paul Kahn for saving me from some even more grievous missteps.

France in Mali: the end of the fairytale

Whew, Mali. French air raids against Islamist positions in Mali began Thursday night, and the dust hasn’t settled yet. The news is changing fast, but three things emerge from the haze. First, fierce fighting in the North and the East, with French forces in the lead, will open up a whole new set of dangers. With Islamist forces on the attack, foreign intervention was necessary, and many Malians at home and abroad welcomed it enthusiastically. Still, this remains a dangerous moment all around.

Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law

Humanity editorial board members Conor Gearty and Costas Douzinas have just published their new coedited Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law -- of which a review is forthcoming in the journal. Meantime, according to his Twitter feed, Conor announces a book launch at Birkbeck on January 30, 2013 at 6 p.m.

Mazower responds to Nunan

Right off let me say how grateful I am to Timothy Nunan for the care and intelligence with which he has read and commented on my book. Maybe it is worth saying at the outset that it was not an easy book to write, still less one of those books that write themselves. I found I was engaging more than usually a variety of quite disparate and mutually incomprehending scholarly and quasi-scholarly literatures to a degree that had simply not been true when I tried, for instance, to synthesise the historiography on the Nazi occupation of Europe.