Advocates of Humanity: Human Rights NGOs in International Criminal Justice

Abstract

Advocates of Humanity offers an analysis of international criminal justice from the perspective of sociology of punishment by exploring the role of human rights organizations in their mobilization for global justice through the International Criminal Court. Based on multi-sited ethnography, primarily in The Hague and Uganda, the author approaches the transnational networks of NGOs advocating for the ICC as an ethnographic object. A central objective is to explore how connections are made, and how forces and imaginations of global criminal justice travel. By analysing how international criminal justice is arranged spatially, and as such expresses social, political, and cultural relations of power, Advocates of Humanity shows how international criminal justice is situated in particular spaces, networks, and actors, and how they structure the imaginations of justice circulating in the field. From a sociology of punishment perspective, it compares the ‘penal imaginations’ of domestic and international criminal justice, and considers the particularly central role of victims as a universalized symbol of humanity for the legitimacy of international criminal justice. With clear global asymmetries emerging from the work, Advocates of Humanity provides descriptive as well as explanatory understandings of criminal punishment ‘gone global’, analysing its social causation while examining its cultural meanings, particularly as regards its role as an expression of ‘the international’ will to punish. To whom is it meaningful, and why?

The two-sided spectacle at the border: Frontex, NGOs and the theatres of sovereignty

“…A burgeoning body of IR scholarship has in the past two decades thoroughly documented the rising power and authority of international NGOs and their complex relationships with state actors (Stroup and Wong, 2016). These insights are also increasingly gaining salience within criminological scholarship (Lohne, 2019).…”

“…The article analyses Twitter communications in order to examine the competing claims on authority made by border control agencies and humanitarian actors in the Mediterranean. While previous criminological scholarship has shown how NGOs and civil society organizations can in various ways be coopted into performing the tasks and objectives of the state penal apparatus (Corcoran et al, 2018;Tomczak, 2017), or assume expert authority that shapes state punitive trajectories (Lohne, 2019), there is a dearth of criminological studies of direct state-NGO confrontations, particularly in the EU context.…”

Krisetilstanden i det internasjonale strafferettsprosjektet – en rettssosiologisk analyse

“…29 I økende grad stilles også spørsmål om hvordan denne utviklingen former selve substansen av «det internasjonale», og saerlig på hvordan det internasjonale samfunn responderer (eller ikke) på grensesprengende kriminalitet, kriser og konflikt. 30 En slik internasjonal (straffe)rettssosiologi er dermed mindre interessert i gjeldende rettom hva internasjonal strafferett sier om seg selvmen mer om hva den sier om det globale samfunnet den er et produkt avog samtidig bidrar til å skape. På denne måten aktualiseres tradisjonelle rettssosiologiske problemstillinger hva gjelder vekselvirkninger mellom retten og samfunnet 31 nå ikke utelukkende innenfor nasjonalstaten men også utenfor.…”

Narrative expressivism: A criminological approach to the expressive function of international criminal justice

“…As a theoretical argument for international criminal justice, legal expressivism tends to focus on the particular normative potential of criminal punishment. Paradoxically, however, the sentence and execution of punishment ‘remains little more than an afterthought’ in the international criminal justice project (Drumbl, 2007: 11; see also Lohne, forthcoming). The punishment is arguably ‘far less significant than the trial itself’ (Luban, 2011: 74, emphasis added).…”