Re-presentations of Defendant Perpetrators in Sexual War Violence Cases Before International and Military Criminal Courts: Table 1

End Impunity! Reducing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence to a Problem of Law

“…Yet, commentators have noted how the liberal legalist approach—with its inherent individualization of responsibility—critically misses the collective engagement and societal complicity of mass violence (Drumbl ; Fletcher and Weinsten ). As the court constructs evil perpetrators (Houge ; Mohamed ) and helpless victims (Henry ), it further presents an etiology of conflict‐related sexual violence that suits individual criminal prosecution and feeds into the two dominant causal “camps.”…”

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

“…Here, narratives may be more fragmented, compiled by several voices, sequenced, shifting back and forth in chronology, produced over time, or in a single statement. In terms of court proceedings, counsels' arguments may constitute narratives, judgments are read as narratives, as are defendants' statements and witnesses' testimonies (see Houge, 2016Houge, , 2017. Thus, counsel's cross-examinations of reluctant witnesses that respond in monosyllables, may constitute a fragmented narrative as here understood -telling a (stuttered) story about the events addressed and about the court actors, their relation to one another and the context of storytelling within which they speak.…”

“…In line with narrative criminology, they need not be true in order to qualify as a story or narrative of interest. With public proceedings and transcripts, the trial becomes a public theatre of different and contesting ideas – a place to test and rename, pronounce and project, and also, establish history about mass harms (see Houge, 2016).…”

“…Narrative expressivist approaches to these cases could describe the work these narrative ‘performances’ do in different audiences – their function relative to the trial truth produced in judgment. Similarly, narrative expressivism could cater to the particular fixation on individualized guilt and responsibility that international criminal justice constructs its explanations of mass harm in relation to, relative to social scientific understandings of collective harms that tend to submerge the relevance of individual agency (Houge, 2016; Mohamed, 2015). Whether these various narratives work well in terms of the purposes of international criminal justice or not, is a different endeavour – also open to further empirical analysis.…”

“…Their appeal, in turn, follows from the legal framework that carves out and constrains the historical record courts can produce – overall presenting a simple causality line and, not least, individualizing guilt. In the author’s research, it is the particular abstraction through binary reductions that law contributes to that is at the centre of attention (Houge, 2016). An extract from the judgment of Miroslav Bralo at the ICTY may illustrate.…”