{"id":4505,"date":"2015-03-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T08:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.voelkerrechtsblog.org\/articles\/rescuing-cosmopolitan-locals-at-the-international-criminal-tribunal-for-rwanda\/"},"modified":"2020-12-09T13:55:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T12:55:13","slug":"rescuing-cosmopolitan-locals-at-the-international-criminal-tribunal-for-rwanda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/rescuing-cosmopolitan-locals-at-the-international-criminal-tribunal-for-rwanda\/","title":{"rendered":"Rescuing (cosmopolitan) locals at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Transitional Justice is an important emerging theme in legal anthropology. V\u00f6lkerrechtsblog will explore this theme through a collaboration with the blog \u2018Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World<\/a>\u2019 and re-post their series \u2018Transitional Justice under the anthropological microscope<\/a>\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the 31st December 2014, after twenty years of existence, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)<\/a> finally ceased operations. Established in November 1994 by the United Nations Security Council, the ICTR was tasked with putting on trial any person accused of committing the following in Rwanda in 1994: genocide (as defined by the 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide); crimes against humanity (a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population) and \u2018war crimes\u2019 (Article 3 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions). With its seat and four courtrooms in Arusha, Tanzania, the ICTR indicted ninety one individuals; of whom sixty one were convicted; fourteen were acquitted; ten were referred to domestic jurisdictions; three died prior to or during the trial; and three remain \u2018at large\u2019.<\/p>\n

With the closure of the ICTR, debates that have surrounded the Tribunal since its inception continue. While some praise its accomplishments at both the local (ending a \u2018culture of impunity\u2019 in Rwanda) and global levels (clarifying international crimes) others denounce the ICTR\u2019s weaknesses, including the length of trials (lasting an average of four years \u2013 one lasted nine years); the cost ($1.5 billion); the failure to be sensitive to the \u2018culture\u2019 of Rwandan witnesses; the lack of engagement with the Rwandan population and so on. Given that (along with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia<\/a> created in 1993) the ICTR was an innovation, resuscitating the project of international criminal justice that had stalled after the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg<\/a> (1945-6) and The International Military Tribunal for the Far East<\/a> (1946-8), any serious assessment of both complementary and negative commentary on the Tribunal, requires an appreciation of the daily conditions under which the trials were pursued. And yet, a substantial literature on the ICTR written by legal scholars has concerned itself not with daily conditions, tasks and routines, but with outcomes, the Tribunal\u2019s legal precedents (defining rape and sexual violence as international crimes; the right to counsel etc.).<\/p>\n

Omitting attention to process impedes praxis and obstructs an adequate assessment of the arguments made in favour and against the Tribunal. For example, listening to lawyers and judges speak of the challenges of simultaneous translation from Kinyarwanda to French to English and back again sheds light on why trials took so long. Likewise, recording how lawyers from different legal traditions forged a common practice in the courtroom is an achievement rarely acknowledged by advocates of the Tribunal. The omission of the daily conditions from the ICTR literature reflects other transitional justice institutions.<\/p>\n

Scholarly resistance to extra-legal knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n

The bulk of the literature on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission<\/a>, for example, contains \u2018literally no information about its everyday aspects \u2026 as if the everyday work is just a neutral medium for information gathering and processing, a means to an end\u2019 (Buur 2003: 67n68). While my ethnographic research at the ICTR has sought to remedy this omission, the question remains why there is such apparent resistance to incorporating daily conditions, tasks and routines into scholarly accounts of these institutions?<\/p>\n

Part of the reason may be the concern among legal practitioners (especially in common law) with legal precedent (the outcome). This is always future-oriented, anticipating future utility for which the conditions in which the precedent was forged are irrelevant (Bourdieu 1987: 845). In terms of the reproduction of the legal profession, it has been observed that, in the case of UK barristers at least, those who teach law portray it as only having life in \u2018the gradations of the printed word: case notes, legislation, law reports\u2019 (Morison and Leith 1992: 3). And yet, analysis of law in practice has revealed a \u2018completely different view of the nature of law\u2019 (Morison and Leith 1992: vii). Such analysis has, not surprisingly, revealed that knowledge other than that of texts and precedents is important for the lawyer including knowledge of the temperament of judges, personal networks with other practitioners, ability to deal effectively with bureaucracies and so on. The preference of scholars for \u2018\u2019the gradations of the printed word\u2019 masks the importance of this \u2018extra-legal\u2019 knowledge. In contrast, an appreciation of the lawyer as social individual and of law as, therefore, a \u2018necessarily flawed human process\u2019 (Morison and Leith 1992: vii) would contribute to our assessment of the ways in which the ICTR has been both celebrated or condemned.<\/p>\n

The pitfalls of homogenising the ‘internationals’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two other, interrelated, reasons may also explain why the daily conditions, routines and tasks of lawyers and judges have not been considered worthy of sustained concern. Both involve what constitutes the \u2018local\u2019. Critical literature on transitional justice has been concerned with how the supposedly universal mechanisms of \u2018transitional justice\u2019 are \u2018localised\u2019 (see Shaw et al. 2010). This has had an unintended effect. Just as development scholarship has tended to be interested in the complexity of \u2018developees\u2019 and ignore the similar complexity of \u2018developers\u2019 (Hindman and Fechter 2011: 12), so in emphasising the complexity and diversity of the \u2018locals\u2019, there has been a tendency in transitional justice literature to homogenise the \u2018internationals\u2019. By portraying \u2018transitional justice\u2019 as a disembodied, unified set of discourses and practices, this approach has obscured another locality with its own complexity and variations, the interstitial locality of the transitional justice institution and its community of (cosmopolitan) \u2018locals\u2019. The specific sites occupied by this diverse group in which their varied interests, realities and needs are played out must also be recognised as localities, that there is no such place as the \u2018international\u2019 divorced from the contingency of daily practice.<\/p>\n

This concern with \u2018local\u2019 responses to transitional justice rather than cosmopolitan locals, may also be influenced by long-standing undercurrents on what is considered \u2018authentic\u2019 research. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 13) describe a \u2018hierarchy of purity\u2019 in anthropological field sites, where those at the top of the hierarchy are \u2018distant, exotic and strange\u2019. It can be argued that this perpetuates \u2018dominant-subordinate\u2019 relationships with pliable \u2018locals\u2019, privileging the culture of powerlessness over the culture of power (Nader 1969: 289) (Hannerz 1998: 109). In discussing his analogous ethnography of the cosmopolitan locals of M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res Peter Redfield (2012: 358) suggests that it may be received by some readers as the \u2018antithesis of ethnographic authenticity\u2019 because it is only \u2018subaltern\u2019 views that \u2018count\u2019 as ethnography. There is a parallel between this and the place of the \u2018charismatic victim\u2019 (Bonacker 2013: 115 101) in the discourse that legitimises institutions such as the ICTR that require a \u2018tragic spectacle of suffering \u2013 the spectre of a victim representing the condition of oppression in need of salvation\u2019 (Clarke 2009: 15). The insinuation that ethnography must concern the powerless and the ICTR\u2019s need to place powerless victims centre stage combine to eclipse lawyers and judges.<\/p>\n

Privileging disembodied \u2018victims\u2019 can also be seen as part of a wider set of practices whereby those who speak on behalf of the ICTR cultivate a \u2018public image of cohesion and shared belief\u2019 (Scott 1990: 55). This includes a tendency to speak of the ICTR as an entity. For example, the Tribunal\u2019s Registrar (head of administration) would speak of \u2018The Tribunal\u2019 having adopted a particular strategy in who had been indicted. And yet, it was not \u2018The Tribunal\u2019 who had taken these decisions, but the Prosecutor.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the Tribunal\u2019s spokesperson while speaking of \u2018the Tribunal\u2019s\u2019 achievements, would denounce criticism of \u2018the Tribunal\u2019 by defence lawyers. On one hand, any achievements claimed for the ICTR must also implicate defence lawyers because without them, there would be no trials and, in any case the defence lawyers the spokesperson referred to had criticised the Registry, not \u2018The Tribunal\u2019.<\/p>\n

Avoiding scrutiny: the idea of the institution as a ‘super-person’<\/strong><\/p>\n

To speak of the Tribunal in this manner is not to engage in an innocent figure of speech. Rather, this tendency is also a means of avoiding scrutiny. Employing the idea of the institution as \u2018super-person\u2019 indicates an unwillingness to \u2018reveal the everyday muddle to be found there\u2019 (Czarniawska 1997: 2). This parallels David Mosse\u2019s (2006: 938) observation regarding the analogous institutions of international development, that such institutions maintain knowledge systems that \u2018constantly organize attention away from the contradictions and contingencies of practice and the plurality of perspectives\u2019. Barbara Czarniawska (1997: 46) suggests that portraying the institution as a singular \u2018person\u2019 persists because \u2018the rules for constructing personal and organizational identities are very much alike\u2019, in that both are dependent on a \u2018continuous process of narration\u2019. But, Czarniawska also notes that, \u201ceach person who receives the organization\u2019s narrative is also a narrator. Each judge and lawyer at the ICTR was constantly \u2018involved in formulating, editing, applauding, and refusing\u2019 (Czarniawska 1997: 46) the narrative disseminated by those tasked with speaking for the ICTR.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it is there, in that critical response to the narrative that one can find, if one is willing to look, a commentary on daily conditions, tasks and routines that can contribute to a more balanced assessment of the ways that the Tribunal has been celebrated and condemned.<\/p>\n

A legal concern with the \u2018cult of the text\u2019 (Bourdieu 1987: 851); the foregrounding of the powerless; and presenting the organization as \u2018super-person\u2019 are all reasons why the daily conditions under which lawyers and judges operate have been obscured. Transitional justice may seek static texts (judgments and precedents) and it may be those \u2018gradations of the printed word\u2019 that are of interest to legal scholars, these, but these are a residue of daily, situated encounters. Just as the judgment of a precursor institution, the Nuremberg Tribunal, stated that \u2018Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities\u2019 (1947: 223), so, in turn, there is a need to appreciate that such crimes are tried not be abstract entities but by persons in a specific locale under specific conditions. After all, as one judge told me \u2018The process is much more challenging than the end result\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nigel Eltringham<\/a> is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda (2004), editor of Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (2013), and co-editor of Remembering Genocide (2014).<\/em><\/p>\n

This article appeared first on Allegra Lab.<\/a><\/p>\n

More\u00a0contributions of this series can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cite as: Nigel Eltringham, \u201cRescuing (cosmopolitan) locals at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda\u201d,\u00a0V\u00f6lkerrechtsblog<\/em>, 18 March 2015, doi: 10.17176\/20170403-213837.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

References<\/em><\/p>\n

Bonacker, T. (2013) \u2018Global Victimhood: On the Charisma of the Victim in Transitional Justice Processes\u2019, World Political Science Review, Vol. 9 No. 1.
\nBourdieu, P. (1987) \u2018The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field\u2019, Hastings Journal of Law, Vol. 38 No. 5.
\nBuur, L. (2003) \u2018Monumental History: Visibility and Invisibility in the Work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission\u2019, in D. Posel and G. Simpson (eds) Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press ), 66-93.
\nClarke, K. M. (2009) Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
\nCzarniawska, B. (1997) Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
\nGupta, A., and J. Ferguson (1997) Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkley: University of California Press.
\nHannerz, U. (1998) \u2018Other transnationals: perspectives gained from studying sideways\u2019, Paideuma, Vol. 44.
\nHindman, H., and A.-M. Fechter (2011) \u2018Introduction\u2019, in A.-M. Fechter and H. Hindman (eds) Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland. Sterling, VA: Kumarian.
\nMorison, J., and P. Leith (1992) The Barrister\u2019s world : And the nature of law: Open University Press.
\nMosse, D. (2006) \u2018Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities\u2019, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 12 No. 4.
\nNader, L. (1969) \u2018Up the Anthropologist \u2013 Perspectives Gained From Studying Up\u2019, in D. Hymes (eds) Reinventing Anthropology. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.
\nRedfield, P. (2012) \u2018The Unbearable Lightness of Expats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility\u2019, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 27 No. 2.
\nScott, J. C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
\nShaw, R., L. Waldorf, and P. Hazan (2010) Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
\nInternational Military Tribunal (1947) Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal. Vol. I. Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Transitional Justice is an important emerging theme in legal anthropology. V\u00f6lkerrechtsblog will explore this theme through a collaboration with the blog \u2018Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World\u2019 and re-post their series \u2018Transitional Justice under the anthropological microscope\u2019. On the 31st December 2014, after twenty years of existence, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[],"authors":[3837],"article-categories":[],"doi":[3838],"class_list":["post-4505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","authors-nigel-eltringham","doi-10-17176-20170403-213837"],"acf":{"subline":""},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20170403-213837"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4505"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=4505"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=4505"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=4505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}