Fictions of Justice
The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa

This book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices.

Kamari Maxine Clarke (Author)

9780521889100, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2009

352 pages
23.4 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.58 kg

'… the theoretical scope is ambitious, the data are fascinating, and the analysis is incisive. These qualities make the book a must-read in the anthropology of human rights and humanitarianism.' Niklas Hultin, American Anthropologist

By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make explicit the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies - all practices that detail the ways that justice is made real.

Introduction: the rule of law and its imbrications - justice in the making
Part I. Multiple Domains of Justice: 1. Micropractices of justice making: the moral and political economy of the 'Rule of Law'
2. Crafting the victim, crafting the perpetrator: new spaces of power, new specters of justice
3. Multiple spaces of justice: Uganda, the international criminal court and the politics of inequality
Part II. The Politics of Incommensurability: 4. 'Religious' and 'secular' micropractices: the religious roots of secular law, the political content of radical Islamic beliefs
5. 'The hand will go to hell': Islamic law and the crafting of the spiritual self
6. Islamic Sharia at the crossroads: human rights challenges and the strategic reworking of vernacular imaginaries.

Subject Areas: Laws of Specific jurisdictions [LN], International criminal law [LBBZ], Law & society [LAQ], Political science & theory [JPA]