The Archival Politics of International Courts

Offers the first analysis of international courts' archives and of how these constitute the international community as a particular reality.

Henry Alexander Redwood (Author)

9781108844741, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 August 2021

224 pages
23 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

'The book is a detailed and engaging analysis of the archives produced by international courts that makes an important argument about the discursive construction of justice. It is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning critical scholarly literature on legal archives … [and] demonstrates the potential for further analysis in relation to other international legal contexts.' Trish Luker, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies

The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, as this book argues, these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain.

1. The politics of archival knowledge in international courts
2. The international criminal tribunal for Rwanda and its archive
3: The force of law
4. Contesting the archive
5. Reconstituting justice
6. Imagining community
7. The residual mechanism and the archive.

Subject Areas: International criminal law [LBBZ], International organisations & institutions [LBBU], International human rights law [LBBR], International law [LB], Law [L], Human rights [JPVH], International relations [JPS], African history [HBJH]