The Sentimental Court
The Affective Life of International Criminal Justice

Analyses how atmospheres and sentiments shape the workings of international criminal law in (post-)colonial Africa and beyond.

Jonas Bens (Author)

9781316512876, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 May 2022

250 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.53 kg

'In The Sentimental Court, Jonas Bens offers a brilliantly eloquent detailing of the affective life of international criminal justice through this innovative ethnography about the Court and its connections to other sites of justice making. From a person entering the ICC and clearing the security check, to the examination of the constructed narratives of the prosecutor, the victim's representative, and the feelings that such encounters conjure, he offers a deterritorialized mapping of the International Criminal Court's Dominic Ongwen case to show the way that justice atmospheres are sentimentalized in mass-atrocity violence contexts. Not only is the ethnography a wonderful must-read, but it offers precious insights into the wildly complex and unfinished results of the postcolonial condition. With passionate insights about the complexities of justice, Bens clarifies the affective spaces and the fierce stronghold of transnational globalized legal processes in the contemporary period.' Kamari Maxine Clarke, Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto

Modern law seems to be designed to keep emotions at bay. The Sentimental Court argues the exact opposite: that the law is not designed to cast out affective dynamics, but to create them. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork - both during the trial of former Lord's Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Netherlands and in rural northern Uganda at the scenes of violence - this book is an in-depth investigation of the affective life of legalized transitional justice interventions in Africa. Jonas Bens argues that the law purposefully creates, mobilizes, shapes, and transforms atmospheres and sentiments, and further discusses how we should think about the future of law and justice in our colonial present by focusing on the politics of atmosphere and sentiment in which they are entangled.

Introduction: Affect, emotion and the law
Part I. Atmospheres: 1. Courtroom atmospheres: The courtroom of the ICC as an affective arrangement
2. Transitional justice atmospheres: The ICC's outreach work in northern Uganda
Part II. Sentiments: 3. The sentiment of plausibility: Affective framing and the production of legal truth
4. The sentiment of objectivity: Arranging objects and subjects in the ICC courtroom
5. The sentiment of justice: Navigating normative pluralism in northern Uganda
Part III. Politics: 6. The politics of atmosphere and sentiment: International criminal justice in Africa and competing indignation regimes
7. We have never been rational: The emotions of liberal legalism and the affective politics of modernity
Epilogue: Affect and colonialism
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], International relations [JPS], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]