The Immanent Frame

The International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrated its ten-year anniversary last summer. During its first decade of life, both the shadow and the actuality of international justice in the form of investigation, trial, and judgment have become a central feature of many conflicts, ongoing and concluded. Nearly a decade before the ICC opened its doors, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission attracted enormous global attention, and the moral sanction against racial violence at its core resonated across the globe. And yet, the concept of reconciliation that defined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has not occupied the same coveted (if also contested) international space that international justice—through trials—does today. If anything, advocates of justice and trials have subsumed reconciliation and truth seeking into a package of justice that has trials at its core. In his new book, Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott forces us to rethink this ordering.

On October 21, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe, India, and the United States met for a workshop, “Shared Sovereignty:  Rights, Religion and the Problem of Authority,” organized by Leslie Vinjamuri, Matt Nelson, Stephen Hopgood, and Rochana Bajpai.