Chapter 18
In: Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions
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Abstract
Rightly or wrongly, atrocity crimes are associated with the production of spectacles of violence. They are loud, ugly, and generally offend our sensibilities. Exposure to such horrific spectacles is a viscerally unpleasant experience. This chapter considers how these unpleasant sensory experiences may influence questions of what purpose(s) and constituencies atrocity prosecutions serve. Much attention has been paid to local, directly affected populations, especially victims, as the primary group whose interests are addressed in post-atrocity justice-seeking efforts, including criminal prosecutions. However, these local, directly affected communities do not exercise significant control over the workings of international criminal justice institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). Rather, a cadre of loosely affiliated technocratic elites and their governments, primarily hailing from the Global North, collectively steer the course of international criminal justice, including what atrocity crimes are prosecuted. Publics clustered in the Global North also exercise a considerable amount of indirect power in determining what situations are recognized and prioritized both in domestic courts and international institutions such as the ICC. Individuals committed to the rallying cries of ‘accountability’ and ‘anti-impunity’ may even feel a degree of indirect responsibility; an uncomfortable faint notion that their privilege is to some extent intertwined with distant violence committed mostly within postcolonial nations in the Global South. This chapter considers whether one of the unacknowledged functions atrocity prosecutions may serve is a cathartic one, namely, a process whereby supporters of ‘global justice’ may expiate some of the accumulated negative emotions triggered by their exposure to the horrors of distant atrocity violence. Indeed, providing (or permitting) cathartic release for those troubled by exposure to atrocity violence may be one function atrocity prosecutions actually serve quite well.