Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions

Series: 

Volume Editors: and
This book unlocks the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of justice for massive human rights abuses. Twenty-nine expert authors examine the dynamics of the five human senses in how atrocity is perceived, remembered, and condemned. This book is chockful of images. It serves up remarkably diverse content. It treks around the globe: from Pacific war crimes trials in the aftermath of the Second World War to Holocaust proceedings in contemporary Germany, France, and Israel; from absurd show trials in Communist Czechoslovakia to international courtrooms in Arusha, Phnom Penh, and The Hague. Readers embark on a journey that transcends myriad dimensions, including photographic representations of grandfatherly old torturers in Argentina, narco-trafficking in Mexico, colonialisation in India, disinformation and misinformation pixelated in cyberspace, environmental degradation in Cambodia, militarism in Northern Ireland, and civil rights activism in Atlanta. Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions reimagines what an atrocity means, reconsiders what drives the manufacture of law, and reboots the role of courtrooms and other mechanisms in the pursuit of justice. It unveils how law translates sensory experience into its procedures and institutions, and how humanistic inputs shape perceptions of right and wrong. This book thereby offers a refreshing primer on the underappreciated role of aesthetics, time, and emotion in the world of law.

Drumbl and Fournet have done us all a great service in knitting together – in a single, powerfully imagined, volume – these essays about how we might experience the institutionalisation of judgment in atrocity trials.
– Gerry Simpson, Professor of Public International Law, LSE Law School (London).

Contributions to this volume offer a unique opportunity to delve into law’s hidden landscape using the primary reality of the five senses.
– Marina Aksenova, Assistant Professor in Comparative and International Criminal Law, IE Law School (Madrid).

Prices from (excl. shipping):

$297.00
Add to Cart
Mark A. Drumbl (J.S.D., 2002, Columbia University), is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director of the Transnational Law Institute at Washington and Lee University.

Caroline Fournet, (Ph.D., 2003, Faculty of Law, University of Leicester) is Professor of Law at the University of Exeter, UK.
“This book asks a remarkable and deceptively simple question: How do we hear, taste, smell, feel, and see justice? Mark Drumbl and Caroline Fournet have done us all a great service in knitting together – in a single, powerfully imagined, volume – these essays about how we might experience the institutionalisation of judgment in atrocity trials. Reams have been written on the intellectual, juridical and ethical response to war crimes or crimes against humanity. This unusual – singular – book describes our emotional and aesthetic relations to these terrible wrongs and the forms of politico-legal reckonings that attempt to come to terms with them.”
Gerry Simpson, Professor of Public International Law, LSE Law School (London).

“Law is inherently multidimensional. It is not just an analytical tool for achieving social order, accountability or reconciliation, but it is also one of the filters through which reality is perceived and processed. The initial absorption happens naturally through the senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Contributions to this volume offer a unique opportunity to delve into law’s hidden landscape using the primary reality of the five senses. The entire volume makes surgically precise incision on the body of international law as we know it.”
Marina Aksenova, Assistant Professor in Comparative and International Criminal Law, IE Law School (Madrid).
Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Introduction
Mark A. Drumbl and Caroline Fournet

Part 1
Shows and Cases: Showcasing(s) in the Courtroom
1 Optical Allusions, Indecency, and Injustice in the Trial of Japanese War Criminals
  James Burnham Sedgwick

2 ‘The Show Must Go On’: The Trials and Tribulations of Ludmila Brožová-Polednová
  Barbora Holá

3 Atrocity Then, Trial Now: The Aesthetics, Acoustics, and Visualities of Prosecuting Oskar Gröning
  Caroline Fournet and Mark A. Drumbl

4 Performing Justice: The Trial of Bruno Dey and Its Protagonists
  Moritz Vormbaum and Jara Streuer

Part 2
Translating the Senses into Law and Judgment
5 Does Music Create Killers?: The Role of Music in the Commission of Violent Crimes
  Agnieszka Jachec-Neale

6 The Stench of Death: The Olfactory of Genocide in International Criminal Trials
  Carola Lingaas

7 The Sound and Taste of Atrocities: From Cambodia in the 1970s to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s
  Audrey Fino

8 The Age-Impunity Rhetoric in Trials for Crimes Committed during the Argentine Genocide (1975–1983)
  Adriana Taboada and Lior Zylberman

Part 3
Filtering the Sensory: Language, Evidence, Culture, and Procedure
9 Sounds of Atrocity Prosecutions: Intersubjective Interpreting as a Key Ingredient for Effective and Fair Trials in Multilingual and Multicultural War Crimes Courtrooms
  Dragana Spencer

10 The Mind’s Eye: The Invisibility of Culture in Individual Criminal Responsibility
  Vera Piovesan

11 Versions of the Truth: Disinformation and Prosecuting Atrocities
  Emma J. Breeze

12 Putting Things in Play: The Spectacle of Criminal Justice
  Sebastián Machado

Part 4
Staging, Re-enactment, Film
13 A Trial without a Defendant: The Mock Trial of Dr. Josef Mengele in Jerusalem
  Yehudit Dori-Deston

14 Reconstructing the Crime: Memory, Re-enactments, and Space in Atrocity Investigations
  Maria Elander

15 Staging Atrocity Prosecutions: Re-enactments and Pre-enactments of Atrocity Trials in Theatre
  Hanna Luise Kroll and Kerstin Wilhelms

16 Entertaining Selectivity: ‘Narcos’, Netflix, and International Crimes
  Javier S. Eskauriatza

Part 5
Sensibility Divides: North–South, Imperial–Colonized, State–Society
17 Hearing Voices: Victim and Witness Demographics at the International Criminal Court
  Annika Jones

18 Ugly Atrocities, Cathartic Prosecutions: International Criminal Law as Emotional Salve
  Randle C. DeFalco

19 Appropriating Sovereignty through Trials: British Imperial Expansion and Staging of Oppression through Law
  Aman Kumar

20 ‘Protecting the Environment Is Not Illegal’: Ecological Activism, the Visualities of Law and Justice, and the Land Concession Crisis in Cambodia
  Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier

Part 6
Reflections on Aesthetics and Methods
21 Veteran Mobilisation, Prosecutions, and the Contested Legacy of the Past in Northern Ireland: Deconstructing the ‘Witch-Hunt’ Narrative
  Kevin Hearty and Kieran McEvoy

22 Negative Aesthetic Experiences of Prosecuting the Barely Alive
  Shannon Fyfe

23 Elaborating on the ‘Asymmetry’ of Prosecuting Aged Defendants for Atrocities: A ‘Multimodal-Visual Argumentation’ Perspective
  Konstantinos P. Tsinas

24 Atrocity Prosecutions, Cultural Representation, and the Invisible Older Individual
  Kirsten J. Fisher

25 The Sights, Sounds, and Silences of International Law During the Cold War
  Mark A. Drumbl

Index

Readers interested in public international law, criminal law, transitional justice, memorialisation of atrocities, theatre and staging, legal history, aesthetics, linguistics, and philosophy.
  • Collapse
  • Expand