Affective Justice: The Racialized Imaginaries of International Justice

Abstract

AbstractThis article contributes to contemporary debates in the anthropology of international justice by exploring how narratives about the International Criminal Court have been applied, understood, and contested. It traces the way that justice is materialized and made legible as a domain of practice that is predicated on deeply embedded racialized logics, which are themselves obscured in the process. The article focuses on how bodies, psychologies, and social imaginaries come together to produce the terms on which justice is materialized, disaggregated, ruptured, and made legible again. This is demonstrated through the introduction of “affective justice” as a framework for understanding justice as a social practice. Through several ethnographic examples, this article illuminates how embodied affects at the micro level underpin emotional regimes that are expressed in a diversity of social practices, which then have a collective capacity to influence notions of justice at the macro level. The examples illuminate how international justice assemblages interact to constitute affective justice in three interrelated domains: technocratic practices, psycho‐social embodied performances, and emotional regimes. When examined through anthropology of international justice lenses, each of these domains offers insights into how people draw upon racial imaginaries to produce and refashion justice through practice.