African Criminals/African Victims: The Institutionalised Production of Cultural Narratives in International Criminal Law

Abstract

Since 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened 13 cases against African individuals who have been accused of crimes under the purview of the Rome Statute. This article critically examines the centrality of African subjects and African conflicts to the operation of the court. I argue that representations of criminality and victimhood, which define the construction of the African subject at the ICC, are crucial to the self-identity of the ICC through their discursive corroboration of the court’s cosmopolitan and liberal narratives. These representations are consequently institutionalised in the operation of the court, which encourages the repeated indictment of African subjects at the ICC and the reproduction of the criminal—victim dichotomy in the representation of African subjects in the discourse of international criminal law. Rather than presenting this trend as a simple phenomenon of the court’s mechanisms of referral, or alternatively suggesting that the court is engaged in a conscious neo-colonial subordination of African justice systems, I argue that the focus on crimes located in Africa during the court’s first decade is related to the particular discursive compatibility between representations of African criminals and victims and the cosmopolitan and liberal conceptions of international criminal law.