The Individual-Centred Lens

Abstract

Using a frame analysis approach, this chapter focuses on one of the lenses through which judges and other legal practitioners interpret and understand past events, namely, the individual-centred lens. In international criminal adjudication, judges interpret and explain historical events primarily on the basis of individual agency. The individual-centred lens has the advantage of focusing on the role of particular individuals and thus facilitating the allocation of guilt on the basis of individual criminal responsibility. It would be incomplete, however, to describe this framework as exclusively focused on individual agency. This lens also contains constructs that allow for an understanding of historical events which, at least to some degree, extend to broader, collective agency. Nevertheless, historians, social scientists and some critical legal scholars have long been sceptical of the one-dimensional, individual-centred accounts of mass atrocities produced by ICTs, preferring instead more nuanced, multi-dimensional explanations. By focusing on the role of the individual, the individual-centred lens tends to de-emphasize other potential causes and explanations of mass atrocities. These would include broader environmental and structural causes, collective agency and colonial legacies. Examining such counternarratives is important as it exposes the outer limits of law’s lenses and the potential blind spots in the historical narratives that ICTs may produce. This chapter thus proceeds to illustrate one such counternarrative relating to colonial legacies.