Justice Can't Prevail in a Vacuum

M. Kamari Clarke’s position, “Justice Can’t Prevail in a Vacuum,” felt the most persuasive and appealing to me because of its global view on how the ICC affects countries that have been colonized. She notes the importance of acknowledging the structural inequities in postcolonial Africa and how its impacts still persist to this day. Clarke makes it a point to say that while the ICC can be useful in some circumstances, we cannot overlook the type of justice we are trying to seek. In trying to seek justice, we cannot solely use law to address the inequities that many Western/global powers have been involved in. 

It’s likely that the approach to resolving conflicts/criminal justice in Africa and other colonized states cannot address the actual interests of the people that will be targeted. The people that are the ones that are impacted by the structural violence and inequities that come with resource extraction, enforced impoverishment, how wealth is distributed, etc. If the ICC wants to actually be part of global justice and say that they stand with providing justice for post-colonial states, they have to genuinely tackle the root and systemic causes of problems that arise in these states (the causes of war, how their people have been exploited, what resources are scarce, their financial or economic dependency on other states and organizations due to their historical origins of colonialism). But in order to do that, we must seriously redefine and analyze what criminalization means. We need to acknowledge how international financial institutions have in the past, and even now, contributed to insecurity in Africa and places similar.

In addition, we have to acknowledge the possible bias and racism that has become institutionalized in the ICC. Seeing that international law and the ICC were non-existent before World War II, outright genocides and colonialism have led to no accountability to Western powers that have committed such atrocities. As unfortunate as it may sound, colonialism and even colonialism still continue to frame and influence power dynamics within the ICC. The lack of approaches and solutions to attempt to address that kind of violence is troubling, especially seeing that these inequities are still contributed to by many global powers. So while the ICC may promote their “peace-making” organization, it actually continues to tolerate and accept the consequences of colonialism in post-colonial states.