| Popis: |
This chapter argues that contemporary accounts of Africa and International Criminal Law (ICL), divergent and acrimonious as may be, generally rely on a foreshortened history of this relationship, one that begins in the 1990s. In contrast, the chapter aims to show that ‘Africa’ and Africans were present at ICL’s inaugural moment in 1919, and that for much of the ensuing period ‘Africa’, Africans (and later African states) have been a ‘present absence’, to use Toni Morrison’s phrase, but present and represented nonetheless. Moreover, by tracing the story of Africa and Africans’ ‘present absence’ in ICL from since 1919, and the continued silencing thereof in historiography of the field today, the chapter aims to highlight three threads of critique—concerning ICL’s racial politics, imperial entanglements and ‘regime of representation’—that weave their way, at times together at times apart, from 1919 until the present. The chapter will end by re-considering the relationship between Africa and ICL in light of this longer history, arguing that when doing so the question becomes not whether ICL (or the ICC) might be a field that operates on neo-colonial and racist lines, but whether it might have been anything else (or might yet be). |
