 Can you start the recording? Great. Welcome, everybody, to this webinar hosted by the Center on Conflict, Rights, and Justice at SOAS. My name's Phil Clark. I'm a professor of international politics at SOAS, and I also co-direct the center that's hosting this event. It's fantastic to see so many people attending, and I'm looking down the list of names. As I was just saying to Layla, I can see many of you are not based in London, not even based in the UK. So this is one of the few virtues of this virtual space is being able to attract an audience from all around the world. So welcome to all of you, wherever you might be at the moment. Let me introduce Layla. She's very familiar to most of you, I'm sure, so she probably doesn't need an introduction, but I'm going to give her an introduction nonetheless. Layla Oryx, a lecturer in law at Queen Mary University of London. Her work really focuses on gender dimensions in lots of different fields, international criminal law, issues around terrorism as well as counter-terrorism. She's got a PhD in criminology from Oxford, where she also convened Oxford Transitional Justice Research. In between her PhD and then starting in her position at Queen Mary, she worked for UNDP in Lebanon. And I'm sure that some of what Layla talks about today is going to draw both on her academic background but also on her stint with the UN. She's currently finishing up a book manuscript at the moment to be submitted to Oxford University Press. And I guess that's the basis of much of what she'll present today. The title of Layla's presentation is the Blame Cascade, Justice for Victims at the International Criminal Court. Layla's gonna present for about 45 or 50 minutes and then that'll leave us lots and lots of time to discuss with all of you. So without further ado, Layla, it's a real pleasure for CCRJ and for SOAS to have you very much looking forward to your presentation on this very important but also very timely topic. So thanks very much, Layla. Thank you so much, Phil, for the introduction and for the invitation. I mean, as you're saying, I'm writing up the book at the moment so it would be really helpful to have some feedback. So the title of my presentation is the Blame Cascade, As You Said, Justice for Victims at the ICC. And I want to start by reading out an excerpt from my last fieldwork trip to Northern Uganda which was in July and August 2019 which now feels like years ago even though it's barely a year. And this paper will mainly draw on that particular fieldwork trip. And this fieldwork, so this diary, these observations come from an ICC outreach event at San Monica Locational School for Girls in Gulu, in Uganda on the 17th of July, 2019. Happy Justice Day to all of you, to all of us, the champions of justice, the champions of accountability, the champions of the protection of human rights. You deserve that. So please respond, happy Justice Day. The ICC's outreach officer greets the crowd. Happy Justice Day, the audience responds. Thank you. Today is the 21st anniversary of the court. The court is now fully functional. A big blue banner hangs over a podium in the hall. It reads, public dialogue in commemoration of International Justice Day. The outreach officer points to the banner explaining, the theme of the anniversary is humanity against crimes. To achieve global peace and justice, humanity needs to be united. Peace is linked to justice. By now, we all know that without justice, there can be no sustainable peace. Then there's time for questions. One woman jumps up, she's a victim and this is the first time she's attending an outreach meeting. She complains, the perpetrators are walking free. They're being protected by the government, by the victims' fend for themselves. She was abducted as a young girl by the Lord Resistance Army and came back from the bush with children. She married, but her marriage didn't last because of all that she went through. A priest from Kidgum exclaims, they should change the law so that the suspect has to carry the burden of proof. The ICC's outreach representative retorts calmly, but assertively, on when is innocent until proven guilty. He who accuses must prove. Unfortunately, the law is like that. That is the law. You are not the judge, you're not the policeman. They're institutions to enforce law and order so that we don't take the law into our own hands. After the expert panel comes the panel of victims and victims' representatives. In fact, there's only one victim on the panel, Betty from Lucobi. The ICC's representative admonishes her. We know the terrible things. Don't talk about them. It would take a whole day. And so Betty, simultaneously instructed to speak and not to speak, does not talk about her experiences as a victim. Instead, she talks about the impact of the court on her community. Crimes have gone down in our community because people now fear accountability. Justice is an aspect of the future. We show the screenings of the ICC's trial to our children and we tell them, if you misbehave, you will be held to account. You will be sent to the ICC. Our children will have a better future. The ICC's outreach officer goes on to explain victim participation in the ongoing case. The prosecutor selects victim's testimony based on the relevance of the story. If you are harmed on the 31st of January, rather than the 30th of January, you might fall outside the scope of the charges. She continues, it's a handful of victims who will benefit. We need to manage expectations. It is the law. Yet victims can still participate in traditional justice, amnesty, reconciliation, and nation building. First civil society colleague adds, ultimately the greatest responsibility for justice lies with the government of Uganda. And this paper today, I want to look at the ICC's victims' engagement in Kenya and Uganda. And sitting in outreach meetings and victims' meetings, such as the one that I just cited, I often wondered why people in Kenya and Uganda engage in justice processes that offer so little. Why do they come to the court's meetings and what does that engagement with the court do to them? And I will first look at how the literature makes sense of the ICC's victims' engagement and then offer an alternative interpretation through ideology theory. And I argue that the court's victims' engagement works by creating, by interpolating its own victims. And I will illustrate this process of ideological subject formation through the notion of the blame cascade. So I use this term, ICC's victims' engagement. I use it rather loosely to refer both to the court's outreach work in its situation countries, so community outreach, media outreach, and outreach to local stakeholders, as well as more specifically looking at victim participation, reparation, and assistance, not in the courtroom, but in the situation countries. And it's important here to know that the ICC is the first international criminal justice institution that provides victims with rights to participation and reparation. And so that's quite a novel feature in international criminal law. And for Uganda, it's important to know that while the court started working in Uganda already in 2005, issuing arrest warrants against five commanders of the Lord Resistance Army, it was only 10 years later, in late 2015, that one of those commanders, Dominic Ongwen, unexpectedly landed in the custody of the ICC. And now we are pretty close to the verdict in the case. So the literature is obviously very complex on the ICC's victims' engagement and very rich, but I think we can distinguish between three different perspectives, which I call the legal perspective, the critical legal perspective, and the socio-legal perspective. And the legal perspective focuses very much on victims' rights to participation and reparation and what they mean for the court's due process and how they might affect the defendant's rights to a fair trial. And I think this debate is by now quite well rehearsed and I won't engage with it in this paper. The critical legal perspective largely sees victims as imaginary or passive figure in international criminal law that is merely used by the court to raise money, to rally support and polish its image. And they argue that flesh and blood victims are actually cut out of the ICC's processes through the juridification of victimhood, but that also means that they have perhaps paid limited attention to the court's everyday victims' practices, what the court actually does on an everyday basis. The socio-legal literature, on the other hand, has engaged with the question of how the court relates to affected communities and victims, but it does so mainly through the concept of legitimacy. And while scholars disagree on whether international criminal courts are legitimate or not, they do increasingly agree that courts can work on their legitimacy by informing victims, by including victims, by listening to them, and that's of course what the court is trying to do with its outreach function. And in my paper today, I want to problematize the concept of legitimacy, and specifically two premises that I think underpin the legitimacy paradigm. The first premise is that there is something such as a legitimate power. Legitimacy as a concept works as a justification and rationalization of power. It assumes that we need institutions in modern life to work as societies. And this goes back to Weber who argued that power is seen as legitimate if it is either legal, it corresponds to legal procedure, it is traditional, it's in line with traditional values, or it is exercised by charismatic authority. And we can already see the ambiguity here of the legitimacy concept, because on the one hand, it is portrayed as a perception. This is how people see it. They regard institutions as legitimate if they correspond to legal, traditional, or charismatic criteria. On the other hand, it's also portrayed as an objective quality because we already know what people's perceptions are. They care about legal, traditional, and charismatic qualities. And so a lot of the scholarship then basically proceeds by effectively asking people which institutions they find more legitimate and that then becomes the basis for legitimacy. But I will focus in this paper more on the second premise of the legitimacy paradigm, which is that these courts engage with subjects who are already fully formed by local culture or other forms of socialization. So the idea is that basically the values and beliefs and the subject of people is already formed. And so when they engage with the courts, they are quite static and passive. And we might be able to persuade them by rendering the court closer to their values and beliefs, but their subject as such is prior to an independent of the court. And in this paper, we have to challenge this idea of a one-off production of subjects by showing how subjects are continuously constituted and reconstituted through powerful institutions. And I argue that the court's victims engagement works not as the legitimacy model assumes by informing, including and listening to victims, but by creating its own victim subjects. And this brings me back to the outreach events that I talked about at the beginning. The courts practitioners are usually quick to point out that outreach is not advocacy. A senior registry official told me, we always say we're not trying to persuade individual victims to apply for participation or reparations. Our role is to explain and to facilitate. And indeed, if we think back to the event, the outreach officer didn't really try to persuade people of the court's merits. Instead, I think she did something which was arguably more effective. She designated affected communities as the court's natural subjects. You are the champions of justice. Rather than being persuaded, we are being celebrated. And we know that we celebrate before we know why we celebrate. We learned that this is a happy day, to celebrate us, humanity against crimes and that we deserve that day. And this is all established in the first few seconds of the outreach officer's speech. Instead of explaining, the outreach officer is naming people. You are the victims. This is the law. You are the judge. You are not the policeman. And she's allocating our roles. And this is exactly what Althusser meant with the concept of interpolation. He showed how ideology works by creating its own subjects. And he chose an everyday scene to make his point. A police officer on the street who calls, hey, you there! And by turning your head, you have become interpolated. You have recognized that this call was addressed to you and to you only and you have responded. You have become a subject of the law. So for Althusser, ideology works not through violence and also not through persuasion, but simply by calling people names, victims, intermediaries. But responding to a name is still a learned process. And as such, it can also be unlearned. New names supersede old names. Keeping people named, keeping people in ideology requires constant repetition and reenactment. And this is something that I want to show today. In fact, when I talked to the victims' lawyers in Uganda, their concern was much less to overcome victims' resistance to the court or even their indifference to the court. And the issue was also not to make them understand how the court works or the legal technicalities. Their main issue was how to make them remember. As one victim's assistant told me, the victims come to the meeting, they understand and the next day they have forgotten. So every time the victim's lawyers came back to meet their clients, they had to start from scratch. People forget quickly. Forgetting might even be an act of resistance. People unlearn quickly to make space for other roles that might feel more comfortable. And what is crucial here is that the practice or the role precedes the subject. So in Judith Butler's words, the act that one does, the act that one performs is in a sense an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. The act has been going on before the victims arrived on the scene, even though the victims are supposedly the rational for the court. Why would there be a court if there are no victims? But it works exactly the other way around. The court is there first and it produces the victims. And I think what Alphys' ideology theory does here, it effectively reshuffles the norm persuasion and the legitimacy model that underlies a lot of the literature. So the norm persuasion model assumes that there is a subject first, that subject has a consciousness, that consciousness produces beliefs and norms, and that leads them to decisions and practices. For example, coming to the court's meeting, participating in the court's trial, and the court intervenes at the level of beliefs and norms by either trying to persuade people that it is in line with their norms or trying to show that it can be closer to their norms or trying to change them. And in Althys' third, this is now reversed. In Althys' third, it's the institution that is first, the court, the church, the school, and that institution produces the subject through its practices and rituals. And then those practices produce a consciousness, I'm a victim, I'm a woman, and that then leads to beliefs and ideas. And he gives the example of Pascal who said, kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe. So you pray first, and then you will believe. As Raymond puts it, whereas the believers imagine their faith to be coming from the inside out, they're actually moved by a complex ideological system that moves from the outside in. So it's the practices that produce the believer. And of course, in the ideological subject model, the court intervenes much earlier. It is there before the victims are there effectively. And on that basis, I want to argue today, I want to identify four mechanisms of subject creation that I saw in the court's victims' engagement in Northern Uganda. And I call them first spotlighting, second learning, third schooling, and fourth blaming. And my starting point was an interview with one of the cultural leaders in Northern Uganda who talked about the community's reception of the ICC. And he was in fact the only of my informants who saw the ICC as an ideological tool that works through creating victims. So he said that the community's investment, their attention in Northern Uganda is brought on more by external interest in the matter. He argued that if ongoing had come back, like the rest of the Lord Resistance Army commanders came back, by now there would be nothing going on. Because of course, the war in Northern Uganda, it has been now 10 years. And it was a brutal war where 90% of people were victims in one way or another. So he felt that if there was not that external interest, the distribution of victim and perpetrator labels would by now be forgotten among the people. So he felt that all that is happening now is happening because of external interest. But of course, to link the interest to the local context, the court needed to create the victims to bring that alive effectively. And that leads me to the first mechanism of subject creation, which I call spotlighting. And external interest and engagement is key to do spotlighting, to throw the spotlight on people. And the ICC creates that spotlighting effect through its outreach program. I would argue, and I think here, I slightly disagree with Phil Clark's notion of distant justice. I would argue that the ICC has gone much more local in recent years trying to create local ownership of the court. Of course, the court has very few trials, only one in Uganda, but it does engage millions of people. Millions of people have listened to the court's radio and TV broadcasts. Tens of thousands have attended town hall meetings, public viewings of the Ongwen trial, and local stakeholder meetings. And hundreds of thousands have been engaged by the trust fund for victims assistance programs. I mean, of course, in the bigger picture, that's still not very much, but I think it does something. And I should also say here that, of course, the ICC did have a rough start when it began working in Northern Uganda, particularly in the Charlie sub-region. Back then, it's arrest warrants were seen as a threat to the ongoing peace negotiations between the Ugandan government and the resistance army, particularly between 2006 and 2008. But I do think that the situation is rather different right now because the LIA is not seen any longer as a threat to the peace, but also because the court did ramp up its community engagement with the start of the Ongwen trial in 2016. In fact, I would say that the ICC, after a long marginalization and silence around Northern Uganda, the ICC now once again cast the global spotlight on Northern Uganda dramatizing people's suffering. And that matters because it radiates from a place of power and promises recognition. So for example, in a focus group discussion I held in Likudi, one woman said, I want the community to be heard, but she wasn't looking to the government, but for outside help, the outside friends, the world should come and help us, they should listen to us. And of course, that also suggests that the hope for material support from the outside friends is part of the reason why people engage with the court. And that brings me to the second mechanism which I call learning. So spotlighting is not exclusive. The spotlight is sort of thrown generously. Everyone is celebrated as a champion of justice. Everyone is recognized as a victim of the war in Northern Uganda. But from this larger audience, a subset is learned to engage more exclusively with the court as designated victims or intermediaries. And money does play a bit of a role in that. I mean, for example, if you attend local stakeholder meetings, they take place at hotel or conference venues and offer good food and transport reimbursement. And they also offer the prospect of potentially becoming an intermediary for the court. So that means that, for example, you help mobilizing people to come to the court's events, to the public viewings, and you get a more substantial site payment for that. And it's a bit similar for victim participants. So victims' meetings with their lawyers provide some food and transport reimbursement of a couple of pounds. One field assistant in Kenya told me victims come to get reimbursement, tea and lunch, and to see some friends. And she felt that this was a bit the end of the story of my question, in fact. And of course, victims also participate in the trial because they hope to receive reparations. So money plays a role, but the court also uses steps to furnish the notion of a deserving victim who doesn't want money. And so one of the victims, lawyers, for example, told me, she said, and so they, the victims have also internalized this idea that if they say they want money, not all of them, but some of them have internalized this idea. So they don't want to say that they want compensation because that will cheapen their suffering somehow because people will say they're only in it for the money. Where I think like, frankly, your entire life has been ruined. Like you can't even begin to quantify that. And if you actually did want some money to make up for the fact that you haven't had the education you would have had, you're living in inadequate housing, you've got massive mental health issues which you can't afford to pay a psychologist for, what would be wrong asking for money for that? If someone smashes into my car, it's thought to be normal that I would ask for money for that. And yet if someone smashes into your life, you're not meant to ask for money, it's so strange. But I see that that at the court all the time. And I really have a lot of respect for the clients who stand up and say, no, in Uganda, the clients are really clear that they want material individual compensation. So in the moral calculation of international criminal justice, the worse the harm you suffered, the more inappropriate a demand for monetary compensation seems to be. In fact, the court strangely over-regulates even the most basic provisions for victims, transport reimbursement has been cut. And when I was in Kenya, a victim's lawyer told me that he was really outraged. He told me that the court's support section had suggested that only those victims who travel from very far to the meeting should get a cup of tea and some lunch at the meeting. So there's a tendency at the court to create moral panics about fake or fraudulent victims who access the court. And that's also part of the reason why the victim category is very exclusive and well-policed. In Uganda, for example, only 4,100 victims out of potentially 50,000 victims have been admitted to participate in the trial. And it's not clear whether this process will be opened up again for reparation. And there are reasons of judicial economy for that, but there's also that kind of moral arguments that real victims should already have come forward by now. And so victims are taught not to want money or expect reparations and what the court calls expectation management. And this brings me to the third mechanism of subject creation, which is schooling. And so when I accompanied one of the victim's lawyers in Kenya on a victim's registration mission in 2014, I was struck how much the meetings between the lawyers and the victims felt like a school class. In each class, the teachers repeat what was learned in the previous class and ask pupils to feed the knowledge back to them in their own words. And then of course the first thing that victims had to learn is not to act reparations. And one victim's lawyer told me, we have to discuss reparations every time. And it's funny now because if you have a new person who has not attended the rest of the meeting and they ask a question about that, someone within the meeting who has been attending can get up and respond. We give them the opportunity to respond on behalf of the community. And they've come to appreciate it now, but we feel like it's something we have to say anytime we're discussing reparations. We have to make sure there's a clear explanation before we discuss it, so that there is no expectation. But even more than that, victims' expectations are revealed to be foolish. So one victim's lawyer said, we've tried to challenge them, the victims, in many respects. When people say they want reparations, we've asked what kind of reparations? And they say, we want a school. We say, okay, a school. So if the school is built and put for your community, are you ready to buy school uniforms? Are you ready to pay the teachers? And of course, it has gotten people thinking twice, saying, okay, maybe it's not a good idea. So yes, you have to really think about these things. And you must remember, of course, that reparations can only come if there's a conviction. Without a conviction, there isn't much the court can do. So victims are exercised of expectations and responsibilities for reparations by their lawyers. How can you ask for a school if you cannot pay the teachers? The expectations are not only constructed as being too high, but also as being a bit sort of muddled. They didn't really think it through. Victims' lawyers also share the teacher's frustration about their pupil's inability to remember. Even good pupils keep asking the same questions. They don't do their homework. And one of the field assistants I spoke to, she attributed this to what might be called the amnesia of poverty. So she said, but the communities are crazy one because look at the poverty rate, the majority of victims are really poor and that makes them not to put so much energy into following this trial or even sharing information at home. And also the time that they should sit and update themselves might not be there. From mornings in the garden until the evening, somebody's still in the kitchen and cooking and the following morning you're back in the garden and it's crazy. So by the time the team comes back next month, you would have forgotten totally everything. There are people that you ask and they have forgotten, not that they had not mastered, but they would need a click or something like that. And so after the same questions were asked over and over again, the victims' lawyers decided on a new schooling technique which is to role play the court. So we had to act as in role play the court. The judges sit here, you sit here, you are the victim's counsel, now you're OTP, now you're defense and your client is here. Now the three of you are the judges. So this is our answer, this is their role. But of course role playing the court ultimately reifies their role as victims. People, victims are put in their place. Ultimately, you're not the judge, you are the victim. This is your role. Embodied knowledge lasts longer. Victims constantly have to reenact their roles. Calling their names is not enough. And this brings me to the last mechanism of subject creation, which I call blaming. Now I should say here of course that victim participation is voluntary. No one has to participate. And the court doesn't have any formal power over victims in the same way that they would have over a defendant. And yet there's something about the privileged category of victim participant that creates expectations. So if you are among the 4,000 victims granted the right to participation by the court out of 50,000 potential victims, if you agreed to participate, if the court pays for your lawyer, you have a duty to participate. As a one victims lawyer, when I asked her what her main challenges are in doing this work, she said the victims still don't understand fully how it works and even what's expected of them. At the beginning we had clients who were telling us that they're tired of attending meetings. But one would expect that this is something that someone who has chosen to participate would understand. This is the expectation. This is their duty. So this is something we had to go through over and over again and tell them step by step. Do you remember when you came in to apply? This is what participation means. This is what is expected of you to share your views. The trial cannot go on without you giving us your views. It becomes pointless if we are to work without you. We only work with what you've told us. It took time. And I want, so and of course from duty there's only a small step to blame. And I want to connect us here to a broader debate in victimology and transitional justice on the notion of blame. So victimologists have long argued that criminal justice works through the binary of the evil perpetrator versus the innocent victim. And then the law comes in as a savior sort of trying to rescue or trying to revenge the innocent victim by blaming and by punishing the evil perpetrator. And this debate also has been at the heart of the Ongren trial because Ongren of course was himself abducted as a child and then indoctrinated and brutalized by the Lord Resistance Army. So he was a victim as well as a perpetrator of the crimes against humanity and war crimes that he has been charged with at the ICC. And Sander observes, for example, that one of the complexities of Ongren's case is that his victim perpetrator's status challenges the binary coding of international criminal law, which as Mark Drumble has argued derives its energy from and in turn disseminates polarities of guilt or innocence, capacity or incapacity, adult or child and victim or perpetrator. Yet I would argue that this kind of fuzzy ambiguous figure of the victim perpetrator is convenient rather than inconvenient for international criminal justice because it reinforces the image of the always already blame-worthy victim and depoliticizes violence. The Global South emerges in this imagery as a cauldron of violent people and the court's function is to discipline and to mold violent people, both victims and perpetrators. And you can see this a bit in the trust fund for victims assistance programs. So for example, as part of its assistance to victims, the trust fund funds peace schools, which are supposed to teach communities how to find solutions to the root causes of conflict in a way that is nonviolent, which of course also suggests that the victims are somehow responsible for the violence that they have suffered and they just have to learn to be peaceful. And so victims are really judged as marches perpetrators. And I think it reinforces the idea of the victims as inherently suspicious. And I think that's an idea that also comes out with the money issue. This idea of victims just want money, they're just in it for the money. And of course that's important because it helps to justify their unceremonious abandonment by the court if charges are not confirmed or perpetrators not convicted. So I do think that blaming matters in the court's victims engagement, but it doesn't work through the binary of the evil perpetrator versus the innocent victim, but I argue it works through a cascade. So the judges blame the victims lawyers, the victims lawyers, the intermediaries, and the intermediaries finally blame the victims. So of course the judges wouldn't lash out against the victims directly. That would be tasteless. And also the victims are far away. Plus the court does want people to own its processes at all the different levels. They don't want to be a foreign and removed institution. So what they do at every level is they recruit people to work for the court. And through that the people become, they become blame subjects. The blame is pushed down from the powerful to the powerless. And you can see that, for example, in the discourse, when I interviewed people at different levels at the court, the judges, for example, this is an interview with a judge who talked about victim participation and how it led to the emergence of a new case of lawyers who make big money out of the suffering of the people. To be a victim's lawyer is an easy job. And it's not the same as being a defense lawyer or a prosecutor. And basically they're just like sitting in the courtroom earning 30,000 or 20,000 euros a month for this work. And something similar happened a level down when I talked to the victims' officers at the court who were worried about gatekeeping through intermediaries. So one victim's officer, for example, said, that always really worried me about this. People who were farmers or were businessmen or whatever are seeing an opportunity to just get involved on the development train and become this kind of pseudo-helping Musungu people reach their little village as if that's an actual career. And of course, in each case, the accusation could be leveled back. Is the judge who makes 200,000 US dollars a year tax-free and sues the court for a higher salary so different from the victim's lawyer sitting in the courtroom? And aren't we all making a career out of pseudo-helping victims? And that, of course, includes us researchers as well. Isn't the difference simply that the accuser benefits from this more than the accused? And I think here the local comes in as something that helps the court to... The local does important blame work for the court. Going local is a way for the court to share blame and ultimately absolve itself from blame. And from the very beginning intermediaries were blamed for a lot that was wrong with the court, especially in the court's first trial, the Lubanga trial. And the court hasn't really changed its work with intermediaries since then because I think because also because they're quite convenient scapegoats because they are a bit more powerful than victims so it is less dubious to blame them but not powerful enough to strike back. And I think the blame cascades captures quite well how by shifting blame gradually down through the multiple layers for which the court works. It also means that at the end the blame accumulates at the bottom and of course this is where the victims are. And because the intermediaries also don't want to sit on the blame, they also pass the buck on. And I interviewed quite a few different types of intermediaries in Northern Uganda ranging from local NGO officers, cultural and religious leaders, teachers, and there was a very uniform narrative around or like a very uniform narrative what is going wrong in Northern Uganda. And this was a lot about blame. It was a lot about that the victims have to stop crying and they have to go back to toil on the fields. And I should say here that if you look at those quotes so basically their concern was that the war in Northern Uganda obviously massively disrupted the local social order because the majority of people were forcibly displaced so they were displaced by the government and they had to live in camps which some of my informants called concentration camps which supposedly served the protection of the people from the attacks by the Lord Resistance Army but they also were a way of cutting the Lord Resistance Army of any type of local support or resources. And the intermediaries I talked to their concern was that this has really disrupted the social order and that the young people, the youth, they went, people back then weren't able to go to their field so they became dependent on food aid provided by the World Food Programme and the idea is that basically the young people, the youth have now become lazy and they're not willing to go and dig anymore and they just want to eat freely. So one cultural leader when I asked him what his main priority is, he said, my priority is that I cannot just lament that these things happened and now we have an excuse. I try to do community outreach, they, the youth begin to understand come easy is not possible, you have to work hard. And our socioeconomic system is based on the land. People who grew up in the camps don't know how to tear the land. They have to go back to the basics. But of course, what the intermediaries had in common that I talked to was that they were in fact not working on the land, they were doing different types of professionalized labor either as cultural or religious leaders or as NGO workers. So I think that if, I think if there is a, if blame works through a binary here, it's a rather different one. And I think it's the binary between intellectual or professional labor and manual labor. And that's also, in fact, Marx and Engels argued that this division between manual and intellectual labor is at the very heart of the formation of ideology. So this is how ideology came about in the first place. And Riemann, Riemann argued that what explains the emergence of religion as an ideology out of the magic and natural mysticism of pre-state societies, according to Marx, is not an inverted consciousness, but rather the formation of a specialized priesthood that is set free from manual labor. So priests were the first ideologists and ideologies served to explain why they had to think and pray while others had to work on the field. And I think that that brings me to a broader point about the blame cascade because it seems to be very much constructed around work. So at each level, the main accusation is that the people below don't work enough or well enough. And professional labor counts here much more than any type of manual labor. So even though the victims work all day from morning to late in the evening, and that's also why they forget about the trial and the type of subsistence work, caring and social reproduction work that they do doesn't really count. So the victims ultimately become the emblem of laziness. I think this is a good time to ask, why does it matter? Why does this notion of the ideological subject matter? Why, what does it add to read that material through ideology theory? And I think it does matter. And I just want to reiterate that the point of the ideological subject is that ideology works not so much by influencing beliefs, but by forming subjects. And then those subjects are continuously constituted and reconstituted through institutions. And that of course also means that there is no prior authentic innocent true self with values and beliefs that we can easily fall back on. And I think that also might provide a slightly different perspective on some of the debates that we have in transitional justice. For example, the old debate of whether the ICC as an international legal institution is more legitimate than for example, local justice rituals. And I think because once we look at this debate through the lens of ideology theory, the differences between the ICC and the local cultural or religious institutions become a bit less pronounced. They are both top-down mechanisms. They're both top-down institutions that work by creating their own subjects, which also then makes the question of which one is more legitimate, a bit difficult to answer. And in fact, when I was watching the ICC's victim participation video on YouTube, they have this video where they represent how they see victim participation. And after that, I watched a video by the Atchali Cultural Institution on the Matu Uput Atchali traditional justice system. I was struck how similar the visuals were because in both you had the experts that were either legal experts or traditional experts who taught victims how to play their role. So to conclude, I think ideology theory, I think it can help us to move a bit beyond the critique of the court or the question, is it legitimate? Is it more legitimate than other types of institutions? And it can help us to better understand the effects of the court's everyday victims practices because whether we like the court or not, it is already working on the ground. It's already doing something. And I think it's interesting to understand what exactly happens there. And while legitimacy assumes the existence of passive subjects that accept governance as long as it adheres to certain principles, for example, it's legal, it's traditional or charismatic, ideology wants much more from people. It wants and creates very active victim subjects who come to the court's meetings, who participate in the trials, who act out an identity as a victim, who speak a legal language, who make legal demands. And the court needs those active victims to reproduce the institution over time. And it creates them by going local. But of course, in that act of victims engagement, the court also shifts the blame to its subjects. So the victim becomes the accused and the intermediary becomes the comparador. And that also means that failure of the ICC's multiple justice promises. And of course, we saw in the outreach meeting at the beginning that there's this promise of sustainable peace, of economic development. Most of these promises are probably going to fail, but the court shares the failure with the different subjects it engages on the ground. And beyond this institutional self-reproduction, I think it's also important to highlight that the court is also part of the reproduction of a global capitalist order. And we can see this in the type of victim assistance programs of the trust fund for victims. For example, they fund vocational training programs and microcredit and loan projects to help victims become local entrepreneurs or waged workers. And many of these programs in fact also target women who are supposed to transform from SGBB victim to an entrepreneurial wife and mother. And this brings me back to Betty's comment at the outreach meeting. Betty was the only victim on the victims panel. And she said, if you recall this interesting comment where she said, crimes have gone down in our community because people now fear accountability. Justice is an aspect of the future. We show the screenings of the ICC's trial to our children and tell them, if you misbehave, you will be held to account. You will be sent to the ICC. And I think Betty might be right that one of the most important things that the ICC is doing, probably not consciously, is in order Uganda is to shore up the local order. And that was in general, in my sense, also talking to religious and cultural leaders that they were actually fine or were quite happy with the ICC's role in that kind of law and order work in Northern Uganda and the disciplining of the children and the disciplining of the youth into playing their roles. And you can see here how Betty really positions the court as a disciplinary mechanism that forms people from a very early age, even in the most intimate family setting. And now I should say here that, of course, of course there's also resistance, people don't just accept their subjecthood in the way these institutions would like. And this paper hasn't really focused, or hasn't focused at all on resistance, but I think we see some traces of resistance. For example, victims constantly forgetting what they are taught. And I think that could be, that's probably like one of those weapons of the week which erode power without openly confronting it. And in my book, I want to have a whole chapter on resistance where I also look particularly at the type of work that is devalued by the court. For example, subsistence work, caring and social and social reproduction work, all the work that is not remunerated. And how that might give rise to alternative practices, alternative subjectivities, alternative values also a bit beyond powerful institutions. But just to have a concluding sentence, I do wanna argue that the ICC is also part of the moral reproduction of a global capitalist order together with the development and human rights industry more broadly that works through creating and disciplining subjects in the global south to stop crying, work hard, be peaceful, get married and accept the global division of labor that puts them at the bottom. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks, Leila. Such a rich presentation, empirically, theoretically a very provocative argument as well. Yeah. As intended, clearly. So I'm sure there'll be lots of questions and lots of comments that people would like to make. I certainly have some. So I'm gonna turn the recording off because we've been institutionally told that we can't record people's intervention.