 Great. We might go ahead and make a start, I think. I can see that more people are joining that they'll, I'm sure, be in this room in just a couple of minutes. My name's Phil Clark, I'm a professor of international politics at SOAS in London. I'm also the co-director of the Center on Conflict Rights and Justice, which is the center that's running today's webinar. This is the first center event for the year, and in an ideal universe, we'd all be physically in the same space. But I guess the virtue of having this online reality is that we can have participants from all over the world. I was just quickly looking down the list of participants, and many of you are old friends and very familiar to me. I can see we've got people logging in from Canada, the US, Australia, South Africa, just to name a few. We wouldn't have been able to have all of you involved if we weren't doing this online, so I guess that is definitely a silver lining to this COVID-19 situation. It's a real privilege to have Umar Bar come and give this very first webinar in our series, and Umar, of course, is going to talk about his fantastic new book, States of Justice, the Politics of the International Criminal Court. Those of you who have been following the debates around the ICC in the last year or so will know just how prominent Umar's book has been and the splash that it's already made, not least with the online symposium on Epinodurus and lots of other debates that have already been generated by his really important book. So Umar, we're absolutely delighted to have you come and speak to us today. We've also got a fantastic discussant to provide some commentary on Umar's book. Kelly Jo Bluean from LSE, who also I know is very well known to all of you, absolutely fantastic to have Jo with us as well. I'm going to introduce both Umar and Jo properly in just a moment, but just let me quickly just discuss the format for this event. I should say, too, we're recording the event, so this is on the record for those of you who are concerned about that kind of thing. Umar is going to present for about 40 minutes or so, particularly based off the back of his book, States of Justice. Kelly Jo's then going to give us about 10 minutes of commentary on the book. I then want to come back to Umar and give him a chance to respond to the things that Kelly Jo has raised. And that will probably leave us with about 40 minutes for discussion and question answers with all of you. So before that, let me introduce our speakers formally. Umar is, of course, assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College. His research focuses predominantly on international justice norms and regimes. He also does a huge amount of work around the global governance of atrocity crimes. He is, of course, the author of the book that he's here to discuss today, States of Justice, the Politics of the International Criminal Court, which came out recently with Cambridge University Press. He's got an incredible publication record. He's published in Human Rights Quarterly and the African Studies Review and elsewhere. So really, it is going to bring to bear on today's discussion a really rich vein of research and publications over the last few years. And our discussant, Kelly Jo Bluens, she's a PhD candidate in international relations at LSE. She's, of course, the editor of Millennium, the Journal of International Studies. Kelly Jo, of course, organized the Millennium Conference last year, which I think will live long in the memory. I must confess that I missed it, which is a personal tragedy of mine. But anyone who was at that conference says that it's the kind of conference that people will talk about for 20 or 30 years after the event, which is certainly not the average thing that people say about academic conferences. So Kelly Jo is also really shaping so many debates and her own research looks at issues of anti-blackness and anti-Semitism, especially in terms of the legacies of the Nuremberg trials and the way that that has been interpreted and understood in subsequent decades. So two really fantastic speakers to present to us today. And again, on behalf of the Center and also on behalf of the Politics Department, Umar and Kelly Jo, it's a real delight to have you here. And welcome to all of you who are joining us from around the world. With no further ado, I want to hand over to Umar now to hear from you. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Professor Clark. This is an honor of mine to be able to have this discussion today with you all. Thanks also to Kelly Jo for taking up the task of providing comments to this. I want also to thank all the audience, everybody who's here this morning, afternoon or evening, depending on where you are. These are incredibly challenging time for all of us. So again, I really appreciate that you all are able to join us in this discussion. And if you allow me, I would also like to apologize to my good friends, Obiso and Sherry for bursting their ICC bubble this morning on Twitter. They had requested that I apologize in public. So there it is. I want to make one big argument today, I think. And the argument which may also seem simple enough is that international criminal law and international criminal justice are inherently political. One question I want to grapple with is why is it that the ICC seems able to deliver justice only on behalf of states rather than for victims and communities who are affected by atrocity crimes? And what are the implications of such a state-oriented judicial mechanism? How does the state-oriented judicial mechanism square with the ending impunity narrative? And also, how does it square with the justice for victim, quote unquote, narrative? So international courts, I argue, operate in a world made primarily of states. Now, I would also say that I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a legal scholar. I'm trained in political science and international relations. So I approach these questions from that perspective. So I argue that those states try to leverage the legal institutions and processes in pursuit of their political and security interests. The ICC then cannot resist it being instrumentalized by states. Even the states that do not wield the global power in the book, I refer to them for lack of a bit of words as weaker states in the international system. And certainly, African states would fit into that description. So states that do not wield global power are able to use international courts in pursuit of their interests. Those states are able to leverage their stateness to obstruct, influence, or instrumentalize the courts. They strategically sell for reference situations to the ICC. They shift between compliance and non-compliance as they see fit. And they outsource their political disputes to the Hague. I should also argue that the courts and the states are not always in competition. The court and the state are oftentimes able to accommodate one another and collaborate with one another. They can develop working relationships where in the interest of the courts and those of the states at a given moment converge. Now I will provide a very brief summary of some of the main arguments of the book. And then I will open up the discussion to the implications and the broader questions. So to summarize the main argument of the book, one research question that I engage and grapple with is, why and how do states engage with the ICC, especially states that do not wield global power? In other words, what mechanisms and strategies do state developers in reaction to and within regimes of international criminal justice? To what extent are weaker states in the international system able to use the ICC as leverage in their pursuit of political and security interests? Consequently, what lessons can we draw from such mechanisms in terms of the primacy of states' interests vis-à-vis norms of international justice? The empirical focus of the book revolves around four major themes that are all at the intersection of states' power and interests with the ICC. The first major theme I discuss is the strategic use of self-referrals which has been discussed a lot in the literature. So I'm not saying anything new on this specific question. Which is that states would often use self-referrals to the ICC as a way to remove or incapacitate local adversaries, whether they are rebel leaders or political opposition. And this tends to happen in situations where the state is fragile or fragmented or when you have a government that has come to power after a military coup or in the aftermath of contentious elections, a volatile political situation in states who would use the self-referral mechanism to the ICC to establish an assert legitimacy in state control. This is also an argument that Phil Clark has made in his book, Distant Justice. The second theme is the complementarity between national and international justice systems. Wherein we can see the ICC being used as the core of first resort or even only resort when in reality the ICC should have been that's how it was conceptualized as the core of last resort. So in this sense the ICC is used as a bad bank where states would outsource their problems. The third theme is limits of state compliance. So I discuss compliance and non-compliance as dynamic tools that states would wield depending on the political risk that the ICC may pose to to the elites or the state agents. States are more likely to comply and cooperate with the ICC if and when they are assured that the investigation and prosecution for instance will not extend to their own agents. And finally the ICC being used as the stage for domestic political disputes, a domestic political arena. Then the book contents ultimately that African states have been able to use the code instrumentally and strategically to their advantage. And then I develop a theoretical framework that would explain the range of behaviors that are associated with the states engaging with the court and what can be expected in the future of how such states will continue to engage with them. I'll repeat the main argument again. Even states that do not wield the global power are able to use international courts in pursuit of their interests. Those states are able to leverage their stateness to abstract influence and instrumentalize the court. They strategically self refer situations to the ICC. They shift between compliance and non-compliance and they outsource their political disputes to the ICC. Now simple enough why would that be a problem? Well it is because the ICC and the international criminal justice system are still in denial by the political dimension of their product and its instrumentalization for political and security goals. So the ICC is still in denial. For a long time and that's still the case I would argue the international criminal justice system has sought to divorce itself from international politics because of the anxiety of being perceived as a tool for power politics. A quick Twitter discussion I had this morning for instance with Open Society that published a new report talking about the upcoming elections for judges at the ICC basically saying that states should refrain from campaigning for their nominees and then they should refrain from waiting votes. Now in a perfect world where you could diverse the ICC from politics that would have been possible but how in the world would states not campaign for the judges that they have nominated to sit at the court? But again this takes us back to this view or this perception that the ICC is above politics and political considerations and should remain so. The international justice project still holds onto the belief that personal accountability for atrocity crimes has become a widely adopted shared norms that state believe that this is the right thing to do they have been socialized into this norm and this is what I'm sure all of you are familiar with the justice cascade argument which also says that the arc of this justice cascade bends towards a brighter feature of an international legal order that this progress has been made and this would put the pursuit of justice for the victims which is the mantra that the international justice system uses the pursuit for justice for victims is perceived as a moral call a duty that is beyond the approach and the lofty goals of ending impunity of politics outside and above political considerations. I argue however that the ICC I'm not arguing rather I'm not saying that the ICC has become a political institution or has been politicized. What I'm trying to say is that the foundation of this project was political from the big from day one this was a political project. Why? Because well the Rome Statute which is the founding document of the court is a political document it is made through political compromise by actors who had competing interests but also the definitions and delimitations of material or territorial jurisdiction of these courts their mandates are always reflective of power dynamics as Camarie Parker has argued recently. What counts as core crimes or crimes of concern to humanity as a whole the non-retro activity in the non-retro activity principle temple jurisdictions, territorial discretion all these are in match with political and racial constructs I would argue. The yellow brick road from Naranbek to the Hague we charts this trajectory of humanity from the darkness of international lawlessness to the promise of a civilized era of justice is as Kelly Joe said recently a fairy tale. The focus on norms and institutions of international justice such as courts, commissions of inquiry, fact-finding missions, the prosecutions, the trials the focus on these items as a measure of justice cascade and how much progress has been made from Naranbek to the Hague these obstacles I argue the problematic foundations of the project and how it is deployed and wielded both at the international and local levels which leads to the ICC's constituency to become reduced in reality to nothing but itself. ICC interventions or lack thereof whether they are justified by the Rune Statute or not do have real consequences on local communities and domestic politics and these consequences oftentimes are actually harmful to those local communities then beating the drum that we are doing it for the victims as the ICC proponents tend to repeat this is about the victims this does not adequately address that problem which is the ruling agency of states and African states in this case is not necessarily a reflection of the concern of the local community states oftentimes do not actually speak for the local communities. States oftentimes do not act on behalf of or in the interest of specific local communities who have been victimized by political violence that take us to the question of the victim the ICC refuses to see politics it doesn't see race either but that's a discussion for for another day it only sees the victims and the ICC compensates it's a failure to deliver that for which it was created by reorienting itself towards the politics of representation of the victims and there's a lot of work that has been done on about this narrative by Kamari Kark and Meghre and Olivia Lanter-Moes as well this justice for victim narrative is uniform across different contexts and conflicts in any situation in which the ICC has been involved there is this narrative of we're doing this for the victims we bring in justice on behalf of the victims and this narrative this justice for victim narratives is it overtakes all or the potential objectives such as the truth peace reconciliation reparation etc the justice for victims becomes the ultimate tell us the raison d'etre of the ICC project and the legitimacy of the international justice project rest on such a narrative in the words of David Dubin quote international criminal justice will always be an extraordinary institution that perpetually needs to pursue the world of its own legitimacy and the legitimacy of the ICC reposes on its own ratification which has become a crisis of its own and the crisis of ratification of the ICC is the idea that criminal justice and individual criminal accountability are the appropriate venue to deal and prevent as prosecutor Ben Suda said quote without the ICC we will regress into an even more turbulent world where chaos volatility and violence take the upper hand as inevitable norms so the court changes the world simply by existing this is the claim that David that the world is hanging on a very tiny little thread if that were to break we will all plunge into an abyss of chaos and violence will be unleashed and the only thing protecting us from such chaos is actually the mere existence of this court no matter how ineffective it is so this is the client this is the ratification of the ICC that i'm talking about that's part of the narrative of progress from Nurmey to to the Hague and this narrative still prevails the ICC is viewed as a driver of this master narrative this civilizing practice of code introducing the rule of law into the cynical sordid culture of international politics the same international justice narrative and the ratification of the ICC forecloses any possibility for the court to curtail its ambition and to recognize its structural flaws and limitations to conclude I would say in in the late 90s when the ICC came into existence that was it was welcomed the ICC was welcomed into this era of accountability with some tri-front and gibberish language for instance Kofi Annan in 1998 said that the ICC is called a gift of hope to future generations and a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law and code but two decades later we see that victims have felt abandoned and frustrated by the court we see that state compliance in cooperation remains elusive the ICC is nearly incapable of successfully prosecuting higher ranking state officials even higher even state officials from African countries actually the fundamental rule of criminal trials and the Hague's version of justice are in question through the Hague I mean though the Hague refuses to grapple with these questions and the experts reveal that's being done on the ICC seem to focus on the assessment of the court's performance and the shortcomings of the court in terms of institutional governance work culture workplace culture at the court not the broader questions so what's the future of the court and what's the future of this international criminal justice project that's unclear the report from the experts that was published a couple weeks ago has pointed to some directions and make some interesting recommendations and it has addressed to some sore points but the politics of the politics are still outside of the picture they're still outside of the debate regarding the ICC and the answering mentalization by states is still not addressed um race and racism do not appear anywhere in this 348 page report and thanks to what we saw for pointing this out these questions will go beyond fixing the ICC which is the call that the four past presidents of the ASP had made last year that the ICC the ICC needs fixing I think this points to broader questions of what sustains the international justice project is the foundations of international law and Western liberalism and humanity and they avoid any discussion of the imperialist and colonial origins that perpetuates international justice agenda too therefore as long as the ICC is viewed as central or the de facto institutions that shows humanity's progress it will be difficult to grapple with the extents to which the international justice project itself has structural flaws this ending impunity and justice for the victim narratives will continue to obscure the serious critiques of the court and other institutions of the international criminal justice regime and their ideology and assurance we would continue to veal the ICC's crisis as simple bumps in the road towards a more perfect world of justice rather than those structural flaws that are rooted on the foundations of the project itself meanwhile maybe the focus of the prosecutor's office would be to add a few Filipino Burmese or Eastern Europeans to the docket and steer so as to foreclose the debate about the focus on Africa itself but again this is a fix but not a solution to these problems or an institute with these questions and I'll stop there thank you very much fantastic thanks Omar plenty to discuss plenty to debate in in what you've said there but i'm going to hand straight over to Kelly Joe for her discussions comments and then Omar i'll come back to you for a couple of minutes to respond to what Kelly Joe has said thanks Kelly Joe hi my is that okay hi there there we go great thank you thank you so much Phil for having me and thank you Omar for writing this book and for for being in conversation with us and for allowing us to think with you um I think this book is remarkably important and I think uh one of the things that's really interesting about Omar is that he is at once one of our finest thinkers on the specificities of how international justice works when you read the book the empirical granularity the depth of it is is remarkable and at the same time and I think it's really interesting how how this this talk that he has just given has moved from from this kind of erasinated depoliticized politics of the ICC into the systemic issues of white supremacy of racism of colonialism that that that this court speaks to speaks with producers and creates and I think it's really powerful how Omar manages to move between these spaces and to show us in fact that it is not a movement between but it is a self-same space so Phil in fact that the conference that you mentioned very much was a collective project and came from many different conversations many of which were with Omar and and one of our favorite pieces in the special issue that will come out of that is a reflective piece by Omar talking about the kind of subjectivities and politics and racial politics around doing the research for this very book and I think it's really beautiful how Omar holds those things together I want to talk about this yellow brick road which as I described it in the opinion of Eurus peace which Omar says charts the trajectory of humanity's progress from the darkness of the lawlessness of lawlessness to the promise of a civilized era of justice and I think it's really I think it's really interesting because one of the things that is governed there is the idea that that Nuremberg is is the starting moment and therefore the Holocaust and particularly a very particular notion of of what was contained there is the exception and in order to make that possible of course you have to suggest that that if you're talking about the notion of a crime against humanity the first piece of the term crime against humanity that we know of is by George Washington Williams black American lawyer and journalist in response in a letter to King Leopold in response to the absolute heinous atrocities in the Congo Free State and that does not form part of the lexicon of our international justice moment. My friend Zoe Samuidze who I think is on the session here writes about the the Herrera Nama genocide by indeed by the Germans which you know within a similar temporal space within a similar geographic space that is also not written into a national international lexicon of genocide and I think what's really important here to is is the idea that we are governed by a logic of inevitability that this that a particular instantiation of fascism as seen in the second world war is the ultimate evil and that a juridical approach to addressing it is the only way. Now of course if you look at the writings for example of Emma Goldman Jewish and Anarchist contemporary Abel Emkin we see a lot of different approaches to how we address fascism and when we fast forward I suppose to how the international justice architecture today is intersecting with anti-fascists fighting fascism in the United States for example I don't see the bonds of solidarity there I don't see I see international justice seeking to assert itself rather than saying how are we collectively working against fascism international justice's response to Donald Trump's raising genocidal actions in in the United States is not to say how can we be in collective fighting of this fascism it is to say how can we focus on the particular instantiations where the international justice project is threatened so I suppose where I think I start and I want to come into this this conversation is is this idea what if we take seriously and umar I think you said the court changes the world simply by existing and the court believes this and what I I think I what I take from your book and what I want us to think about is how does that work and you know it it thinks it works for positive what you are showing is that it works quite a lot for negative and how do we think about that and think about how we respond to that and I think one of the things that's really phenomenal about this book and I think umar has undersold it I will say that I think one of the things that's phenomenal is that if we have a juridical architecture that it's in the business of focusing on contradiction there is a contradiction between civilization and barbarism there is a kind of contradiction between good and evil we see this replicated very much in a critical space uh where we the critics all of us better we are better than the liberals or worse than the liberals or different to the liberals or absolutely dislocated from the project that we are critiquing all of us I see us in the business and I use the term business very pointedly of showing the contradictions and inconsistencies to an order ourselves whose continuity depends not on overcoming these contradictions but in a simultaneous rendering of these contradictions as existence and also of the institution that produces them and ultimately always successful so I read this when I read this in in the last chapter of Umar's book he says the ICC is a court in permanent crisis and yet it always manages to be the court that is the answer for humanity I think so much of us are really really busy showing how there are contradictions these little cracks that show actually it is in crisis it's not legitimate what Umar is saying to us is that it's in built it is supposed to be both in crisis and the answer to humanity and that is perhaps how it's sustained itself so the way that Umar does this which is so powerful and also again quite quiet in its power and I I don't I don't know if I'm you know my first job was as a magician's assistant and one of the things you know that you never give away the tricks you break the magic code so I don't know if I'm if I'm breaking the poetry but one of the things that Umar does so well here is he takes he's not doing some growing you know we love in international law everyone wants to be a grand macro theorist we have the big theory on the whole world Umar is taking a particular point a particular juncture and showing how it cracks um and the particular juncture that Umar is taking is this idea of the justice cascade and he is showing that this idea that has dominated um our in our political and our intellectual space which suggests that there is an inevitable progression from lawlessness to peace via a cascade of justice whereby the the barbarians are being incorporated into the system Umar is showing which is really not that unsurprising that states in fact engage with the international justice architecture for many reasons because surprisingly enough states in the global south are entirely capable of doing many different things in relation to justice architecture so I think this is and this is this another contribution that I really want to focus on is that it's not just an empirical site and I think one of the things I mean Sabelo and Lovgaciani talks a lot about how Africa becomes a site of empirics while the west is the site of theory and I think when we look at what Umar is giving us here it is an empirical space to theorize the international so when Donald Trump is um targeting the the the prosecutor of the ICC with sanctions it is absolutely no one asks questions about whether he's acting in states self-interest or not no one does this it's it's okay western states to do that what Umar is showing us is that this is what states do so I think um what I am content that I need to uh to wrap up and I think uh what I want to say is I don't want to I want to continue a conversation that Umar and I have been having for a long time about this idea of the court in permanent crisis um the court has always been in crisis the court I think I rely on the idea of both crisis and perfectability which is ultimately a colonial logic um and yet we are all trying to frustrate and show empirically how the the crisis doesn't this is illogical when in fact it is a fairy tale as I have said it is supposed to be illogical so I want to suggest that we use this moment to move beyond the crisis and outside of the imaginaries because the map between Nuremberg and the Hague is not a spatial map but cartography is always a colonial enterprise so what I want to end with and I think ask Umar to to help us think through and I don't expect an answer but I think just in the fact of in the in the act of talking about this maybe we can collectively start imagining something else and I want to talk I suppose I want to to focus on two points here and the one is critique and the other is justice and the interlinking between them in a recent piece from a couple of weeks ago on on critique in times of crisis Hortense Spillers says it has occurred to me before now that the only only by way of example that critical theory and its varied iterations witnesses its most impressive moments and efflorescence in times of crisis what happens if we look at this moment where the world is literally on fire where the ICC is at the center of much of the world that is on fire and say what do we do in this moment of crisis in Umar's book hero writes let me find the line the court itself may need to acknowledge that it can only deliver justice that is both political selective and partial he does not say we must have to acknowledge he says the court must have to acknowledge so for those of us who want a better world or want a better notion of justice how do we think out of this and I think to end I'd like to just end with the thoughts of one of my other favorite thinkers also on here Yasin Brunja who also has a c up book forthcoming soon on on notions of justice and one of the things I've had the privilege of kind of watching this book as well emerge and I think it's in such beautiful conversation with with Umar's book is what do we mean by justice and what kind of articulations of justice liberatory versions of justice can coexist within this liberal legal framework but not only within the liberal legal framework within the critical mass space outside of that where we are articulating notions of justice but feel so stuck within this logic so I think in conclusion I'd like to say a huge thank you to Umar and to for this this truly remarkable book and this opportunity to think about justice within and beyond the court and to ask you to help us think how we might think of critique and justice in this moment as the world is on fire thank you fantastic thanks kelly joe that I think you know really helps us start to see that the the the big significance of Umar's book in terms of you know current global events but also big debates at the moment about the court about the place of criminal justice in the the pantheon of institutions designed to deal with with mass atrocity but also the place of critique and the role of of academic commentary as well in many of these debates Umar I wanted to come back to you just for a couple of minutes to respond to anything that kelly joe said and then I'm going to open it up to the rest of the group all right thank you kelly joe for these pointed remarks and and comments I always learn something new about the book when I hear kelly joe commenting about the book um so um to answer this quickly this question about crimes against humanity for instance and we obviously cannot discuss crimes against humanity without trying to look deeper into humanity itself who counts as this humanity who is included in in this in this label and one way of doing this and I've been trying to think through lately is going back to the genealogy of this notion itself um it's a history but also going back to the genesis of the ICC itself how did the ICC came to be for instance and to do that we ought to go beyond gasoline conference because in many ways what happened in rom in 1998 was already a done deal this was the last remaining few disagreements that states were trying to grab away but um we would probably need to go back as far as the ILC international law commission um look at all of these un sponsored conferences and committees that were put together in the early 90s and then try to see for instance and I've learned so much about looking at what did the african delegates say during these meetings these conferences in the early 90s you you want to have for instance to stay like a risotto saying um we need to make sure that the un gives us enough resources money so our delegates can travel to these conferences so we can fully participate this court can be successful only if it has the broad participation by everybody um you have a state like a Haiti that said for instance that we fully support an international criminal court because we were victims of slavery that was a great injustice we need a court to make sure that this does not happen again um all the states will talk about for instance the need to include the threat of the use of nuclear weapons as a crime against humanity that should be under the jurisdiction of the ICC all the states would talk about the need to make sure that the ICC is totally independent from the UN Secretary of State for instance so we we learned so much about the visions that african states for instance had what kind of court they want to come out of of this negotiation and what the end result was um and this is the last point I will make here about um critique itself the role of critique and what does it tell us for justice at the at the ICC um the goal if there is one here is probably as kelly joe said to bring the ICC to the to the realization and acknowledgement that it it will keep failing as long as it keeps the same goal that the goal that it tries to achieve that was enshrined in the room started as not deliverable so there's a call for some humility reconsideration and also the opening of the space to allow all the conceptions of justice of politics of accountability to to take hold um for instance a couple weeks ago you know the the financial times that has this very interesting feature where the journalist will go and have lunch with someone so it's called the lunch with the ft and so they go to a nice restaurant they eat nice meal and then they talk and then the journalist arrives at body so Fatih Ben-Suda was invited to the lunch with the ft couple weeks ago and the headline for the article was quoting Ben-Suda as saying it's not about power it's about the law and that was her response to the sanctions that the Trump administration has put on her in the prosecutor's office so in other word we could translate that as to mean also Ben-Suda saying what we're doing has nothing to do with politics just about the law and my my reaction was my god she still doesn't get it or at least she still refuses to get how can you look like what Trump administration is imposing on the ICC and still say what she's trying to do has nothing to do with politics it has nothing to do with power we're just following the room statute and that's what we'll keep doing also there great thanks so much Ula um what i want to do now is open it up to everybody else i think the simple way to do this is i you've got a hand function um if you look at your uh you look at the screen the bottom of the screen there's a little logo with its hand in the air if you'd like to speak um literally just press that button that'll tell me that you've got a question or a or a comment that you'd like to make and i'll basically take them in the order in which they appear on the screen and what i would ask people to do is when i throw to you to speak if you could just introduce yourself so that umar and the rest of us know exactly who you are so who would like to start us off yes sit sit in barely yeah please um hi yeah if people would like to turn your videos on if you're able to turn your video on that would be great because it's uh it's nice to see people's faces uh i'm not sure if um i can do that yes uh fine no it does seem to be working um hi everyone and thanks so much uh umar for writing and for um really providing a perspective on the icc that has been kind of desperately needed and um i find that anecdote you gave about um about to go and her continued refusal to talk about um the politics of the icc uh really fascinating and because i research the ua security council in particular um role of uh elected members of the security council from the global uh fascinating is what the relationship between the security council the referral and between the council in the icc that seems to the work of of the court so i'd like to hear from you basically what you think the fate of that referral mechanism will be uh do you think that there's any chance of i know from the south african perspective that this that part of the reason why the south african government is they want to leave um the icc is particularly around the referral mechanism which south africa was opposed to in the original um negotiations uh on on on the um on on the on the court so um on the statute so i'd like to hear your opinion on you know where do you think that referral mechanism is is going to go and then um secondly i as you know because i wrote uh i contributed to the symposium about the book uh what i thought was most fascinating is about the agency of um african states and states of the global south more broadly in relation to the icc and how the icc gets tangled um in in internal politics or domestic politics of different states and it seems to me that from a conflict resolution and security perspective the existence of the icc is actually very poorly for the resolution of many conflicts on the continent because it acts as this external um as a stick that incumbents can use against um the rebels or those to oppose internally um and really makes it difficult to find political solutions to conflicts i'd like to hear your view on that thank you great thanks sinton billy um yeah uma back back to you and then i can see that always is also i've wanted to jump in but uma a response to sit in belly please thank you sinton billy for these very important questions regarding the the referrals and i'll give you a talking specifically about the un security council uh referrals to icc which so far has occurred twice uh in reference to sudan and uh and libya is also the the deferral power that kenya had tried for instance the afghan union had tried to get the un security council to use uh which was uh only successful so as you know well um this is probably the prime example of how the icc's work is embedded in power politics because you have this security council um with the p5 members and three of which are not members of the icc and who still have this ability of triggering an icc jurisdiction over a situation in a country in a state that has not ratified the rome statute and that was a very big point of attention during the negotiation during the rome conference because a lot of states especially african states were against this um subordinating the icc to the security council some wanted total independence from the two all this like the united states wanted actually the prosecutor to work under the supervision of the security council so total control of the security council and the compromise that was made between those two positions which is called the singaporean compromise was to give the security power to refer or differ um prosecutions now that's a very problematic issue especially even in the two instances where the security council has used its power to refer cases to the icc the language that is used for instance in these resolutions also specifically say that we allow you the icc to go into sudan or libya to investigate but your investigation must focus only on sudanese nationals or libian nationals so that's written in the resolution actually which means that the icc ben sudan has the power to investigate and prosecute libyans but not nato members who were bombing libyans in 2011 for instance so again this is a prime example of i think how power politics infuses the work of of the icc now in terms of the domestic disputes yes it's been the case that african states that have used or invited or tried to use the icc to settle domestic political disputes by making the icc go after a political opposition or rebels in their territory and icc also oftentimes has played along because if it goes after the state officials or the government military forces then there is no access to icc investigators and there's a blackmailing by the government and with the drawl of cooperation the one instance where the icc tried to go after state officials was in canya and we we also how how it ended now for that for the african context itself and whether there can be political solutions to deal with this probably i mean we are still waiting to see what the malibu protocol would bring we're still waiting to see what african states themselves would propose at the continental level but i'm not very optimistic there either because if an african court of justice would become operational i tend to think that that court will probably face similar problems than the icc is facing right now great thanks umat now i can see a clutch of hands so if it's okay what i might do is take a pair of questions i'm gonna go to awisa and then i'll come to benjamin then back to you omar and then i'm i'm gonna come to the hands after that so yeah awisa hi well thank you very much phil and uh omar and uh i i did read your book of course because we run an opinion you are symposium on it and it is an absolutely interesting addition to my reading catalogue this year and i was quite fascinated by you know your findings and your arguments maybe just to link it up to some uh recent events fattu the suda and uh fakesu mochi choco if i get his name correctly were in sudan this week i think they're still there if i'm not mistaken and they are two individuals who've been sanctioned by um the trump regime and i use regime there very deliberately yet sudan welcomed them sudan has not welcomed anybody from the icc in the past almost well the past decade actually they sudan prevented anybody from the icc from accessing sudan it's awful they're full in regards to the investigations but this week sudan opened up and welcomed icc officials not just any other icc officials but the two that have sanctioned what do you think i mean uh based on your arguments in states of justice your findings and arguments in states of justice about how weaker states quote unquote instrumentalize the icc so sudan knowing quite well that these two individuals are sanctioned by the trump regime yet it's welcoming them at the same time knowing uh the past sudanese regime's relationship with the icc what do you think is sudan's game here do you see any uh a correlation between what sudan is attempting to do at the moment and the argument the findings that you made in states of justice and then at the same time just to throw another wrinkle and i think we've uh talked about this briefly you know on twitter of course sudan is still currently on the state sponsors of terrorism list i guess that's what the americans call it so these all these factors taken to including the latest events what do you think you know what do you think is sudan's end game of course um in regard to you know the whole situation and uh specifically linking it to your findings in states of justice i would just like to hear your comments on that because i find it intriguing great thanks always though um benjamin over to you hi benjamin are you there we seem to be struggling with your sound um is there a chance that you're muted um that's great then benjamin's actually written his um his question maybe i'll read it out and then i'll throw it back to you um uh so yeah it looks like benjamin's having some tech problems but uh benjamin's uh he says look thank you oma for a really interesting thought-provoking presentation my question relates to the icc's legitimacy and the language of victims as you touched on victims um as all can all encompassing in the icc's discourse and this is highly problematic notwithstanding the very important experiences and redress for people who've suffered because of crimes um as a result of the political use of the term victims by the icc has the term uh within the institution become a bit of an empty vessel and do we need to think of a new and expanded language for talking about the importance of individuals and communities who have experienced uh heretics suffering or is it possible to reclaim the language of victims from its saturated political use by the icc uh that is able to account for the complexities of victimhood so obviously a a question about this concept of victim and the way that uh that the icc deploys it um so yeah oma back over to you if you'd like to response to for we sows and also benjamin's comments thanks all right um thank you uh oh so and benjamin i'll i'll uh address uh what we saw as a question first about the recent developments between the office of the prosecutor and uh sudan and what can we learn from from these developments um so the one of the arguments of the book is that states are able to use international criminal court to engage with the court in ways that would advance their own political and security interest and that seems to me to be the case with sudan right now sudan the post brochere um regime in in sudan um why because as you know the um the icc the office of the prosecutor had these investigations in sudan and issued the warrant for the arrest of some of the top commanders and the basheel himself but the office of the prosecutor never had their own investigators on the ground in that full incident the day they issued the warrant for the arrest of the basheel the sudanese government revoked the pyramids all of all western NGOs that was operating in sudan and kicked them out accusing them of being spies of the icc helping the icc investigations so the otp never really had people on the ground to collect the evidence they used them satellite imagery they talked to that fully refugees who were in chat but a lot of experts some experts had argued that even if basheel was to be transferred to the sudan i mean to the icc right now it's not clear that the otp has a strong case against it it's not sure that they could actually achieve a conviction so this new development of the icc of the sudan going to visiting sudan could be helpful for the otp to be able to gather evidence and build their case it also benefited the sudanese regime right now as they're trying to pass the basheel era they're trying to reclaim a seat at the table of the international community which goes inside by side with also this attempt to get removed from the list of the terrorist groups given by by the u.s. government so all these fits within sudan trying to reclaim a place in the international community and if working with the office of the prosecutor and handing over some of those who are wanted by the court is a price to pay so big so again these are political calculations costing benefit analysis by the sudanese regime but also by by the otp itself trying to have access to sudan itself to be able to to build their cases regarding benjamin's question yes that's that's a really good question about the language that we use the language of victim roles and whether it can be reclaimed i'm not sure i do have an answer to to this question um what what i find interesting about how the language of the victim is deployed by the icc is in fact that when there is no guilty verdict actually there is no victim so the icc spends like for instance a decade telling local communities you are the victims we will try to seek and deliver justice for you and a decade later when that trial is over and defendant is acquitted then the icc has no other option but to tell the victims we cannot pay your relations there's nothing we can do because no guilty verdict means no victim of the crime because we were not able to prove that there was an actual crime so again this i guess i'm just trying to show the complexity of this victim image that is deployed and this is not just about the icc this goes way beyond the icc this also includes the whole humanitarian work and the NGOs or the horse themselves so i i think this warrants for the studies or questioning for the analysis whether the victim can be reclaimed or whether we should try to move and beyond this label and trying to find all the expressions to deal because again we don't want to take away the fact that there are people who are actually victimized there are people who are actually victims of these atrocities we don't want to minimize the seriousness of these atrocities crime that are being committed against humans but this language is also part and parcel of how we can deal and more effectively with these questions great thanks umar i'm going to take another two questions in a row so first i'm going to go to simond thanks hi can you hear me yes you can um let me try to put on my video yes it's working okay perfect um well thank you much for the talk it was super interesting and but now i'm a bit lost like okay and what now so how do we move forward from this so i actually really would like your opinion on do you even see if there is a place for an international court or maybe even broader do you see if there is a place for criminal conflict just in the international law and um i would really would like your opinion on that because i'm very interested in justice but i know there are a lot of critics on the RCC but for me i'm really in doubt that these are a concern right now so i would really like your view on that thank you great thanks simon um i'll also take a question from sewer and then i'll come back to you umar hello my name is rare um i hope that you can hear me um so i found this conversation to be really great i had the pleasure uh reading this text already um and i found this to be a really fantastic conversation that in many ways um encapsulates the heart of the text and in many ways also it's been beyond it in really wonderful ways as well um and so one of the comments that i wanted to make is that it's really fantastic to see uh what's possible when not just focusing on critique but also thinking as a graduate student learning from this text what it's possible to do when you think about situating african state agency as your premise as opposed to the argument that you're trying to to drive towards and so i've learned a lot about how what kind of writing is possible from this text um my question orients around something that ken joe also brought into her discussion which is around the question of the justice cascade which towards the beginning of the book you also form really really interestingly an ethical question in knowledge production you speak to it as a ritualization of international justice where unmitigated good is taken granted and you kind of reformulate in mccollif's citation justice cascade and the advocacy cascade right i'm thinking here about the scholar practitioner space and what this means possibly for knowledge production around uh questions around atrocity and mass violence um and what with this really powerful formulation as an ethical consideration in research production what we can take away from what's possible and maybe how the academic functions of knowledge production have maybe brought us into some of these tenuous circumstances as we stand great thanks very much um yeah back to you on our two questions there and then i i can see two more hands after that so the the questions are coming thick and fast thank you okay um thank you simon and i'll try to be brief as to allow more time for the question to simon the question how do we move forward is there a good alternative what what do we do with this critique and i think um surer also her question also addresses this um that's that's always a very hard question for me it's a difficult question for me to to answer because i'm not proposing any solution i may actually be part of the problem um but um one one thing i think one first step would be acknowledgement and contrition especially from the icc and those who support icc an acknowledgement that the icc is very limited in what it can achieve um that the justice that the icc delivers if it does delivers any will always be selective it will always be partial justice and it will always be political that contrition that a knowledge would open up new new avenues to explore all the alternatives that can work alongside icc it the icc doesn't necessarily need to disappear but if we would come to the realization that the icc is not big response that it is one partial political selective response then maybe that can allow us to look for all the responses out there and this would deal with take care with the reification of of the icc and the haig bridges of of justice as the solution to conflict and crime in atrocities and um to to go back to surer's question about ethical considerations um that we grapple with as you know as scholars and researchers and this knowledge production and positionality unfortunately i tend to think that our disciplines do not provide enough incentives or enough um solutions the possibilities opening the for us to deal with those questions to grapple with those questions um one very promising and encouraging revenue for such exploration is the millenium journal and conference that kerry joe and her colleagues put in together for instance um so i have tried to think through these questions um at that at the conference um what are my ethical considerations as an african researcher researching these questions interviewing victims of these atrocities whether it's in kenya or in northern uganda or in mali and when i would benefit from this by publishing a book but the concerns of those victims are still unaddressed so these are some ethical consideration that i tried to um grapple with and hopefully um soon enough um i would have a publication coming out that actually touching up on this um this very very question phil i think you are muted yeah you're right that's the rookie error isn't it you'd think after all of these weeks of doing all of these online classes i'd work out how the bloody mute button works clearly not um we've got just enough time for the last three hands and that's actually going to be four because i'm going to abuse the role of chair and ask a quick question right at the end but um so i want to go to richard and then i'm going to come to yasin and then i'm going to go to margo so richard thanks phil um can you hear me okay yeah you're very clear thanks um and to umar as well for this for the talk um it's been really great actually as also just think about as kelly joe was saying about things a bit more in terms of strategically and and imagining potential other ways of thinking about this and i guess my question relates to um sort of the definition of politics that you're working with umar um so and i know this also is something that that phil does in his his book as well so looks sort of you kind of talk about those various themes or self referrals complementarity state compliance and then i see as a kind of stage for carrying out political disputes somewhere else other than in the domestic sphere and it's interesting but to me that you would select those um those as examples of the political because they seem they all seem to react to an idea of politics or sorry an idea of the icc as operating and reacting to a pre-existing political world that the icc is still somehow outside of so of course i mean and as as you you do mention in the book as well icc also in a way creates that world partly through its interventions so it does that through those kinds of mechanisms that you mentioned but it also does it by say not involving itself in certain scenarios when other international organizations are are involved particularly international financial institutions um it does it by reshaping the domestic institutions themselves to make to make them do criminal work rather than say doing more uh property rights kinds of work that they might be doing otherwise so that's a very economic it's a very economic choice about what they're gonna invest local resources in um also in terms of what goes on in terms of positive complementarity and outreach what type of victim we're thinking about what kind of status being rebuilt on all those are political questions that the icc is involved in uh depending on so my question i guess would be is why you made that choice regarding the definition of politics and if the the phrase that you use about utilizing their stateness as something to say about that as well because i'd like to hear a bit more about that thanks thanks rigid uh yes in hopefully you can hear me and see me um um umar and uh kelly joe and for uh and do you feel for putting this fantastic uh event together umar my question to you is uh a provocation uh and it's a provocation in terms of how can we imagine an international justice system that embraces a pan-african vision of the world and a pan-african vision of justice that speaks to african communities uh citizens living on the african continent african leadership that gives way for an african based response to mass atrocities or has something like the icc in fact suffocated the space and it's something that i explore certainly within my work but i'd be interested to hear your perspectives because i think your book as i read it just compelled me to think about where would africa as a continental space and power house in the world be in 20 years 25 years 50 years or will it forever be a site for international justice to be experimented produced and and we therefore suffocate any ideas of a pan-african uh vision of liberation of freedom and of justice thank you kelly joe i'd also love your thoughts yeah i was gonna say as well i wanted to give kelly joe a chance to come in at the end here too um that often happens with the discussion they give us all this great food for thought and then we we don't always bring them back into the the subsequent discussion so i'm definitely going to do that too um let me go to margo um yeah for your question thanks hi can you hear me yes hi hello um so uh thank you to you both um and you fell as well for this very interesting talk i don't i don't study law or the international justice system at all but i have a question and actually bounces off from uh yesine's provocation i'm thinking uh with regard to the colonial legacies these undeniable um underlinings of the international justice system uh i was wondering what promises you see in the african court on human and people's rights uh i don't know if this is completely irrelevant in this debate because i'm not knowledgeable about the international system at all uh i would like to kind of future you see for this considering that um well most of the states uh have not recognized or ratified the protocol while some have ratified they don't recognize the competence um and so possibly could the african court achieve more than the icc and uh and that in a pan africanist i mean afrocentric perspective uh and maybe more as opposed to the selective partial and political uh justice that you say the icc delivers um thank you and all my i'm gonna abuse my role of care um to ask the final question which is i wanted to pick up on your very early comment about the icc being in denial about the political arena that it's a part of in denial about the danger of being politically instrumentalized especially by states and i wonder how much the court's in denial and i i wonder how much it's deliberately in cahoots with this because i think that the court has often gone looking for this kind of instrumentalization it's act in in pursuit of state cooperation it's often been i think very aware uh but unmoved by the degree to which it's being instrumentalized it doesn't seem to budge the court at all uh that it's being used by say kabila's government in congo uh against its political opponents or mussevini's government uh in uganda against its political opponents the court seems aware of that it just doesn't seem to care because for it's as long as it's got some cases l r a cases conglies rebel cases that that's fine so in some ways i i wonder whether it's worse than you're suggesting um denial would would suggest that um either they don't know about it or that they don't think it matters my sense is that sometimes the court very deliberately calculates that that's the kind of thing that gets at cooperation and so it goes looking for for this kind of instrumentalization it wants to make itself useful to states particularly african states i just wonder if you've got a a comment on that and in a similar vein i'm also thinking about a couple of the questions you've had from other people about where do we take these critiques now where does this go um is there any way improving the court and its behavior and and i wonder whether we have to go back to your starting point which is that this is all about state power are there avenues through states to bring about change to to straighten the court up to improve its modalities to change its responsiveness to victims victims groups civil society groups seem to be getting very little purchase in their own critiques but this is a court that does pay attention to state power do we as critics do people who are worried about the direction of the court need to start to put their feet somewhere else and that might be to channel our concerns through states who have the ear of the court who can wield their own power to to bring about change i just wonder what you think about that so if you could maybe take the final questions that you've been given i'm then gonna throw to kelly joe just for a really quick capstone comment from you and then we're going to wrap things up um um thanks all right thanks all i will start with which is a very interesting question about the definition of politics and so i i don't mean to suggest that politics is a bad thing or that it is actually a page written that's not the intention at all i think actually it is the icc that tries to say politics are dirty it's a bad it's a page written we steal away from it we only follow the wrong statute we do what the wrong study tells us to do and that's how we operate we have nothing to do with anything political and that's the denial that i'm i'm speaking about but of course you cannot escape politics when you are dealing with states and when your constituency the members of the icc the bodies that ratified the wrong study are states if you are dealing and operating within through states you cannot escape politics um and i also want to suggest that the icc itself is a political actor and it is not just as fuel has very pointedly said that the icc is not just being instrumentalized it the icc actually is a political actor itself with with its own interest and its own image that it wants to cultivate its own reputation that it wants to to preserve and luckily in the last expert review that was just published at least the experts have proposed some recommendation that point to the fact that the icc should start viewing itself as an io as an international organization and change its governance to fit with the mold so it's not just a court it is an international organization with all the pathologies that goes with international organizations um to yasin's provocation this is a provocation i like very much because i'd like to think about a pan-african feature what does a pan-african vision of justice would would look like unfortunately i tend to think also that as long as this vision for justice would be operating through states it runs at the risk of being used and instrumentalized the same way that the icc is operating right now and this also ties to margot's question about the african court of human and peoples right um as margot says the most states haven't ratified it yet there's a lot of reservation they did change the protocol to include in it immunity for heads of states in the aftermath what happened was but she they made sure that if this african court would ever come to be african's the heads of states will be shielded and protected from prosecution by this court so they don't want to do the mess they did by refining the room statute where they had no immunity so this again points just to that states are political lagers ruled and run by political elites who have interests in protecting themselves and and their interests and finally to to Phil's comment yes i i do agree that i don't want to also say that the icc is just a pound in the hands of states that is being used as a football no that's not the case at all the icc has its own agency um the icc went after cases of self-referral as you show in in your book um in drc you garner in the central african republic um so many was quite very aggressive in trying to get these self-referrals because they guarantee cooperation from the state and then they guarantee cases for for the icc to be able to to prosecute channeling concerns through states would be an interesting venue to take and i think the assembly of state parties has over the past couple of years become a bit more proactive in trying to figure out solutions and fixes to the icc and on the processes of how the icc works um so there is a core of strong icc believers within those states and for good or worse i think also because those states that tend to believe that they are pretended by the existence of the icc i don't necessarily believe it has it's about norms and believing in in these ideals of justice at the end of the day i think the states are guided primarily by by their own interests but yes it's encouraging to see um these actions taken lately by the the asp uh kelly joe maybe a final comment from you am i there sorry you are hi here i was thinking i could just you know relax and listen to brilliant um i think you know let me let me say for you know these conversations have been really really interesting and i i suppose yassin's point about you know how do we imagine a pan african notion of justice and that deeply important provocation is certainly something that that inflects in my thinking um because i'm thinking a lot with yassin a lot of the time and not doing it quite as well but trying my best here um i think uh we don't need to find a pan african notion of justice um i think we need to think about who the we is uh and i think we need to think about the fact it is the self-same people who as yassin says i i think suffocating uh visions of of pan african justice who are also defining what injustice is uh and so i think you know if we look at if we look at the fact that you know in the u.s now with what's going on with with the the i sterilization of of of women in in concentration camps uh that would clearly be an icc crime um but because it's not within the jurisdiction of the court it is not articulated as an injustice so what i want to say i think and i think just sort of picking up on on what's being said is that the um the knowledge is there and i think it speaks again to sarah's point about about the knowledge production side the knowledge is there um we if you look i mean there's a if the i've read a speech by a male at the u.n where he absolutely articulated african notions of justice through the language of human rights um but that articulates through a notion of the human and the we that is not predicated on a white liberal christian subject and the sort of liminal boundaries of that so you know i think i think both in our notions of what prosecutorial justice is and our notions of critique i mean i think the way we critique is very much emerging from a particular form of ideology critique of showing the contradictions ideology without ideology you know steered hall was talking about ideology in many different ways um and and that is written out of the canon right we can talk about justice eril handerson who i see has just joined the conversation and when that happens everyone goes silent uh when eril handerson is talking about reparations that is a knowledge of justice that is there already it is just not taken as part of an articulation of justice because the teleology is within all of us who are doing this work so i think the in the same way when we look at steered hall when we look at a Haitian notion the Haitian revolution as a as a moment of of human rights it's written out of modernity because it incorporates a human that is not just a white subject when we look at steered hall being written out of the critical canon where wb e d boys being written out of the critical canon we can see also yes and you are writing this an african justice kamari maxine clark is doing this umar is doing this you know the this this knowledge is here we don't have to find it i think though we i think what we have to do is stop when it is a white critical we or a white liberal we stop thinking of ourselves as both the arbiters as as as any possibility of being the arbiters of a notion of justice for an injustice that is both central to our proliferation and that we were central to the court fantastic well that that seems like a really appropriate place to end i i think on a a resonant provocative note from kelly joe there i think the only thing that remains for me to say is firstly thank you to all of you for logging on and coming there's always a bit of nervousness especially in the online space about how to organize these events and how we'll gather an audience but but you guys have turned up in droves which i think is testament to the quality of our speakers and participated really vigorously i i do hope that you'll come to our ccrj events for the rest of the term i'm going to gratuitously just put the link to our events in the chat but that the final thing is of course to say a huge thanks to umar for his book and for this presentation and also to kelly joe for such fantastic discussant comments very grateful for both of you giving up your time and contributing so vastly in the way that you have and i look forward to taking these discussions forward with all of you as things unfold from here uh have a great evening everybody and thank you once again thank you all