Anthropological Quarterly

Affective Justice offers an extensive, ambitious, and thorough reconsideration of how we think about international criminal justice, as principally embodied in the International Criminal Court (ICC) today, and the pushback against it by African countries. Starting from the premise that international justice is not simply about the law in a narrow sense but also about affect and emotions and the ways these get technocratically sublimated, accentuated, and expunged though legal discussions, Clarke maps out the discursive terrain of 20th and 21st century attempts to create criminal culpability for gross abuses of human rights such as genocide. The thrust of the book is twofold: first, that undergirding the history of international criminal law is a series of “sentimental narratives” about the nature and identity of victims; and that, second, African states’ pushback against the ICC should be understood as an attempt to reconfigure these narratives of victimhood (as well as accompanying ones such as culpability) and to center them in Africa’s history of being exploited by the West. Whereas a kind of Whiggish history of international criminal law might point to the resistance to the ICC by Kenya, South Africa, and other countries as examples of mendacious hypocrisy, Affective Justice suggests that these are part of a pan-African effort to reassert African agency, however incomplete the results of this effort might be in the end. Clarke develops these themes through a series of chapters based on fieldwork and interviews at selected international fora and with key African legal [End Page 367] professionals, such as Donald Deya of the Pan African Lawyers Union. Thus, the book is an effective argument for bringing the methodologies, theories, and sensibilities of contemporary anthropology to international law, to go beyond the “black-letter language of the law” to the “affective and socio-cultural universes that shape it” (259–260).

Affective Justice is divided into two parts. Part I spells out the “component parts” of international criminal law. Chapters 1 and 2 locate the book in a post-WWI history of the constitutive role international law has played in development of the international order, showing the normative role played by appeals to law and legal accountability in development and transitional justice. Of particular focus is the ICC and its precursors (the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals); Clarke uses these institutions to show how the idea of the “victim” has served as a kind of conjunction, drawing equivalences between different experiences of marginalization and suffering in the development of international criminal law. Chapter 3 uses the #BringBackOurGirls campaign that started after the kidnapping of hundreds of young women in Chibok, Nigeria, and led to a worldwide, celebrity-stuffed campaign, as a case study in the formation of the “perpetrator” and “victim” as a “critical fetish” (138) that feeds into a necessarily reductionist view of injustice and the solutions thereto. Chapter 4 focuses primarily on the ICC’s attempt to address the electoral violence in Kenya, and Clarke presents this as a compelling contrast with Chapter 3, showing how the legal notion of culpability transforms (some) notions of victimhood and perpetrator status, while sidelining others—here, the “longue durée of structural violence” (155) inflicted on Kenya going back to the colonial era.

Part II of Affective Justice focuses on the pan-African (that is, not country-specific) response to this international criminal law assemblage. Chapter 5 addresses the development of the African human rights system and, more specifically, the effort to establish an African Court with international criminal law jurisdiction. This was partially accomplished with the Malabo Protocol in 2014, which expanded the existing African Court of Justice and Human Rights by giving it jurisdiction not only over the crimes recognized by the ICC but also crimes such as piracy, terrorism, and the illicit exploitation of natural resources (the ICC has jurisdiction only over genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression). The central theme of Chapter 6 is African states’ wrestling with sovereignty and...