The Global Sites of International Criminal Justice

Project Information

JustSites

Grant agreement ID: 802053

DOI

10.3030/802053

Project closed

EC signature date 8 November 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 31 December 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 497 436,00

EU contribution

€ 1 497 436,00

Coordinated by

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - JustSites (The Global Sites of International Criminal Justice)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The JustSites project developed and deployed a new way of studying the social conditions that shape how atrocity crimes accountability is produced. Hinging on its original definition of the ‘justice sites’, the project analysed how such localised organisations work to produce international criminal justice in some of the most topical contemporary conflicts around the world. Conducting fieldwork in relation to several different conflicts and countries, the project underlined how agents in justice sites face opportunities and obstacles that are structured by their physical and organisational rootedness as well as by relations to other sites working either close to where crimes occurred or outside of the country in question. Collaborating or competing across Global North/East/South divides, justice sites as different as the International Criminal Court (ICC), NGOs, law firms, think tanks, investigative mechanisms, media outlets, and academic research centres depend on each other to produce accountability for international crimes. The potential impact, opportunities, and obstacles of these different justice sites are shaped by their locality that, for instance, gives them access to specific networks in The Hague where the ICC is headquartered or to witnesses and evidence in a specific case country.

Taking the physical conditions and global relations of the justice sites as its main research objects, the project contributed frontier theoretical and empirical perspectives on how international criminal justice works in practice – as well as on why it often fails to work as intended. It also contributed tools that connect the justice sites to localised organisations in other fields. For instance, the justice sites often face obstacles defined by what the project calls ‘practice sites’, some of which are linked to states that are sceptical towards international criminal justice. Sites outside of the field of international criminal justice often work according to converging or oppositional logics. As such, the developed framework enables critical studies of how international criminal justice is situated in a larger global space characterised by competing norms and goals, including those linked to state interests or to other stakeholders involved in defining distinct forms of justice, peace, and security at the domestic and global levels.

Contributing the first investigation of the wider constellation of justice sites is not only of scientific value. It is crucial for understanding the wider social, legal and political impact, or lack thereof, of this field of law. As such, the results produced by the project are also of importance for practitioners working in different justice sites, as well as for policy makers and stakeholders that design future responses to atrocity crimes or plan wider efforts to create lasting peace and security.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first two and a half years of the JustSites project have been focused on building original databases on the sites of justice, the agents working in them and the perspectives on international criminal justice they produce and promote. For instance, the team has built a large database of more than 1.000 agents that work in (and at times across) the different sites of justice. In parallel to building original datasets, a new research team has been built from the ground up. Recruited from a global pool of applicants, the JustSites team includes researchers with expertise in law, sociology, linguistics, criminology and policing. In addition to working with new datasets, JustSites researchers have performed interviews with key stakeholders, although the number of interviews has been limited: Fieldwork to a number of important sites of justice had to be postponed because of COVID-19.

So far, the main results of the project have been published in scholarly outlets, on blogs and communicated at conferences. The research output builds on collected datasets to produce original perspectives on international criminal justice. For instance, JustSites publications have analyzed the linkages and differences between sites focused narrowly on international criminal justice and sites invested more broadly in transitional justice and policing. These results contextualize the collective work that takes place in the sites of justice and demonstrate how the relations between them are embodied, for instance, in different types of professional power. These forms of professional power are closely linked to particular normative perspectives on what forms of justice are perceived as most valuable. Contributing new perspectives on the forms of professional and symbolic power that characterize relations between the sites of justice, the results pave the way for future studies of how the larger constellation of justice sites has developed over time and what effects it has had on the effort to end impunity as well as on other social, legal and political initiatives.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

JustSites publications have pushed beyond the state of the art by contributing new thinking tools designed to enable future studies of the justice sites and by empirically investigating the differences and linkages between specific sites of justice. With regard to thinking tools, JustSites have developed new concepts that make intelligible how the power relations between sites of justice work and develop. For instance, publications have demonstrated how the proximity to or distance from the state, as well as relations to specific parts of its bureaucracy, can affect power relations between the sites of justice. Concepts developed in previous publications will be used in future research and some have already been tested in empirical studies. These empirical perspectives push beyond court-centered literature to investigate how collective work performed in different sites of justice – spread out across the globe – affect material and symbolic developments in the field of international criminal justice.

In the coming years, JustSites results will build on progress made beyond the state of the art in at least two ways: First of all, JustSites researchers will contribute deeper studies of how the specific power relations between agents in distinct sites of justice work and develop. The JustSites project employs three PhD and two postdoc researchers who all focus on specific such relations. Second of all, JustSites research, primarily that of the principal investigator, will contribute frontier perspectives on the larger constellation of justice sites, its power dynamics and how they have evolved over time. Such contributions will demonstrate how the constellation of justice sites was affected by larger global transformations and how the constellation itself has effects in the world.

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