Periodic Reporting for period 3 - JustSites (The Global Sites of International Criminal Justice)
Période du rapport: 2022-01-01 au 2023-06-30
The project moves beyond the conventional focus on courts and their context to investigate the more diverse constellation of justice sites – focusing in particular on the balances of authority and power that affect the relations between them. The main objective of the JustSites project is to contribute new frontier scholarship that provides a fuller and more accurate picture of how international criminal justice actually works, develops and has impact. To this end it makes the sites of sites of justice and the relations between them its main research object. JustSites scholarship is published in international, peer-reviewed outlets and shared with relevant stakeholders and policy makers, for instance through conferencing and blogging.
Contributing the first investigation of the wider constellation of justice sites is not only of value as new and original research, but is crucial for understanding the wider social, legal and political impact of this field of law. As such, the project is of importance not only to victims and communities affected by atrocity crimes, but also for practitioners working in the different justice sites, as well as for policy makers and stakeholders that design future responses to atrocity crimes as well as to other forms of globalized crime.
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.
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.