Description
Within liberal institutionalist circles of International Relations and International Law, international criminal justice has been lauded for its commitment to universal human rights and condemnation of crimes against humanity. The (re)emergence of international criminal tribunals in the 1990s solidified this normative understanding of criminal justice as a path to the prevention and accountability of mass atrocities internationally. However, critiques from postcolonial scholars and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) have unsettled this assumption of international criminal justice as a universal site of human rights and justice. For example, critiques have been waged against the International Criminal Court (ICC) for predominantly investigating crimes committed in Africa, overlooking crimes committed by Western and European countries, often against populations in the Global South. Contemporary international criminal justice, through these critiques, is seen as a continuation of the colonial civilising mission, of distinguishing between ‘savage’ criminals, ‘hapless’ victims, and ‘paternal’ saviours. These three logics follow global hierarchies, whereby criminals and victims are located in peripheral or ‘distant’ lands, while the saviours are embodied by the Western, international community. In this paper, I trace this civilising mission at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), applying Makau Mutua’s metaphor of savages-victims-saviours to the realm of international criminal justice. More specifically, I queer this logic, arguing that the ICTY (re)produces and depends on gendered and sexualised invocations of the savages-victims-saviours trope. In this way, the ICTY extends the civilising mission of international criminal justice to ‘the Balkans’, reinforcing the distinction between the ‘unruly’ criminality in the former Yugoslavia, and the ‘civilised’ paternalism of the international community.
Keywords: international criminal justice, queer theory, ICTY, postcolonial critique, Balkanism
