Narratives of international criminal justice often depart from the horrors of World War II and the legal process of the Nuremberg Trials to set the scene for how the International Criminal Court addresses contemporary violence. These narratives can be found in academic books and articles as well as in films, even art works. There are goodies and baddies, conflict and resolution, war and justice. The problems with the over-simplicity of this narrative and how it renders some subjects hyper-visible and obscures others, are questions of aesthetics and of international criminal justice. 

The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice is an edited collection with chapters that set out to unpack and problematise how aesthetics and international justice interrelate. Engaging with questions of justice across a range of institutions, geographical sites and subject positions, there is a breadth of chapters that further advances the understanding of both aesthetics and counter-aesthetics and of international justice.

The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice is also a curated collection operating at the intersection of aesthetics and international justice scholarship. Engaging with the work of violence and justice as expressed through different genres and forms, authors and artists in this collection push the boundaries of international justice through a variety of aesthetic forms. 

The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice is thus a collection that makes contributions across (at least) two dimensions: its analysis and arguments advance the knowledge on international justice, and its mixture of genres push the boundaries of how knowledge is presented in academic work. It is this combination of content rich and genre bending chapters that makes this such an exciting collection. Alongside more traditionally structured academic chapters, we find a screenplay, an artwork, parables, a poem, a comic, and interviews. While each chapter is certainly a contribution in and of itself, as a variegated whole, the collection is a forceful challenge to both the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of representations of international justice.  

Within this variegated whole, there are some recurring themes. The spectacular and marketisation is one theme. Victim representations is another. Indeed, for a collection with 13 chapters (and two introductions) on aesthetics and international justice, it is noticeable that so many focus on victim representations. Sofia Stolk unpacks how victims’ voices are mediated within an educational video by the International Criminal Court; Padraig McAuliffe identities six victim figures within transitional justice discourse (the victim as ‘active liberal citizen’, as ‘normal’, as ‘indigent’ etc); Ruby Mae Axelson and Wayne Jordash present ‘a view from practice’ on the dissonance between the role victims are said to hold in international criminal justice and the role they are actually accorded; Alex Batesmith traces how a victims of the Khmer Rouge regime engages with the judicial process, and sheds light on the dominant aesthetics and the counter aesthetics of that process; and Carolina Alosno Bejarano and Peter Quach tell in their comic a story of victim agency and reflect in their interview on healing and kinship. In addition to these victim-centred chapters, two more chapters deal with representations of subject positions: Anne Neylon problematises the image of the asylum seeker and Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Deger Ozkaramanli critique the construction of the ‘grateful refugee’. In total, more than a third of the chapters in this collection thus explicitly engage with representations of particular subject positions. 

Perhaps because this is a line of questioning that resonates with my own research interests, it made me wonder: why is it that research into the aesthetic of international justice so often turn to victim representations as the locus of inquiry and critique? What kind of aesthetics enables, even encourages this form of critique? 

Schwöbel-Patel and Knox have divided the collection into two parts: the first on aesthetics and the second on counter-aesthetics of international justice. Aesthetics, as they note, is often approached as a question of beauty and the beautiful, and in international justice scholarship, this often takes a visual turn (p5). And while the collection certainly poses questions regarding the visual, the editors take this visual aspect into an enquiry into how aesthetics is always necessarily political. Building on Rancière and Debord, they emphasise that ‘the distribution of the sensible’ is not a neutral practice but rather one of inclusion and exclusion and operates within the ideology of late capitalism. Of particular interest to them is the aesthetics of international justice within the capitalist and racialized structures (p9): who benefits from certain dominant representations within these structures, and who / what are excluded? All chapters in the first part of the collection except the presentation of Terry Duffy’s ‘International Justice Robe’ focus on particular subject positions. The chapters here unpack representations of victims, asylum seekers and refugees as they figure across a range of institutions, and do so primarily to problematise simplistic representations and to illuminate exclusions and omissions. 

In the second part, Schwöbel-Patel and Knox present counter-aesthetic as operating within a tradition that seeks to move away from or contest dominant, Western conceptions of art. They present three techniques to do so: rupture, détournement, and solidarity aesthetics. Rupture in international justice is exemplified in mockumentaries with all too stereotypical actors that interrupt the representation by breaking the fourth wall. Détournement, which can be translated as diversion, misappropriation or hijacking, is a technique by which expressions are – playfully and ironically – used to turn against themselves. Finally, solidarity aesthetics is perhaps less playful and more traditional than rupture or détournement in its technique of storytelling, but is ‘counter’ in how the technique gives voice to those who in dominant aesthetics are silenced or excluded. The chapters in this part are somewhat more varied in foci as well as in genre, with two chapters offering counter-aesthetics of victims that challenge dominant representations. 

So how do these approaches to aesthetics enable or lend themselves to research on victims and other particular subject positions within international justice? ‘Victims’ are represented – in this collection and elsewhere – within a range of aesthetic forms and approaches: victims figure within dominant representations and in solidarity aesthetics; they are problematically ‘othered’ and agentic figures of parrhesias. These (mis-)representations are affective. Whereas Schwöbel-Patel and Knox curate the engagements with aesthetics and the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière) towards the ideological and (anti-)capitalist, another approach to aesthetics adds to how and why victims figure so often in relation to international justice. This approach is more concerned with aesthetics as sensitising or desensitising and questions of how deeply something affects. Rejecting the Kantian concern with aesthetics as rationality and beauty, those engaging with this form of aesthetics instead draw more directly on the etymological origin of aesthetics as sense perception, an understanding which remains in the term ‘anaesthetics’ as that which numbs or desensitises. This approach to aesthetics is only briefly made explicit in the collection but adds a dimension to why research at the intersection of aesthetics and international justice so often focus on victims. In other words, representations of victims are affective: they are infuriating, inspiring, pathetic, numbing, striking and move us to action.

There is much in The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice that one finds striking: problematic and infuriating representations that are unpacked and critiqued, as well as moving and thoughtful takes in genres that are inspire and provoke. The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice is a must read.