International Crimes as Familiar Spectacles: Socially Constructed Understandings of Atrocity and the Visibility Politics of International Criminal Law

This thesis examines the role aesthetic considerations play in the development of shared social and legal understandings of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Utilizing a social constructivist, interactional legal theory analytical framework, I argue that aesthetic considerations play a major role in identifying these international crimes. The “visibility politics” resulting from this heavy reliance on aesthetic factors in turn, influence social interactions through which shared understandings of these crimes are developed, resulting in shared understandings of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes being embedded in a particular aesthetic model of atrocity. According to this model, atrocity crimes are expected to manifest themselves as familiar spectacles of violence and abuse that are both shocking and intuitively “criminal” in nature. While at first glance, this understanding may appear to merely reflect the extraordinary scale of atrocity crimes themselves, the notion that such crimes will necessarily manifest themselves according to this aesthetic model ignores the complexities of mass harm causation, and the substance of international criminal law (ICL). Chapter one, combining insights from interactional legal theory and the field of neuroaesthetics, theorizes ICL as an environment conducive to aesthetic considerations influencing relevant norm development processes. Chapter two, through an analysis of how the language of atrocity is deployed within ICL discourses, argues that shared understandings of atrocity crimes are grounded in an aesthetic model of atrocities as familiar spectacles of violence and abuse. Chapter three demonstrates that this aesthetic model fails to account for the complexity of real-world atrocity situations and the wide variety of means through which genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes may be committed. Chapter four examines how visibility politics have shaped social and legal understandings of processes of mass killing and abuse in Khmer Rouge era Cambodia and elsewhere. Chapter five argues that visibility politics undermine the aims of ICL and negatively influence historical memory and the distribution of human rights, transitional justice, and peacebuilding resources. Chapter six, returning to interactional legal theory, argues that the visibility politics of ICL also impair the legality legitimacy of ICL itself, by undermining ICL’s adherence in practice to interactionalism’s criteria of legality.S.J.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0