Abstract
As criminal law increasingly traverses borders, while also being deployed to reinforce them (Stumpf, 2006; Aas and Bosworth, 2013) people routinely find themselves living within multiple legal regimes. For some, this legal pluralism is personal. It is from this subjective starting point that this chapter asks what does comparative work in international and transnational criminal law look like when we ground it in a person’s experience? To answer this question, the chapter is structured in three parts. In the first part, I discuss how the scholarship on international and transnational criminal law has been characterised by an interest in traversing or superseding national borders, framed as responses to universal wrongs or shared security threats.It offers scholarly terrain in which comparative analysis abounds and comparative legal methods provide a valuable set of tools to start to understand the recursive relationships among these different sites of criminal justice law making.
Drawing on ethnographic insights from comparative law, the second part then argues for the value of personalising the comparative method in international criminal law. This method of comparison becomes something that is deeply rooted in personal accounts of transnational legal orders. Drawing on a set of seventeen qualitative interviews with individuals found guilty of participating in the genocide, I show the deeply personal nature of the post-genocide justice seeking. I argue that this offers the comparative lawyer a crucial opportunity to make visible temporal aspects of legal comparison.
In the third and final part, I show how this temporal orientation opens up important diachronic and synchronic comparative dimensions for criminal justice. I lay out how the diachronic opportunities enable a closer engagement with the continued coloniality of international and transnational criminal law. This sits alongside the synchronic potential, which brings a wider set of regulatory responses into the discussion on criminal justice.
Drawing on ethnographic insights from comparative law, the second part then argues for the value of personalising the comparative method in international criminal law. This method of comparison becomes something that is deeply rooted in personal accounts of transnational legal orders. Drawing on a set of seventeen qualitative interviews with individuals found guilty of participating in the genocide, I show the deeply personal nature of the post-genocide justice seeking. I argue that this offers the comparative lawyer a crucial opportunity to make visible temporal aspects of legal comparison.
In the third and final part, I show how this temporal orientation opens up important diachronic and synchronic comparative dimensions for criminal justice. I lay out how the diachronic opportunities enable a closer engagement with the continued coloniality of international and transnational criminal law. This sits alongside the synchronic potential, which brings a wider set of regulatory responses into the discussion on criminal justice.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Research Handbook of Comparative Criminal Justice |
| Editors | David Nelken, Claire Hamilton |
| Publisher | Edward Elgar |
| Chapter | 15 |
| Pages | 261 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978 1 83910 637 8 |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |