Mandy @ POLI 333D

Blog (and therefore its posts) that I like: No hesitation in answering – Justice in Conflict (JiC)!

JiC talks about international criminal justice through reporting and analyzing the work of international human rights organizations (mostly in Africa). My favorite blogs are those on the International Criminal Court (ICC) – an international organization which intrigues me the most.

My lately favorite post is the one in which Mark Kersten defends the ICC as not a “racist” institution (an accusation raised by African states), whose cases always are aimed at Africa but whose membership is composed of a high number of African signatories. Kersten gathers defenses of the ICC by its proponents. Among them the most convincing one is the quote from William Schabas:

“The root of the problem is not an obsession with Africa but rather a slow but perceptive shift of the Court away from the apparent independence shown in its early years towards a rather compliant relationship with the Security Council and the great powers.”

However, although Kersten has the same stance as all these defenses, he considers them as not convincing enough, because they ignore the fundamental contradictory behaviors of African signatories:

“If the Court is racist, then it holds that African states have supported and engaged in a racist process. The racist critique would suggest that these African states have been somehow fooled into joining the Court by duplicitous, white, Western states. But who truly believes that states like South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, etc. are, to put it bluntly, that stupid? What African state would willingly join a Court that was racist against it?”

As such, he concludes by arguing,

“But to call (the ICC) racist is not only wrong, it deflects from the real problems facing international criminal justice.”

I really like how Kersten not only defends the ICC but also seeks to find out the problems of existing discourses. A lot of times our perception on an issue gets influenced subconsciously by the language used by people/media. This problem is often addressed by JiC (and Kersten), which aims to unfold underlying messages in these discourses by analyzing various arguments for/against a stance.

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Blog (and sometimes its posts) that I dislike: David Bosco on Foreign Policy

I believe that David Bosco is an intelligent man, but for unknown reason he tends to cite others’ comments without elaborating on them and providing his stances. I wonder if that is because he submits posts on a daily basis and therefore his blog is more about gathering arguments rather than providing its own. However, if that’s the case, I find his blog quite unsatisfactory (here I share Aim’s sentiment: I want to read MORE!).

For example, Bosco posted about Hilary Clinton’s comments on referring Syria to the ICC (yes the ICC again 🙂 ), in which Clinton suggests that declaring  President Bashar al-Assad as a war criminal might “complicate a resolution of a difficult complex situation because it limits options to persuade leaders perhaps to step down from power.”

Bosco suggests Clinton’s comment reflects that “the United States doesn’t see international justice as helpful in the Syrian context”

This is a hasty statement, given Clinton has already mentioned that she is not opposed to declaring Al-Assad as a war criminal, but is aware of the repercussions of such attempt. Besides, Bosco does not seem to be impartial to argue that the U.S. as a whole sees international justice as unhelpful in the Syrian case just because of Clinton’s comment.  It would be more convincing to argue such by providing statements of other U.S. officials and actions of the U.S.

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