Fictions of justice

This compelling volume takes up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in a new rule of law regime to produce a new lan guage of international justice that competes with a range of other religious and cultural formations. It explores how declarations of "justice," like "law," have the power to bury the normative political apparatus within which they are embedded, thereby obscuring the processes of their making. The book demonstrates how these notions of justice are produced as necessary social fictions - as fictions that we need to live with. By examining the making of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court in multiple global sites, the application of its jurisdiction in sub-Saharan Africa, and the related contestations on the African continent, the author details the way that notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grass roots contestations. Among these micropractices are speech acts that revere the protection of human rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that point out the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies. By detailing the rendering illegible of certain justice constructs and the celebration of others, the book journeys through the problem of incommensurability and the politics of exclusion in our social world. In an attempt to pay attention to the diverse expressions of justice within which theories of legal pluralism circulate, the author ends by calling for a critical transnational legal pluralism. This approach takes seriously the role of translation and the making of fictions of meaning as they play out in unequal relations of power.

Kamari Maxine Clarke is a professor of anthropology at Yale University and a research scientist at the Yale Law School. Her areas of research explore issues related to religious nationalism, legal institutions, interna tional law, the interface between culture and power, and their relationship to the modernity of race and late capitalist globalization. Her recent arti cles and books have focused on transnational religious and legal movements and the related production of knowledge and power. They include Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Com munities (2004) and Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006). Her forthcoming titles are Testimonies and Transformations: Reflections on the Use of Ethnographic Knowledge and Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era. Professor Clarke has lectured throughout the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean on a wide range of topics. She is Director of the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis and Chair of the Yale Council on African Studies.