Books by Line Engbo Gissel
Making a Difference: The Impact of Transitional Justice
A growing number of academic works addresses political aspects of transitional justice (TJ), yet ... more A growing number of academic works addresses political aspects of transitional justice (TJ), yet the field of TJ operates with a largely implicit concept of politics. This chapter applies international political theory to understand different notions of the political in TJ scholarship, identifying a realist, liberal and constructivist conception of politics and its relationship to law. Each of these conceptions approaches TJ in a specific way that follows from their assumptions. To demonstrate how realist, liberal and constructivist approaches lead to different kinds of TJ, the chapter analyses an existing case of TJ practice and research: the African backlash against the International Criminal Court (ICC). In this case, the three conceptions of politics inform both the phenomenon (the backlash) and scholarly analysis of it. The chapter demonstrates that scholars, policymakers and practitioners act and reflect on TJ according to their particular and partial conceptions of politics and its relationship with law and justice.
Chapter in: Nandor Knust, Susanne Karstedt and Chrisje Brandt, Making a Difference: The Impact of Transitional Justice (forthcoming, Routledge)
Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts, 2020
This is the first chapter of the book Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts. In th... more This is the first chapter of the book Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts. In this chapter, we set out the theoretical framework and the arguments of the book. We also give an outline of the book.
Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts (2020, Zed Books), 2020
At the start of the twenty-first Century the story of Africa’s engagement with international law ... more At the start of the twenty-first Century the story of Africa’s engagement with international law was one of marked commitment and meaningful contributions. Africa pioneered new areas of law and legal remedies such as international criminal law, universal jurisdiction and gave human rights jurisdiction to a number of new international courts. However, in recent years African states have mobilized politically and collectively against the regional courts and the ICC, contesting these institutions’ authority and legitimacy at national, regional, and international levels. The African Backlash Against International Courts provides the first comprehensive account of this important phenomenon, bringing together original fieldwork, empirical analysis and a critical overview of the diverse scholarship on both international and African regional courts. Moving beyond conventional explanations, Peter Brett and Line Engbo Gissel use this remarkable research to show how the actions of African states should instead be seen as part of a growing desire for a more equal global order, a trend that not only has huge implications for Africa’s international relations, but that could potentially change the entire practice of international law.
The International Criminal Court and Peace Processes in Africa: Judicialising Peace (Routledge), 2018
How does involvement by the International Criminal Court (ICC) affect efforts to negotiate peace?... more How does involvement by the International Criminal Court (ICC) affect efforts to negotiate peace? This book offers an interpretive account of how peace negotiators and mediators in two peace processes in Uganda and Kenya sought to navigate and understand the new terrain of international justice, while also tracing how and why international decision-making processes interfered with the negotiations, narrated the conflicts and insisted on a narrow scope of justice. Building on this interpretive analysis, a comparative analysis of peace processes in Uganda, Kenya and Colombia explores a set of general features pertaining to the judicialisation of peace.
The book argues that the level and timing of ICC involvement is key to the ICC’s impact on peace processes and explains why this is the case: a high level of ICC involvement during the negotiation phase of a peace process delegates politico-legal and discursive authority away from peace process actors, while a low level of ICC involvement during the negotiation phase retains such forms of authority at the level of the peace process. As politico-legal authority enables the resolution of sticking points and discursive authority constructs the conflict and its resolution, the location of authority is important for the peace process. Furthermore, judicialisation affects the negotiation and implementation of a justice policy, with a narrowing scope for justice accompanying increasing levels of ICC involvement.
Journal Articles by Line Engbo Gissel
European Journal of International Relations, 2022
This article argues that transitional justice (TJ) has recently been standardised: There is now a... more This article argues that transitional justice (TJ) has recently been standardised: There is now a two-tiered global standard of TJ which structures policy responses and academic thinking. TJ comprises criminal justice, truth-telling, reparation and institutional reform-four core elements in a 'comprehensive' approach. The standard involves specifications for design, procedure and performance and draws on a selection of seemingly unambiguous international legal norms. Paradoxically, it claims to eschew a one-size-fits-all formula, while promoting uniformity in diverse contexts. It is moreover unclear whether its implementation generates beneficial effects in society. Building on existing research on international standardisation as an international political and sociological phenomenon, the article analyses the recently developed TJ standard and presents the first account of the process of TJ standardisation. It demonstrates how processes of 'generification' and 'localisation' make practices transferable and establish the means to facilitate their replication in and across different contexts and settings. These processes are illustrated drawing on existing scholarship from around the world that highlights the acceptance and contestation of and resistance to the standard. After analysing these processes, the article discusses the implications of TJ standardisation for societies, scholarship and global governance.
European Journal of International Law, 2018
This article seeks to understand the contemporary crisis in Africa's relationship with the Intern... more This article seeks to understand the contemporary crisis in Africa's relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) by going back to the Court's founding moment. It investigates African states' participation in the creation of the ICC, asking: Which kind of international criminal court did African countries seek to establish when negotiating the Rome Statute? To understand their vision for the ICC, the article provides an interpretive and systematic analysis of statements by African diplomats on the establishment of the ICC as delivered to the UN General Assembly between 1993 and 2003. Identifying and analysing the most salient themes found in these statements, the article argues that African diplomats sought to establish a court that differed in important respects from the existing ICC. The African diplomatic vision of the ICC centred on particular understandings of universality, participation, complementarity, court independence and sovereign equality. Importantly, the creation of the ICC was never solely about justice; it was also about sovereign inequality and global order. The alternative diplomatic vision for the ICC makes sense of the contemporary critique of the ICC by the African Union and many African countries. This makes the contemporary crisis both intelligible and deep-seated. Africa's relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) has seemingly nosedived. Since 2009, African state parties have made a number of decisions that have damaged the ICC's project of international justice: deciding to prohibit cooperation
Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2022
This article grounds contemporary contestations over the International Criminal Court (ICC) in th... more This article grounds contemporary contestations over the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the constitutive moment of the 1990s, when the Court was a global idea that took shape around a set of key concepts and related understandings of world order. It studies the positions communicated by 129 states during the negotiations of ICC establishment, applying Robert Cover’s narrative law and its pluralist notion of legal meaning to a systematic content analysis. Contrary to the founding ‘epic’ of ICC creation, which centres on the Like-Minded Group and its Others, the analysis identifies two competing and fairly coherent visions for the ICC: A compulsory and a consensual vision. Both aim to build an effective and independent Court, but understand these terms differently and consequently envisage different ICC regimes. The consensual vision has rarely been analysed, but is typically portrayed as the scattered ideas of an undecided majority. Given the Court’s profound lack of universality, however, it is useful to revisit the ideas that animated a large share of international society.
World Development, 2021
Tanzania’s President sent a plane to Madagascar in May 2020 to bring a shipment of Covid-Organics... more Tanzania’s President sent a plane to Madagascar in May 2020 to bring a shipment of Covid-Organics, a purported cure and prevention for COVID-19. The herbal remedy was described as a gift to help African countries in need. Drawing on preliminary data in English and Kiswahili from unstructured participant observation, social and legacy media available online and shared through contact channels, and ongoing conversations, we explore the Tanzanian policy response to COVID-19. What can the exemplary case of Covid-Organics in Tanzania help us to understand about South-South humanitarian assistance (SSHA) in times of crisis? We suggest that Covid-Organics has enabled the government to project a link to latent debates about Pan-Africanism and Julius Nyerere’s legacy and Madagascar’s SSHA has provided an opportunity for a public reflection on Africa’s place in the world. For some, the remedy’s ‘Africanness’ is its comparative advantage, even promising a continental renaissance. For others, the lack of scientific evidence or approval by global health authorities like WHO is delegitimizing. These findings suggest that receivers of SSHA make sense of it in both a broad, post-colonial discursive context and in a specific context of local contestation. If the promise of this particular form of aid is its ability to transcend deep divisions between North and South, the case of Covid-Organics suggests that SSHA draws on deep ideologies of Pan-Africanism; is increasingly important in crises that are global; and like other forms of humanitarianism, reflects elite politics and priorities rather than prioritizing the distribution of humanitarian goods and decreasing inequality.
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2022
If the International Criminal Court (ICC) manages to prosecute Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s former pre... more If the International Criminal Court (ICC) manages to prosecute Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s former president, for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, it will be because the new Sudanese regime arrested and extradited him. African parties to the ICC, who had a legal duty to detain al-Bashir, avoided or refused this dramatic step and instead made a regional commitment to shield him. This article analyses the question of non-cooperation in relation to the most basic challenge facing African governments: their survival. Drawing on the notion of the ‘gatekeeper state’, it theorises three sources of regime security, which variously converge and conflict: border control, domestic alliances and international support. Cooperation with the ICC may yield international support, while contradicting or undermining border control and domestic alliances A case study of Chad’s non-cooperation illustrates the framework and the dynamic interplay of the sources of regime security that cause shifts between cooperation and non-cooperation in African gatekeeper states. More generally, the article demonstrates the merits of analysing African non-cooperation in the context of a dynamic politics of regime survival.
European Journal of International Law, 2018
This article seeks to understand the contemporary crisis in Africa’s relationship with the Intern... more This article seeks to understand the contemporary crisis in Africa’s relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) by going back to the Court’s founding moment. It investigates African states’ participation in the creation of the ICC, asking: Which kind of international criminal court did African countries seek to establish when negotiating the Rome Statute? To understand their vision for the ICC, the article provides an interpretive and systematic analysis of statements by African diplomats on the establishment of the ICC as delivered to the UN General Assembly between 1993 and 2003. Identifying and analysing the most salient themes found in these statements, the article argues that African diplomats sought to establish a court which differed in important respects from the ICC that became. The African diplomatic vision of the ICC centered on particular understandings of universality, participation, complementarity, court independence, and sovereign equality. Importantly, the creation of the ICC was never solely about justice; it was also about sovereign inequality and global order. The alternative diplomatic vision for the ICC makes sense of the contemporary critique of the ICC by the AU and many African countries. This makes the contemporary crisis both intelligible and deep seated.
African Affairs, Feb 14, 2018
Africa has more international courts than any other continent. Yet international relations schola... more Africa has more international courts than any other continent. Yet international relations scholarship has failed to explain this African move to law. This article does so using Bayart’s concept of extraversion. It shows how the creation of international courts in the 1990s and early 2000s was the result of extraverted strategies for attracting international resources and pre-empting donor pressures for political and legal reforms. By adopting these strategies, African states failed to behave in the ‘strategic’ manner anticipated by both constructivist and liberal institutionalist international relations theory. International court creation did not reflect the pursuit of national interests or a response to normative NGO pressures. Making this argument, the article analyses the design and ratification of two new international courts: the SADC Tribunal and International Criminal Court. Using the case studies of Zimbabwe and Kenya, it shows how global scripts were repeated by even those states which have, in recent years, most vocally asserted their national interests against these courts.
Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2017
This article analyses the Juba peace negotiations on accountability and reconciliation. It advanc... more This article analyses the Juba peace negotiations on accountability and reconciliation. It advances a new interpretation of the Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation, focusing on five justice features: national proceedings, restorative accountability, alternative sentencing, individual responsibility and forward-looking victimhood. The article argues that the nature of the agreed justice policy derives from negotiators and mediators’ pursuit of international legitimation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its compliance constituency. This argument has implications for our understanding of the role of the ICC in internationally judicialised peace processes: the need for peace agreement legitimation combined with the legitimacy requirements in such peace processes structurally constitutes the ICC as metaphorically present in the negotiation room and thus akin to a third-party actor.
Global Society, 2017
This article studies the contemporary expression of transitional justice, a field of practice thr... more This article studies the contemporary expression of transitional justice, a field of practice through which global governance is exercised. It argues that transitional justice is being normalised, given the normative and empirical de-legitimisation of its premise of exceptionalism. The article theorises exceptionalism and normalcy in transitional justice and identifies three macro-level causes of normalisation: the legalisation, internationalisation and professionalisation of the field. This argument is illustrated by a study of Uganda's trajectory of transitional justice since 1986. Across five phases of transitional justice, processes of legalisation, internationalisation and professionalisation have contributed to the gradual dismantling of the country's exceptional justice. The case demonstrates, further, that normalisation is a contested and incomplete process.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Nov 1, 2015
This article investigates how involvement by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in situations... more This article investigates how involvement by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in situations of ongoing conflict affects peace processes. It argues that the level of ICC involvement is crucial for the Court’s impact on peace settlements and that this impact takes the form of delegating politico-legal and discursive authority away from peace process actors. To make this argument, the article disaggregates the processes of ICC involvement and peacemaking into component parts and conceptualizes a broad notion of judicialization. This analytical framework is applied to two cases with different negotiation outcomes: the Juba talks between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation between the Party of National Unity and the Orange Democratic Movement.
The Round Table, 2007
Focusing on young peoples' articulation of modernity in the imperial and the postcolonial context... more Focusing on young peoples' articulation of modernity in the imperial and the postcolonial contexts, this paper compares the winning essays submitted to the 1920s Empire Essay Competition with the 21st century entries in the Commonwealth Essay Competition. While the early essays articulate a universal notion of progress as the road to Anglo-Saxon state- and nationhood, the essays of today critically assess and critique modernity. The article argues that today's young people are engaged in a project of negotiating and redefining the modern, essentially a search for a historically and culturally particular modernity. In this way, the young writers become the producers of their own modernity, rather than the consumers of a Western modernity.
Papers by Line Engbo Gissel
Social Science Research Network, 2023
Africa has more international courts than any other continent. Yet international relations schola... more Africa has more international courts than any other continent. Yet international relations scholarship has failed to explain this African move to law. This article does so using Bayart's concept of extraversion. It shows how the creation of international courts in the 1990s and early 2000s was the result of extraverted strategies for attracting international resources and preempting donor pressures for political and legal reforms. By adopting these strategies, African states failed to behave in the 'strategic' manner anticipated by both constructivist and liberal institutionalist international relations theory. International court creation did not reflect the pursuit of national interests or a response to normative NGO pressures. Making this argument, the article analyses the design and ratification of two new international courts: the SADC Tribunal and International Criminal Court. Using the case studies of Zimbabwe and Kenya, it shows how global scripts were repeated by even those states which have, in recent years, most vocally asserted their national interests against these courts. …We are an outward reaching country, not inwards [looking]. We still think we can learn from others, notwithstanding that there can be unforeseen consequences...
Journal of Eastern African Studies, Mar 23, 2017
This article analyses the Juba peace negotiations on accountability and reconciliation. It advanc... more This article analyses the Juba peace negotiations on accountability and reconciliation. It advances a new interpretation of the Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation, focusing on five justice features: National proceedings, restorative accountability, alternative sentencing, individual responsibility and forward-looking victimhood. The article argues that the nature of the agreed justice policy derives from negotiators and mediators' pursuit of international legitimation by the ICC and its compliance constituency. This argument has implications for our understanding of the role of the ICC in internationally judicialised peace processes: The need for peace agreement legitimation combined with the legitimacy requirements in such peace processes structurally constitutes the ICC as metaphorically present in the negotiation room and thus akin to a third-party actor.
European Journal of International Law, Aug 1, 2018
This article seeks to understand the contemporary crisis in Africa's relationship with the Intern... more This article seeks to understand the contemporary crisis in Africa's relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) by going back to the Court's founding moment. It investigates African states' participation in the creation of the ICC, asking: Which kind of international criminal court did African countries seek to establish when negotiating the Rome Statute? To understand their vision for the ICC, the article provides an interpretive and systematic analysis of statements by African diplomats on the establishment of the ICC as delivered to the UN General Assembly between 1993 and 2003. Identifying and analysing the most salient themes found in these statements, the article argues that African diplomats sought to establish a court that differed in important respects from the existing ICC. The African diplomatic vision of the ICC centred on particular understandings of universality, participation, complementarity, court independence and sovereign equality. Importantly, the creation of the ICC was never solely about justice; it was also about sovereign inequality and global order. The alternative diplomatic vision for the ICC makes sense of the contemporary critique of the ICC by the African Union and many African countries. This makes the contemporary crisis both intelligible and deep-seated. Africa's relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) has seemingly nosedived. Since 2009, African state parties have made a number of decisions that have damaged the ICC's project of international justice: deciding to prohibit cooperation
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Books by Line Engbo Gissel
Chapter in: Nandor Knust, Susanne Karstedt and Chrisje Brandt, Making a Difference: The Impact of Transitional Justice (forthcoming, Routledge)
The book argues that the level and timing of ICC involvement is key to the ICC’s impact on peace processes and explains why this is the case: a high level of ICC involvement during the negotiation phase of a peace process delegates politico-legal and discursive authority away from peace process actors, while a low level of ICC involvement during the negotiation phase retains such forms of authority at the level of the peace process. As politico-legal authority enables the resolution of sticking points and discursive authority constructs the conflict and its resolution, the location of authority is important for the peace process. Furthermore, judicialisation affects the negotiation and implementation of a justice policy, with a narrowing scope for justice accompanying increasing levels of ICC involvement.
Journal Articles by Line Engbo Gissel
Papers by Line Engbo Gissel
Chapter in: Nandor Knust, Susanne Karstedt and Chrisje Brandt, Making a Difference: The Impact of Transitional Justice (forthcoming, Routledge)
The book argues that the level and timing of ICC involvement is key to the ICC’s impact on peace processes and explains why this is the case: a high level of ICC involvement during the negotiation phase of a peace process delegates politico-legal and discursive authority away from peace process actors, while a low level of ICC involvement during the negotiation phase retains such forms of authority at the level of the peace process. As politico-legal authority enables the resolution of sticking points and discursive authority constructs the conflict and its resolution, the location of authority is important for the peace process. Furthermore, judicialisation affects the negotiation and implementation of a justice policy, with a narrowing scope for justice accompanying increasing levels of ICC involvement.