This is a hybrid event. Registration information is below.

Oumar Ba discusses the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its relationship with African states at this week's seminar with the Reppy Institute. RSVP to attend and learn more below.

About the speaker

Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His primary areas of research focus on law, violence, race, humanity, and world order(s) in global politics. He is the author of States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge, 2020). He is currently working on two major projects - Crimes, Against Humanity: Governing Global Justice, and (Re)Centering Decolonization as Ontology and Sifting through the Archives of Liberation.

About the talk

The scholarship on the relationship between African states and the International Criminal Court (ICC) tends to point to various contentions stemming from the quasi-exclusive focus of the Court on the continent and its citizens, and the disputes regarding head-of-state immunity. It is also often pointed out that African states were early and eager supporters of the international criminal justice regime. Yet, the current international legal order is starkly different from the one that African states had envisioned. By revisiting the archives of two pivotal moments in the establishment of the current international legal order – the work of the International Legal Commission (ILC) in drafting the Code of Crimes Against The Peace and Security of Mankind and negotiations that led to draft statute of the ICC, we find that Africa had proposed a different version of the international legal order. This article contends that for African states, their vision for an international legal order was linked to their history of colonial subjugation, colonial wars, wars of liberation, and conflicts after the independences. Therefore, the Draft Code and establishment of the ICC were meant to provide an avenue for redress, amidst a deep mistrust between Africa and “international law”.

This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

Register here

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