Abstract
Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic data, particularly from Northern Uganda, Leila Ullrich's theoretically and empirically informed book examines the operations of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This global tribunal has been portrayed as a ‘victims’ court’ because it places a significant emphasis on the rights and participation of victims throughout its proceedings. Ullrich's socio-legal opus challenges this image and offers original and grounded insights into how the ICC constructs the idea of the victim through its agents, mediators and procedures. At the same time, she traces victims’ resistance to fit the legal ‘mould’ they are required to embody. The metaphor of the cascade, as articulated in the book's title, illustrates the top-down flow of justifications and finger-pointing that arises, within and around the ICC, when legal processes do not produce the institutionally desired outcomes of legal accountability. This blame cascade begins with – mostly white, cosmopolitan – judges who tend to blame victims’ lawyers, who in turn point at local intermediaries, and finally, the blame falls onto victims themselves. In showing how blame is ultimately transferred to victims, who are typically from the Global South, Ullrich disrupts the image of the ‘justice cascade’ (Sikkink, 2011), whereby powerful defendants are brought before international courts to be made criminally accountable, thus ending impunity.
The author brilliantly lays out the analytical framework in the Introduction. The question of who is recognised as a victim and eligible to participate in legal proceedings represents a crucial issue within the ICC's justice ideology. This ideology is intrinsically linked to how legal subjects are constituted to be integrated into global capitalist social relations, within the dominant – disembodied, liberal and criminal law-centric – justice paradigm. Through Ullrich's account of the victim's experiences ‘in the field’ – outside the courtroom – the ideological role of international law and the ICC in reproducing capitalism becomes apparent. For instance, through the book we encounter the daily unpaid and underpaid work carried out by women who cook, look after children, support their communities and engage in other activities to sustain victims’ journeys. International law's operations, as Susan Marks, cited by Ullrich, puts it, naturalises and rationalises capitalism and the unjust property and power relationships that underpin it. At the same time, the international law apparatus obscures the coloniality of the world system in which it operates (Ullrich, 2024: 11).
In this context, victims are expected to become successful survivors who contribute to the goal of realising justice by duly participating in the ICC's proceedings. It is assumed that such participation will enable them to overcome harm and trauma and even to transform themselves into thriving entrepreneurs. Victims are schooled into the court's model of reparations, and if they fail to obtain redress, they are the ones blamed for not fulfilling their duties, which include travelling for hours to be interrogated by the ICC lawyers and attending numerous meetings (Chapter 3). That is, in the absence of legal outcomes, such as the establishment of criminal accountability and, consequently, reparations, lawyers, judges, and intermediaries at the top tiers of the ICC's ‘pyramid’ point to the victims at the base for not fulfilling their role as procedural parties. Under the surface of the processes’ formalities, such dynamics are concerned with the organisation and execution of labour under capitalism. Some people are paid; some are not. Moreover, part of the assistance generated by the ICC for the victims takes the form of microloans, which effectively turn people into long-term debtors, usually perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
As noted by some contemporary critics, the discourse against impunity that emphasises criminal investigation, prosecution and punishment, is central within international law, particularly in the context of human rights violations (Engle et al., 2016; Mavronicola, 2024; Tapia Tapia, 2022). This is evident at the ICC, which has adopted the slogan ‘humanity against crimes’ (Ullrich, 2024: 2). However, Ullrich in many ways decentres punishment and incarceration, rather than foregrounding the conditions that allow the ICC to be regarded as the victims’ court, including how ideologies of justice emerge and how they produce legal subjects in the service of capitalism. One of her key contributions is showing that the dominant justice ideology is not merely a set of abstract rules and principles; it is also an array of dynamic processes through which the everyday practices of lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), intermediaries, and victims are integrated into a power system. Victims are lured into participating in the ICC's processes, which often entails navigating complex and burdensome legal journeys. Yet, because legality regulates who is recognised as a victim, people who have suffered egregious violence may not always fit in the category. This was the case, as cited in the book, of a Kenyan woman who had been raped six times and her house burnt down, but did not have legal recourse due to being outside the temporal scope of the charges (p. 18).
The book importantly highlights that, for victims, ‘procedural justice’, that is, the model that foregrounds statutes, progression, formality and neutrality in judicial decision making, is not a priority. Neither are convictions. Instead, they are concerned with alleviating tangible harms and obtaining substantive redress, such as access to food, housing, financial resources, and, crucially, land (Chapter 6). Notably, it is primarily women who advocate for the return of land, yet their demands are often dismissed when they cannot prove individual ownership. This is within a legal system that largely disallows arrangements like communal property. Furthermore, women are more likely to be considered legal subjects as victims of domestic violence than to be regarded as defenders of land (p. 271).
In addition, whilst the ICC has incorporated the language of ‘transformative reparations’, originally crafted within penal abolitionism, it has not, in practice, facilitated a transformation of structural inequalities, such as land and wealth maldistribution (Chapter 5). Furthermore, many practitioners consider that transformative justice would entail the implementation of a ‘political’ agenda, which would be in opposition to the court's mandates of neutrality and objectivity. As a result, the duty to propitiate change does not fall on the Court but on the victim, who is expected to change herself into a proactive procedural subject. Part of being a proper victim is, of course, performing the societal roles assigned to workers under capitalism.
Against such a background, Ullrich's framing of social reproduction as a form of resistance to international law's disciplining power (Chapter 6), is a powerful account resulting from meticulous, ethical and detailed field work. It also constitutes an innovative integration between Marxist feminist debates and broader discussions about the relationship between international law, penality, and capitalism. Whilst the Court's understanding of justice is procedural and adversarial, women on the ground link justice to social reproduction and subsistence. For them, justice is about everyday life-making. Women reinvent formal spaces, such as meetings with the Court, NGOs, or intermediaries, as collective spaces where children play, and neighbours eat and chat (p. 38). In this way, they resist capitalism's tendency to hide the work of social reproduction. At the same time, Ullrich does not idealise unpaid and underpaid labour conducted by women in precarious circumstances. Instead, she identifies a tension between life-making and profit making; between survival and the market-oriented rendition of justice deployed by the ICC. Resistance occurs when individuals prioritise social reproduction over production. Here lies the potential to engender social change.
Leila Ullrich's opus has immense potential to illuminate future research and scholarship in fields such as international law, criminal law, human rights and legal anthropology. Her Marxist-feminist approach opens avenues for broader uses of political economy to look at the real-world operations of legal apparatuses and how legal subjects are produced within and outside courts. For instance, the unpaid affective and administrative labour that many women perform to support their own or their loved ones’ encounters with formal justice is still underexplored. Combined with an informed integration of anticolonial theories and critiques of imperialism, Ullrich's approach can also shed light on the law's renewed role in the reproduction of late racial capitalism.
