Beyond Punishment
International criminal justice is under pressure. Powerful actors, from Washington to Moscow, have launched virulent attacks on its institutions, while liberal and progressive forces increasingly defend them as essential to a rule-based international order. At the same time, international criminal law has become a particularly powerful language through which demands for justice are articulated in response to mass violence, war and genocide around the world. However, critical voices also question the scope and impact of this legal discourse in terms of structural societal transformation. What might justice look like when approached through repair and restitution instead of punishment and retribution?
This panel explores the possibilities and limits of imagining justice primarily through the language and institutions of criminal law. We will discuss what international criminal justice can do and what it leaves unresolved. Through an abolitionist lens, we will question how capable it is to address structural conditions to mass violence, such as international complicity. Lastly, we will discuss forms of political practice, repair, and resistance that are needed alongside or beyond legal accountability, notably by inviting the Israeli-Palestinian NGO Combatants for Peace to present their work.
Speakers
Marta Pinto da Cruz is a PhD fellow at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Criminal Justice, whose doctoral research questions the centrality of carceral punishment in international criminal law, in light of the nature and context of atrocity crimes, as well as the goals of international criminal justice. In addition to her research, she also lectures on several topics ranging from comparative criminal law and procedure, to the procedural law of international criminal courts and tribunals.
Lysan Boshuyzen is a facilitator, coach, and advisor of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in humanitarian and (post-)conflict contexts with a special focus on collective and generational dimensions of trauma and victim-perpetrator dynamics. Over the last decade, she trained groups in protracted crisis and conflict areas, worked at the Dutch MFA, ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre, ARQ Centre of Expertise on War, Persecution and Violence, and alongside three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Dr Scilla Elworthy, humanitarian workers and peacebuilders worldwide. She serves as director of Netherlands Friends of Combatants for Peace, co-founded DAYF, a foundation supporting resilience and mental health worldwide, contributed to the book The Business Plan for Peace: Building a World Without War (2017) and coauthored Taking Action Towards Sustainable Peace: Integrating Peacebuilding and Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (2023). In her work she integrates 15 years of meditation and somatic practice and combines in-depth knowledge of trauma fields with political and practical experience.
Iris Gur is an Israeli human rights activist, former school principal, and mother of three. She is active in Combatants for Peace and Jordan Valley Activists, and speaks to audiences around the world, sharing her personal journey and advocating for peace, justice, and human rights. She is deeply committed to resisting the occupation and working toward a future of collective liberation, freedom, and justice for all people living in the region.
Wouter Werner is professor of international law at the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. In 2022 he finished his project on practices of repetition in international law, with a focus on restatements, moot courts and cinematic representations of international law. This resulted in the book “Repetition and International Law”, published by Cambridge University Press. His current research focuses on the notion of the absurd in international law, the evolution of customary law and re-enactment practices in international law.
Leo Ranieri (moderator) has a multidisciplinary background spanning the biomedical sciences, medical anthropology, politics, and philosophy. His interest lays at the nexus of these disciplines, particularly around the notion of “the human” and who gets to be considered as such. He mobilises a philosophical repertoire inspired by the biomedical sciences to speculate towards a novel conceptual vocabulary geared at contemporary political problems, notably questions of borders, gender, and identity.
