Money and Land: Resistance in Times of Capitalist Complementarity

Abstract

Abstract A key question scholars often ask about international criminal justice is whether affected communities support or oppose it. Do they want international criminal trials or rather domestic trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, or local justice rituals? This question overlooks that many people, supportive or critical, are willing to engage with the Court. They come to the Court’s meetings and enter into relationships with the Court’s staff and intermediaries. For that reason, it is important to study what people do and not only what they say. What I noticed observing the Court’s victims and outreach meetings in Kenya and Uganda is that victims often come late to the meetings, they bring along their children and people who were not invited by the Court, they haggle about transport reimbursement, and they forget what they were taught last time by the victims’ lawyers. Their lives centre around subsistence and social reproduction and that shapes their engagement with the Court. From this vantage point, this chapter will reread resistance to international criminal justice drawing on ideology and social reproduction theory. Such a rereading, first, suggests that, rather than a blanket refusal to engage, resistance often manifests in victims’ attempts to redefine the relationship with the Court. Secondly, it demonstrates how in mixed economies in the Global South that combine market and subsistence production, and where women still have access to communal land, social reproduction can become a means of resistance to global governance and its colonial capitalist relations, making women key agents of resistance.