Symposium on art, aesthetics, and international Justice. Art, aesthetics, justice, and reconciliation: What can art do?

Abstract

The potential convergence of art and international justice has received greater attention in recent years. In light of recognition of the limitations of international courts1 and the challenges of outreach, scholars and practitioners have begun to seek alternative ways of fostering engagement among the communities most affected by the crimes under their jurisdiction. In this context, the question has arisen: What can art do? What is the potential role of art and aesthetics in furthering goals of international courts beyond justice, i.e., towards peace and reconciliation? In this essay, I discuss three ways in which art has enormous potential, while also acknowledging that there are associated risks and challenges that might cause us to temper our enthusiasm. First, visual methodologies can help us to articulate the extent to which the process itself is visual and performative: a “spectacle.” This can be especially apparent where international justice is invoked to reinforce the power of the state, faith in justice and the rule of law, or to relate a particular historical narrative. In this regard, it becomes a site of storytelling. Second, visual images and artistic approaches can be deployed as a method or practice not only to communicate the work of courts in “outreach,” but also to engage affected communities in an ongoing process of rearticulation, reworking, and even rejecting the work of international courts and other transitional justice mechanisms.2 They help to uncover not only what international justice looks like at a particular moment in time, but also to think more eclectically about how justice and reconciliation are continually enacted, reimagined, contested, and resisted. Third, they can uncover important new perspectives on the purported goals, processes, and outcomes of international courts, especially highly contested concepts such as justice and reconciliation. Here, I am making an assertion that reconciliation is a goal of international justice, which itself is contestable. Nevertheless, while reconciliation was not explicitly included in the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), it was included in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s (ICTR’s) mandate, and it has increasingly been seen as inextricably tied to goals of justice, peace, and deterrence, as a means of ensuring “non-recurrence.” Arts and creative processes encourage a fundamental rethinking or reframing of what we might understand processes of reconciliation to entail, and how they unfurl. I argue that the emergent, unstable, and open-ended character of art can provide “discursive space” in which a form of dialogic reconciliation might occur.