Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice

By Randle C. DeFalco.

This book explores the ways aesthetic considerations shape how international crimes are recognized and categorized. It identifies a dominant aesthetic model of atrocities as horrific spectacles and identifies various forms of mass violence, from the enforcement of famine conditions to socio-economic oppression, that fail to conform to this model.

International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an ‘atrocity’ is remains undefined and undertheorized. This book examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of mass violence and the backgrounding or complete invisibilization of others. In doing so, it identifies various, seemingly banal ways through which international crimes may be committed and demonstrates how the criminality of such forms of violence and abuse tends to be obfuscated. This book suggests that the failure to address these ‘invisible atrocities’ represents a major flaw in the current international criminal justice system, one that produces a host of problematic repercussions and undermines the legal legitimacy of international criminal law itself.

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