Colonized Justice

Late last year I reluctantly decided to attend a talk which I thought would be quite tiring and uninteresting. At the end I only ended up assisting because of the persuasion of a colleague, but to my surprise after a couple of minutes I soon realized that I was taking part in one of the most interesting discussion that I had been a part of in a long time.

The main speaker of the talk was Professor Daniel Komakech the Head of The Department of African Studies at The Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies from Gulu University, in northern Uganda[i]. I cannot recall the exact topic of the talk, but his presentation soon turned to the issue of Joseph Kony, the mythic leader of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army and his arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in October 2005. It was at this time that professor Komakech mentioned for the first time a very interesting term that I had never heard before in my academic career, ‘colonized justice’. 

Throughout my academic studies I have devoted a good amount of time and effort into studying the diverse manifestations, effects, and long term legacies of colonization around the world, yet the idea of justice as being something that could be considered as ‘colonized’ had never occurred to me before. “Why is it that the community and the people that are the direct victims of the LRA’s atrocious acts not the ones that are going to be able to judge Joseph Kony” asked Professor Komakech, “Why is it that an international tribunal, in a country most people in northern Uganda barely know about, presided by judges that Ugandans can hardly identify with, and most likely sentenced according to laws entirely foreign to them; can then be considered as justice” he continued.

“How interesting”, I said to myself after hearing this strange and exiting new argument. Could it be possible that the international community’s approach to persecuting people that commit unspeakable crimes in little know regions of the world be fundamentally wrong? Could a prestigious institution within the international justice system like the International Criminal Court be not much more than a glorified promoter of colonialist values and ideas? Could it be possible that our quest to bring a broader level of justice to the world is nothing more than what William Easterly called “the white man’s burden”?[ii] Is it possible that justice has become not much more than a publicly tradable commodity? All of these were questions that quickly raced through my head as I was hearing the words slowly coming out of the lecture’s mouth. 

Nevertheless, as revolutionary and innovative as these thoughts might be I certainly did not feel quite comfortable yet with taking such a cynical view of the numerous efforts taken by the international community to tackle mass violations of human rights around the world. I could theoretically understand the ideas and motivations behind the concept of ‘colonized justice’, but certainly one could also argue that the international community has a right, if not a duty, to intervene in some capacity in those cases where a state is unable or unwilling to carry out any type of judicial action against the perpetrator of egregious and globally condemnable crimes. And yet somehow, as I was hearing professor Komakech speak, this idea of the international community’s duty to intervene did not seem to resonate with me as strongly as it had so many times before.

Is there an alternative?

I then naturally began to ponder, to imagine what could be a possible alternative to international interventions in the realm of judicial prosecutions. If we start considering this idea of justice as something than can be colonized, how then do we reconcile this concept with our desire to prevent widespread violence and grave abuses of human rights around the world? Surely we can agree that the need for a certain level of justice is vital in order to bring and preserve at least the most basic level of peace, security and stability in conflict and post-conflict areas around the world. 

It was at this moment that Professor Komakech proposed an interesting paradigm shift from our traditional, mechanistic, colonized view of justice, into what he termed ‘organic justice’[iii]. This new approach tries to move away from a linear, interventionist, almost exclusively punitive view of justice were the perpetrator is seen as person that needs to be detained, tried and punished, and if the state where the crime takes place is unable to carry this out then it is the responsibility of the international community to do so; into an approach that rather prefers to see the perpetrator of a crime as a person that through his acts has destabilized the relationships of the entire community, it is then the role of the community to repair these severed relationships.

Organic justice in a way sees the destabilization of the relationships within the community of paramount importance because of this puts the community in a very vulnerable state and if these damaged relationships are not properly healed then survival of the entire community is directly threatened. Organic justice thus intends to move away from an approach were the focus is on which law was broken and who needs to be charged as responsible, into one were the attention is on how to restore the balance of the community by looking into who has been harmed, what are their needs and what is the level of responsibility of the perpetrator.  

Traditionally punitive approaches generally tend to maintain a level of alienation between the perpetrator and the community, which also often prevents the perpetrator from seen and understanding the effects of his actions on the community. Organic justice on the other hand intends to move away from the idea that the international community has the exclusive resources and know how to bring peace and security to the affected areas, and rather chooses to engage throughout the entire process the direct victims of the crime in the development of local approaches and initiatives to peace making and relationship healing.

Now, this reestablishment or healing of relationships is done according to a process that seeks to engage the perpetrator and the victims through mutual discussion and dialogue. This process of open dialogue should lead to a level of mutual understanding of the causes and effects of the perpetrators actions in the community, and it should also take into account the needs of the perpetrators together with those of the victims. I believe this last point is fundamental in order to obtain a lasting and sustainable peace. 

Organic justice does not seek to reject the marvelous progress achieved by the international legislation that seeks to promote and protect human rights around the world, but rather hopes that we tread carefully when we see the presence of the idea of an ‘universalized justice’[iv]. It talks about the ever present need to decentralized justice and move it to the communities where the crimes take place and where the relationships have been most damaged. One could even argue that there would be an increased effectiveness of this approach in those areas with a severe lack of state presence, where the idea of the state is tremendously abstract or nonexistence, and where the existence of local communal forms of organization dominates. 

It is important to note that this approach sees justice as a broad, holistic, open-ended process, meaning that it should not only touch upon all levels of communal life, but it should also be a never ending process that requires constant work and attention.

Organic justice and deterrence?

It was not surprising to see how controversial professor Komakech’s views about justice were, even despite the fact that the great majority of those attending the lecture were almost entirely fellow African professor or African university students.

A very interesting argument was quickly raised during the question and answer period which was the idea of ‘deterrence’. It has traditionally been argued that one of the main strengths of punitive justice is that it deters future offenders from committing a crime, but the concern of how would this work in the case of organic justice was a feeling shared by the great majority of the attendees. 

With regards to this comment, Professor Komkech stressed how the idea of deterrence as a way to stop aggression has always relied on the fear of punishment as a method of discouraging undesired behaviors, yet maybe we could ask ourselves how effective this approach is in preventing crime, and specially how is it supposed to how is it supposed to be implemented in conflicts that span borders and which are located in regions of the world where there is hardly any presence of the state. I would personally agree that if we suppress a person through coercion and fear it might do what you want, but genuine redemption and understanding are generally sacrificed, and so one must ask oneself how sustainable and profound would peace be then. 

It is interesting to note that organic justice cannot be uniform and so it can be perceived by several communities in very different ways, but we could also argue that local communities should not be seen as machines that cannot find ways to coalesce and work with each other. In a sense, we could argue that structures are impersonal and mechanistic, and so this lack of structure in organic justices is not a weakness, but rather the source of its power and adaptability.

Final thoughts

As we contemplate all the full implications of this view on justice, we can come to the realization that this approach has very clear challenges. Nevertheless, this approach does not seek to deny and invalidate the traditional punitive approach to justice, but rather to force us to rethink our assumptions and ideas about peace, justice, colonization.

It is hard not to value the role played by international courts or internationally established tribunals in those cases were the main perpetrator of crimes and violence is the state itself. It is truly remarkable the work done by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania; and The Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown, Sierra Leona; as well as the International Criminal Court’s indictment of several government functionaries responsible for promotion mass violence after the 2008 electoral process in Kenya[v]. An indictment support by a good number of Kenyans who do not believe their own government is interested investigating the responsibility of many of this people the incitement of mass violence and killings.  

Organic justice is not without its challenges, most notably in those cases were the crimes committed are so atrocious that the community has been left deeply traumatized and depleted of their own ability to reconnect with themselves. Perhaps it is in these situations when the international community can be most effective by facilitation the development of local methods of relationship healing and forgiveness. 

I believe we should have a renewed respect for the capacity of local populations to engage in process that would bring justice to their communities, and to value the traditional customs, traditions, and methods of conflict resolution, justice making, and healing that peoples around the world have. Perhaps the difference lies on whether the affected community feels engages in the healing process, perhaps at the end justice is found in the hearts of the community, not in the hells of the jail cell.

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[i] This lecture with was given by Professor Daniel Komakech, Head of The Department of African Studies at The Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies from Gulu University, in the United Nations Mandated University for Peace campus in El Rodeo de Mora, Costa Rica, on October 23, 2012. 

[ii] Easterly, William (2007).  The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York, New York. Penguin.

[iii] The term ‘organic justice’ can also be referred to as ‘restorative justice’, nevertheless for the purpose of this article I will give preference to the former term over the latter. 

[iv] Zehr, Howard (2002). The Little Book of Restorative Justice. New York, New York. Good Books.

[v]Schabas, William A. (2011). An Introduction to the International Criminal Court. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press.

A Language of Power

It has always been quite interesting for me to notice how one of the most basic and often used tools of communication is so rarely questioned, so rarely analyzed. Words define our everyday world; they describe our emotions, our ideas, our actions. The author Gary Craig once said that words shape our thoughts and our thoughts eventually create our reality, and this is what gives language its awesome power. Yet so rarely do we pay attention to this great power language has on shaping our way of seeing the world.

As I listen and notice how quickly we tend to pick up, accept and integrate concepts, ideas, and words given to us by people of power, politicians, presidents, military men, the mainstream media; I cannot help but wonder if we are not quite delicately being led just like lambs through a very narrow and scary path.

Surely the power of language is nothing new; propaganda has been around for millennia. Of course we know that words have a tremendous power to communicate ideas and emotions, and yet why do we keep easily accepting the narrative laid out for us by powerful elites.

Noam Chomsky once famously pointed out that the best way to control a debate in a democracy is to establish a very narrow political spectrum, but to allow for a very lively debate within these small margins. I would argue that many of the words used by people of power in politics and the main stream media often keeps the public within this very closed margin of debate and quite often channels the discussions in very narrow directions. We often do not even notice this, which is what makes words and language something that must be used with extreme attentiveness and care.

Take for example the so called ‘war on terror’ infamously announced by President George W. Bush just after the attacks of September the 11. This concept actually became a US Government policy, and it was widely accepted, debated, and referred to by politicians, generals, and the media; and yet what does it actually mean, I would be hard pressed to find a more ambiguous term. ‘Terror’ could be anything you can imagine; it could even be an elderly person riding a motorcycle at high speed in the highway. Who defines it, how do you fight it, when is it defeated, or even better why do we accept and continue to use such a terminology. Could it be perhaps because we cannot even see how far away from the margins of the debate we are, how conditioned we have become to remain inside this narrow spectrum.

Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the British paper The Independent has done a fascination job pointing out many of these concepts throughout his writing, describing them as what he calls a ‘language of power’. For instance, Fisk talks about how for decades the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has traditionally been referred to as a ‘peace process’, a term that many consider actually refers to a rather unjust, unbalanced, and dishonorable negotiation process, which has in the meantime allowed for the continuous occupation and colonization of Arab land, contrary to all international law, by the Israeli Government through what they refer to as ‘settlements’ or ‘outposts’ protected by a ‘security barrier’.

As Fisk points out, whenever this ‘peace process’ gets stuck, we talk about having it being put ‘back on track’, as if there ever was a clear cut path to peace that was being followed before. Something that will nonetheless be accomplish by a Quartet on the Middle East that is led by Tony Blair, a figure once referred to as a ‘peace envoy’, a term hard to reconcile with his eagerness to send British troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and his alarmist views on Iran, a country he continuously described as a “looming threat”.

And so claims of occupation of Arab territory by the Israeli state have thus become a mere ‘dispute’ or nothing more than ‘competing narratives’. It is no surprise then that we cannot possibly comprehend what drives people for decades to commit cold and bloody murders when we use this kind of language, when we see them as victims of a mere ‘dispute’. Oddly enough we rarely hear of ‘competing narratives’ between the United States Government and the Taliban. It’s funny, weren’t many of these same Taliban fighters called ‘mujahideen’ or ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1980s? I wonder why that was.

Even the use of the term ‘the genocide’ seems to be almost exclusively restricted to the disaster endured mostly by Jews during the Second World War; something the Turkish Government is quite happy to respect, because the catastrophe suffered by the Armenians at the hands of the Ottomans during and just after the end of the First World War can possibly be considered as a ‘regrettable event’, a ‘mass killing’, even a ‘massacre’, but never a ‘genocide’; no, there can only be one of those. Any attempt to revise history otherwise still remains, according to the Turkish Government, as a ‘hotly dispute’ issue.

We can also see this language of power widely used by military men with terms like a ‘spike in violence’ popularized in Iraq and Afghanistan to refer to increases in the level of attacks towards coalition forces. And as Fisk interestingly points out, the term ‘spike’ refers to something that goes sharply up and then eventually moves sharply down; as opposed to a term like ‘increase in violence’ which might not necessarily decrease. Same with concepts like a ‘surge of troops’ , a term widely used in Iraq during 2006 and later in Afghanistan in 2009, instead of a term like ‘reinforcements’ which alludes to the idea of losing a war.

During the early weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, when we first started seen the origins of an armed resistance, I remember US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld referring to many of these people as ‘thugs’ and ‘diehards’. Yet it soon became obvious that the word he was poignantly avoiding was ‘insurgents’, because that would allude to the idea that just perhaps the US Government’s plan that the United States military was going to be received by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi population as a liberating force might just have been a little too optimistic.

And so we talk about terrorism and how widespread and scary it is, and we all know what a terrorist is and looks like. He is surely a Muslim, most likely from Middle Eastern descent, quite possibly very impatient for going straight to heaven, and yet what does that make Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik? Are they terrorist too? .... Oh no, they are actually ‘right wing extremist’. I wonder what is the difference though.

In any case, the use of this language by people of power is not something that should surprise us at all, but what does worry me is how easily it is repeated and internalized without hardly any discussion or thought by analyst, journalist, and regular people. I believe that in order to understand why this is the case, we need to first take a look at one of the most powerful emotions experienced by living beings, fear.

It is not secret that a scared society is easily united, manipulated, and coerced into action. Fear has traditionally been used by ancient civilizations to instill loyalty and obedience to the state, and when this feeling is share by a great majority of the society, and it is thoroughly constructed and channeled by a government, it then becomes an extremely powerful tool. Fear rarely gives way to reflection and dialogue, but rather promotes strong leadership, bold decisions, and decisive action. Thus, this ‘language of power’ which uses words that denote black and white, good and bad, overly simplistic explanation easily puts societies in a constant state of fear and an ever present war footing, since it is pretty hard to take society to war if it has not been deeply scared and tricked into feeling threatened.

I remember reading Orwell for the first time as a young kid and being amazed about how well he envisioned the power of words and language. I can never forget a famous scene in 1984 when Winston ran into Syme, a friend of his who worked in the Research Department, and how Syme quickly begins to tell Winston of his work finishing the last edition of the Newspeak dictionary: “you think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it!" Syme said, “We are destroying words, dozens of them ..... We are cutting the language down to the bone. Don’t you see?” said Syme again, “The whole idea of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought ..... In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there won’t be the words in which to express it”.

Now, surely this chilling account is nothing more than a very interesting and creative work of science fiction, but is it truly so. When we have presidents talking about ‘axis of evil’, when anybody who opposes the authority of the government is labeled a ‘terrorist’ or an ‘extremist radical’ at best, when prisoners of war becomes ‘unlawful combatants’ striped of any rights and protections, when economic migrants become ‘unidentified aliens’, when the response to a terrorist attack becomes ‘the war on terror’ which has lead us to a state of endless war; we must then surely give a second thought to whether Orwell’s writing is truly a work science fiction.

The great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire always talked about the need for what he called ‘the oppressed’ to be able to start their empowerment process by beginning to name their world by themselves, a world that has traditionally been named exclusively by an ‘oppressive elite’. Hence, I would be truly weary whenever politicians, generals and populist leaders insist in naming our world exclusively on their own.

I believe we should step outside the close boundaries set by dehumanized words and concepts, and rather seek to find the excluded middle ground. We should beware of using words that feed cycles of fear, simplicity, and certainty, and rather embrace the complexity, diversity and unpredictability of the world. We should constantly think about and monitor the language of power used by the elites, and always reflect on who is doing the naming; after all, someone’s terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter.

Phenomena and events are hardly if ever black and white, but rather more like fourteen shades of gray. It is only when we move away from words like terrorist, evil, defeat, enemy, and one tries to understand all the nuances and shades of events and people, that one is able to move away from a fearful, menacing and predictable world, into one of complexity, constant discovery and understanding.