Aesthetics of Perpetration and Perpetrators in International Criminal Trials

Authors

Shannon Fyfe, Washington and Lee University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Temple International & Comparative Law Journal

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

In Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice, Randle DeFalco argues that aesthetic, rather than legal, considerations play a role in shaping our understanding of international crimes. He claims that international criminal justice is focused on atrocities that constitute the most horrific spectacles of violence—and largely ignores “aesthetically unfamiliar forms of mass harm causation – those that are slow, attritive, banal, and hence generally unspectacular in nature.” DeFalco makes a compelling case in two senses: descriptively, that we do in fact consider spectacular atrocities to be more worthy of international criminal prosecution, and also normatively, in that we shouldn’t consider these sorts of crimes to be any more worthy of prosecution than crimes that are attritive, slow, or otherwise unspectacular.

Recommended Citation

Shannon Fyfe, Aesthetics of Perpetration and Perpetrators in International Criminal Trials, 37 Temple Int'l & Comp. L.J. 63 (2023).