Prosecuting violence, performing sovereignty: International relations and the laws of war

This thesis is a feminist genealogical reading of the ways in which “war crimes” destabilize state sovereignty as the concrete foundation of international relations, both in the commission of war crimes and in attempts to offer judicial remedies for war crimes. The thesis considers historical war crimes legislation (the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Klaus Barbie Trial) as violence-legitimizing practices and demonstrates that the process of maintaining the primacy of the right of states to wage war limits the humanitarian spirit of the laws of war at their inception. The discussion of the basis of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and its first trial (Dusko Tadic), demonstrates how sovereignty is produced as the foundation for the legitimacy of the ICTY. The thesis demonstrates that the criminalisation of certain acts of violence which occur in the context of institutionalized violence forces a confrontation between the right of states to wage war and the right of individuals to be free from violence. This process of defining the limits of acceptable violence in turn, forces a reconstitution of sovereignty even as sovereignty is destabilized by the notion of “war crimes”. The conventional international relations formula, that law erodes the commitment to war and sovereignty, misses the ways in which the laws of war are implicated within prevailing discourses of sovereignty and war. The gramscian idea that dominant systems are sustained by the hegemonic interests of the hegemonic actors misses the way that well-intentioned actors inadvertently reproduce precisely what they seek to subvert. My feminist, deconstructive and genealogical interrogation of war crimes trials complicates conventional and gramscian approaches and demonstrates the ways that the governing fiction of state sovereignty constitutes the limits of human rights redress in law, while pointing to the places where the principle of sovereignty is destabilized by the application of the laws of war. The thesis maps the terrain relevant to a critical international relations perspective on war crimes tribunals and highlights war crimes trials for the Former Yugoslavia since 1991 as instances of the political struggle over knowledge.