Fictions of justice: The International Criminal Court ant the challenge of legal pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society). by Kamari Maxine Clarke. Cambridge University Press.

Source: (2012) Journal of Law and Religion. 27:213-218.

Debates surrounding the International Criminal Court (ICC), regardless of one’s own particular perspective
on the scope and function of such a court, command attention because they generate fundamental legal, philosophical
and ethical questions surrounding state sovereignty, theories of justice, international law and diplomacy,
and human rights. Kamari Maxine Clarke’s Fictions of Justice makes important contributions through its
ambitious, thorough, and “intellectually radical” (xviii) examination of the dialectical and, frequently, polemical
relationship between these questions. The work is grounded in Clarke’s own extensive anthropological fieldwork
in Africa, the critical theory approaches of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, and a firm
commitment to legal pluralism against universalism. It provides subtle analysis of the normative and political dimensions
of legal frameworks and castigates hegemonic assumptions about theories of justice and human rights. (excerpt)