Making crimes mean: a normative analysis of the acts that constitute international crimes

Laverty, C.S. (2022)

Doctoral Thesis

This thesis examines the normative dimensions of the acts that constitute international crimes. It offers a conceptualisation of the normative dimensions of these acts as processes of construction and meaning making. Using the crimes of attacks on cultural property, pillage, sexual violence and reproductive violence as case studies for analysis, the thesis develops an interdisciplinary methodological approach which centralises the narratives and discourses that emerge around particular crimes as central to how they are given normative content in practice. This analysis reveals a diverse, flexible and dynamic normative picture of these crimes, which demonstrates how their normative meanings are not natural or given, but are instead produced through an ongoing process of meaning making that takes place throughout the legal process in a continuum of cases. Understanding the normative dimensions of the acts that constitute international crimes in these terms not only exposes a diversity of interests that transcends their dominant characterisations as violations of basic security rights, but also uncovers the processes through which their normative foundations are constructed and transformed internally through practice. This thesis ultimately offers a dynamic, pluralist and socially constructed account of wrong in international criminal law, which recognises the relationship between criminal wrong and transformations in the wider social and political order, and contributes to developing a more granular understanding of the nature of the representational work that international criminal justice does in the world.

• International criminal law
• International crimes
• Expressive theories of law
• Durkheim
• Narrative
• Attacks on cultural property
• Pillage
• Sexual violence
• Reproductive violence

• All authors: Laverty, C.S.
• Supervisor: Stahn, C.
• Co-supervisor: Powderly, J.C.
• Committee: Drumbl, M.A.; Lo Giacco, L.; Grewal, K.; Herik, L.J. van den; Sander, B.J.
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Institute of Public Law, Faculty of Law, Leiden University
• Date: 2022-12-14