Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Time: 11 am to Noon, New York (GMT- 4); 6 pm to 7 pm Beirut (GMT+3)
The Use and Abuse of the Tools for International Justice
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) Working Group on Critical Security Studies in the Arab Region invites you to a webinar about the use and abuses of mechanisms for international justice. In a system of nation-states, efforts to develop judicial mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), to prosecute genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression, face many obstacles. States often seek to use the courts to serve their own political interests or obstruct their efforts, as the US has recently done by sanctioning the ICC and its officers seeking to investigate possible war crimes in Afghanistan. This webinar will: a) address how international justice is treated as a security threat by some actors, recognizing the political nature of mechanisms for international justice, and b) explore alternative means and strategies to advance international justice.
Panelists:
Samer Abboud, Associate Professor of Global Studies at Villanova and co-author of "Geopolitics, insecurity and neocolonial exceptionalism: A critical appraisal of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon” in Security Dialogue (2013)
Oumar Ba, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Morehouse College, contributing editor to Africa Is a Country, and author of States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge, 2020)
Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and author of “Pursuing Peace by Engaging Justice in Yemen,” POMEPS Studies 42 (2020)
The webinar will be moderated by Waleed Hazbun, Richard L. Chambers Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alabama, and a founding member of the ACSS Working Group on Critical Security Studies.
Webinar information:
The webinar will be hosted on Zoom.
Please register via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_J6Zb8650RcagxAvclPJhAg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
To submit your questions to the panelists, contact us on: chammaa@theacss.org before October 18, 2020 with the subject line: “Webinar: Securitization of International Justice”
The webinar will be hosted in English (simultaneous interpretation to Arabic will be available for those who register on Zoom), and will be streamed live on the ACSS Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theacss