Crimes Against Humanity

Abstract

Race and racism have a schizophrenic life in international criminal law (ICL) histories, both ever-present, and ever-elusive. This chapter excavates this double-life by tracing, not race, but its repression, in ICL historians’ projection of ICL’s origins to the mid-nineteenth century regime instituted to implement the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade in the name of ‘humanity’. This regime included treaty born transnational tribunals (‘Mixed Commissions’) with jurisdictional authority that extended beyond national borders. Racialized structures and imaginaries hide in plain sight in histories of these tribunals as an embryonic ICL—present everywhere yet not acknowledged anywhere. This chapter argues that this absent presence is constituted, on the one hand, by juridification, and on the other, by moralization. Troubling legacies of juridification and moralization entails unpacking continuities and discontinuities with contemporary ICL and the work of race-invisibility in putting wind in the sails of humanity’s racially mal-distributive global dynamics.