‘Voglio una donna!’: On Rewriting the History of International Criminal Justice with the Help of Women Who Perpetrated International Crimes

In histories of international criminal law, perpetrators of crimes are represented almost exclusively as men. Historiography, criminology, gender studies, and legal studies offer differing views on whether women perpetrators are actually so very few or merely excluded from accounts. This chapter analyses the quest of rectifying the absence (or exclusion) of women by a retroactive ‘search’ and inclusion of women perpetrators. It starts by discussing the discursive practices of ‘becoming’ a perpetrator and the tropes of histories featuring a woman accused of an ‘international crime’. Far from innocuous, various stereotypes of women are instrumental for either obscuring or elucidating women’s role as perpetrators in court practice as well as in ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ histories, serving gendered and racialized ideological discourses which also inform nations and nationalisms. To conclude, the chapter advances an intuitive explanation for the derivative histories of perpetrators, whilst pointing out the possibility of another kind of histories.