Kamari Clarke to Italy Africa and the International Criminal Court a Career in Indigenous Health Leads to a Phd Message from Our Dean
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January/February 2018 • Faculty of Public Affairs in Review Career Paths: Canada's Ambassador Kamari Clarke to Italy Africa and the International Criminal Court A Career in Indigenous Health Leads to a PhD Message from our Dean Whenever you embark on a new project, launched projects that are now an essential there is always that moment when you part of what we do. contemplate failure. As we begin 2018, I am incredibly grateful to Then, hopefully, there is a moment when our faculty members and staff for supporting you realize that your plan has not failed the efforts made in the Faculty over the but has become an essential part of your past few years. It could not have happened organization’s mission. without all of their hard work. Thankfully, that’s the experience we’re having Perhaps the greatest example of this success these days in the Faculty of Public Affairs. story is FPA Research Month. This month- long event series in February and March Four years ago, a number of faculty and staff highlights the success of our internationally members developed a statement of guiding recognized researchers through panel principles called Moving FPA Forward: discussions, graduate symposiums, public Priorities and Directions for the Faculty of lectures and more. Public Affairs, 2013-2018. That document FPA Voices • Page 1 Previous Issue Subscribe Here • Archived Stories • Magazine Signup • Tips for Online Editor • Tips for Designer • Subscription Questions • Contact Us Front Cover: Kamari Clarke, Professor at Carleton University in Global and International Studies. The Faculty also recognizes outstanding I hope you will be able to join us at one of our research through the FPA Research many events during the winter term. To see Excellence Award, which went to Professor all of our events, please visit carleton.ca/fpa. Kamari Clarke of the Bachelor of Global and International Studies program in 2017. All the best, Professor Clarke will be hosting the FPA Research Excellence Symposium as part of Research Month on February 26. You can learn more about her research on international justice in this edition of FPA Voices. So as we begin a new year, we have a lot André Plourde to be thankful for in the Faculty of Public Dean, Faculty of Public Affairs Affairs…and we have a lot to look forward to. Carleton University FPA Voices • Page 2 of the Cold War and the emergence FPA People of new alignments that had severe consequences for countries in the Global Kamari Maxine Clarke South. Professor, Global and International For instance, there were new loan conditions from institutions like the Studies International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There was corporate Professor Kamari Clarke’s interest in restructuring as well as the establishment international law, culture and politics of new extraction arrangements and began early in her university career. She free trade zones. At the same time, the studied political science at Concordia military arms from the former Soviet University, Law at Yale University, and Union began to circulate throughout did a PhD in Political-Legal Anthropology Africa and Latin America. We were at the University of California, Santa watching the restructuring of the global Cruz. Recently she returned to Canada to order. begin a professorship at Carleton in the But the real problem for me was the new Bachelor of Global and International impact that these realignments were Studies program (BGInS). having on people’s lives. On the one hand, In 2017, Clarke was the winner of the we saw during this period the emergence FPA Research Excellence Award, which of new migration patterns as mining provides a generous financial award for extraction industries decimated local research as well as funds for a research people’s livelihoods. On the other hand, symposium that highlights the winner’s those displaced began competing for new achievements and serves as the launch of resources, which resulted in struggles FPA’s Research Month. The symposium over the control of land and in significant will be held on February 26, 2018. violence. What interested you in international law and legal institutions? Professor Clarke, when you were a student, you studied political science, I wanted to understand one of the international relations and then political- greatest paradoxes of our time – that of legal anthropology. What was happening in the world at that time? The late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of major structural transformations and violence. I was fascinated with the new institutions that were taking shape in that post-1989 moment – economic, legal, political and military. They were sparked by a range of events that led to the end FPA Voices • Page 3 the emergence of new international legal institutions that are often popularized as key solutions to global violence. Yet the root causes of violence are well beyond their mandate. While it was clear to me that courts could play important roles in the social establishment of norms, my research in the late 1990s sought to explore the limitations and to raise a range of considerations for understanding the relationship between legal and socio- political processes. The focus of my case studies was the emergence of the International Criminal Court (ICC). After I spent a summer doing fieldwork at the United Nations and with various non-governmental organizations working with the ICC, I realized that I needed to understand the technical language of the law – how legal reasoning works, what are its primary considerations, what are its core values and methods. I decided to pursue a master’s degree in law because, when I was attending the United Nations preparatory committee meetings for the International Criminal Court, I realized that I actually didn’t quite appreciate some of the relevant technical considerations. How was the signing of the International Criminal Court in 1998 seen by countries around the world? It was spectacular. There was euphoria around the idea of international law being there to engage and shape a new world free from violence. For many, the law was seen as a saviour. This was a moment when 120 states came together to agree on a mechanism for addressing core FPA Voices • Page 4 crimes that would serve as the basis for in judicial action if states are unable and holding high-ranking leaders responsible unwilling to act. This means that the ICC for mass violence against their citizens. is relevant after mass violence – after But after fifteen years of the court’s people have been victimized by brutal existence, all of the cases, indictments, violence. and arrest warrants have been for The research question for me is Africans. And while some African states concerned with the complexities of are the ones who made the referrals for justice. I’m arguing that the rise of the arrest, the aggregate reality has caused a ICC should not be seen as the rise and political uproar because for many of the cascading of a new enlightened force court’s antagonists, it seemed that “the leaning toward prosecutorial justice. court was targeting Africans.” Rather, the ICC depends on state and Today, the court has a legitimacy problem NGO cooperation and gains its power because it’s seen as being an African through its moral claims to “save the court. Meanwhile, the U.S.—which is not a victim” and end impunity by “stopping signatory—is critiqued for committing war the perpetrator”. crimes and crimes against humanity in Given this, my thoughts are that we Iraq. The ICC Office of the Prosecutor has need to see the work of international only recently issued a dossier that claims justice-making as a disentanglement these crimes occurred within the court’s of the fiction of the liberal institutional jurisdiction. In fact, the court does not order. To do this it helps to examine have universal jurisdiction and many of the way that new justice discourses are the world’s most powerful states are not being unravelled and alternative justice under its jurisdiction. mechanisms are being erected in the The appearance of selective justice contemporary period. has led to a series of African state- This will be one of the topics of my orchestrated pushbacks. For instance, upcoming symposium and is the key following the indictment by the ICC of the argument in my forthcoming book: Sudanese president, Al-Bashir, in 2009, Affective Justice: The International the African Union insisted that African Criminal Court and the Pan-African countries should not cooperate with Pushback. the call for his arrest and transfer to the court. Since then, many countries have agreed to not arrest him and Burundi has withdrawn from the ICC. South Africa is Professor Clarke will host the FPA on its way toward withdrawal from the Research Excellence Award Symposium court. on February 26, 2018. The symposium is entitled, “Liberal International Institutionalism on the Decline? Rethinking African Treaty Withdrawals.” Do you think the International Criminal Court should exist? Yes, there is a place for it—just as there’s a place for an African Regional Court. But that place has a slim mandate. The ICC is a court of last resort that can engage FPA Voices • Page 5 In 1982, Norman Paterson School of Career Paths International Affairs (NPSIA) student Alexandra Bugailiskis joined the then- Department of External Affairs. She had Alexandra Bugailiskis finished her coursework—but not her Canada’s Ambassador to the Italian Master’s thesis—when in 1984 she was off to Republic her first posting in Ghana. It was a difficult Bachelor of Arts, Political Science time for the country and she remembers the (’79) empty store shelves. Master of Arts, International Affairs “When word came that there was sugar, you (’92) would drop what you were doing and find a way to get to the head of the line,” she recalls.