Dr Christine Schwobel-Patel (University of Liverpool)

ABSTRACT

A global victim industry has grown around the notion of global justice. Resources for humanitarianism are scarce and competition is stiff. Those competing for resources for the purpose of global justice include international organisations (particularly international criminal tribunals), NGOs and governments. Central to the emergence of a global victim industry has been the construction of an ‘ideal victim’ of international crime. Arguably, the features of an ‘ideal victim’ of international crime are: (a) vulnerability and fear, (b) dependency and (c) grotesqueness. If these three are given, a victim is deemed as having the highest value in the global victim industry. Notably, the stakeholders in ideal victimhood create a smoke-screen around the notion of ‘global justice’ to conceal their trading in the named currencies of victimhood. I argue that that the global victim industry not only instrumentalises victims, but commodifies them, alienating them from their suffering: Victims become the faces of global justice rather than the recipients.

SPEAKER

Christine Schwöbel is Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. She specialises in international law, particularly the narratives surrounding global constitutionalism, global governance, international criminal law, and international human rights law. She is the author of Global Constitutionalism in International Legal Perspective (Martinus Nijhoff/Brill 2011) and editor of Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law - An Introduction (Routledge 2014).