Imagining the International: Crime, Justice, and the Promise of Community, McMillan Nesam

Imagining the International interrogates mainstream understandings of international crime and international justice to tease out their ethical limits and possibilities.

International crime and justice are powerful ideas, associated with a vivid imagery of heinous atrocities, injured humanity, and an international community seized by the need to act. Through an analysis of archival and contemporary data, Imagining the International provides a sustained picture of how ideas about international crime and justice are given content and the global interrelations they enable and foreclose. Nesam McMillan argues that dominant approaches to conceptualizing distinctly international crime and international justice are problematic because they disconnect these phenomena from the everyday, fostering distance between those who have experienced international crime and those who have not. McMillan draws on interdisciplinary work spanning law, criminology, humanitarianism, socio-legal studies, cultural studies, and human geography to show how understandings of international crime and justice hierarchize, spectacularize, and appropriate the suffering of others and promote an ideal of justice fundamentally disconnected from life as it is lived. McMillan critiques the mode of global interconnection they offer, one which bears resemblance to past colonial global approaches and which seeks to foster community through the image of crime and the practice of punitive justice. This book powerfully underscores the importance of the ideas of international crime and justice and their significant limits, cautioning against their continued valorization.