A Review of Jonas Bens, The Sentimental Court: The Affective Life of International Criminal Justice. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022, XIV+250 pp.

Abstract

The book by Jonas Bens examines the work of the International Criminal Court. It focuses on the trial of Dominic Ongwen, responsible for the massacre of civilians in Africa. The fieldwork for the study took place in The Hague and Northern Uganda. It allows Bens to describe both the procedures of international justice and the reactions to them in detail. By presenting a rich ethnography of the institution, the author seeks to bring to light the role of feelings and emotions in legal procedures and global organisations that proclaim the rationality and universality of their approaches. Bens draws on from an anthropology of law and emotion studies, and, in an effort to overcome their logocentrism, turns to theories of affect. However, while stating the importance of affect, the author merely labels it, without creating a working conceptualisation that would allow for the specification of knowledge about affect in global justice. The author’s criticism of modernity in the last part of the book, which exposes its rationality as a particular form of affect, also seems unconvincing.