Chapter 4 explores the normative challenge of the experience of dehumanisation. It starts from a paradigmatic case of dehumanisation, as it was described from a first-person perspective: the torture of Jean Améry. This description offers a phenomenology of dehumanisation. In order to deepen the analysis, the experience of dehumanisation is subsequently confronted with recent work on alienation. This opens up the critical potential of the experience of dehumanisation challenging important concepts that figure prominently in debates on (the aftermath of) atrocities.

Chapter 3 is a close reading of several documents and transcripts of the Case of Duch of the Cambodia Tribunal. Interestingly, notions of humanity and inhumanity were used by several parties: prosecutors, attorneys for civil parties but also the defendant’s lawyer and Duch himself declared that the latter was dehumanised. In a second move, these findings will be put in a philosophical context by bringing them in conversation with the work of Hannah Arendt, thus showing the structure of dehumanisation and rehumanisation.

Chapter 5 discusses the various timelines involved in the question of the imprescriptibility of atrocity crimes. I distinguish between four timelines involved in imprescriptibility and assess these from the viewpoint of legal values and philosophical debates on forgiveness. Taking the perspective of the judge, the chapter ends by spelling out what is at stake in the judgement on an imprescriptible international crime.

The epilogue brings together a number of themes of the book and sketches some avenues for further research.

Chapter 6 starts from the insight that, despite international criminal law’s focus on individual responsibility, atrocity crimes are often a result of structural violence and ditto injustices: discrimination, social exclusion, exploitation, and so on. If the violence is structural, the suffering becomes social, that is, inherent in societal structures. The question remains how the legal order can respond to structural injustice and social suffering. The chapter argues that these forms of injustice register as ‘silent claims’ at the brink of the legal order, questioning its boundaries.

Chapter 2 delves into the constitution of humanity as a collective subject. Drawing on the debate between ICL scholars about the we-talk in relation to the ICC and their engagement with the work of Durkheim, I develop the thesis that humanity should be understood as a collective subject that is brought about as a symbolic order through a process of representation. Moreover, as with any order, the order of humanity emerges through a process of self-inclusion of a first-person plural. Finally, I turn to the case of Ongwen to show how this order is questioned by the inhuman.

The introduction serves a threefold purpose. First, it aims to sensitise the reader to the all-pervasiveness of humanity in international criminal justice, more in particular in the discourse on the atrocity crimes. This part of the introduction argues that the concept of humanity provokes more questions than it is meant to solve. Second, it outlines the book’s methodology to the reader. Third, the introduction sketches the main argument of the book through an overview of the chapters.

Chapter 1 critically engages with existing academic work that either emphatically argues in favour of, or radically dismisses the appeal to humanity within international law. The important critique on the invocation of humanity notwithstanding, I argue that a concept of humanity as a collective subject, or normative community, is needed, in order to grasp what is at stake in dehumanisation.