The invitation to consider the “critical aftermath” of international criminal law (ICL) and “what happens next?” raises, for us, the suggestion of a new possibility emerging from the ruins—not only the ruins of atrocity, but also of law's response to atrocity. Yet ICL, we suggest, is lying in wait: it remains a powerful and violent actor, poised to activate and reinforce the prominence and monopoly of carceral justice, even out of the ruins. To counteract the dominance of carceral justice, we suggest learning from the tradition of abolition geography. By this we mean engaging in an act of “reconstruction place-making,”1 whereby we mix our labor with the world and (re)make the world by bending the “narrative arc” toward freedom.2 More specifically, we seek to embrace an abolitionist geography by offering a conception of countercultural visions of justice, drawing from a vignette of the worldwide movement of university encampments for Palestine. With this, we contribute to deepening reflections on a counterculture of international justice rooted in epistemologies of Black feminist and abolitionist praxis.3

Black feminists in the United States have made sophisticated arguments for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, of which criminal law is a crucial component. This literature offers a materialist critique of the carceral system, demonstrating the centrality of prisons for processes of both dispossession of Black communities, and accumulation of capital through the extraction of Black labor inside prisons. In this essay, I explore the potential and limits of an abolitionist critique of international criminal law (ICL), and I argue that there is a danger of losing the radical edge of Black feminist scholarship if its insights are transplanted without its explicitly anti-capitalist politics.

Inspired by the symposium editors’ call to reclaim and reimagine some or all of the space that is currently populated by international criminal law (ICL), we take this opportunity to engage in what we are calling feminist dreaming—that is, we seek to reimagine accountability as it could be, viewed through a feminist lens. Drawing on the work of standpoint feminists, such as Nancy Hartsock, we examine how the punitive mindset has taken hold from the top down, with little regard for or consideration of what those most acutely harmed, who are often women, want. Instead, international actors, often elites educated in the West, have mandated a certain ideal of justice from above through legal principles like the duty to prosecute. This focus on punishment narrows the lens through which “justice” is perceived and administered. It imposes a single perspective—that of a supposedly uniform global community—on affected communities, preempting other forms of justice that may have greater healing potential, including those with restorative or redistributive aims. In this sense, ICL can be seen as inflicting a form of epistemic violence.1 Instead of inquiring into, and respecting, the perspectives of victims, survivors, and their broader communities, it seeks to impose a viewpoint: only punishment will produce justice. This contribution takes a small step toward reimagining justice under the international legal order.2 We employ a standpoint feminist lens to first surface some of the harms ICL inflicts and then suggest a course correction that centers the voices of the most marginalized—in other words, we begin feminist dreaming.

Every May 18, mourners gather near the sandy beaches of Mullivaikkal, a small strip between Chundikulam and Mulltaitivu in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, to commemorate the 2009 genocide against the Tamils. Mullivaikkal is where approximately three hundred thousand Tamil civilians found refuge as they fled the military bombardment between January and May 2009.1 Starting in 2010, the remembrance day commemoration attracts thousands of locals, coming together near the beach to reflect and remember. Increasingly, the commemoration also attracts transitional justice experts, along with diplomats and international governmental organization workers. In my contribution, I reflect on the work of the local and diaspora Tamil transitional justice experts as they begin to gather evidence from the families of victims for the newly created 2024 Commission for Truth, Unity and Reconciliation. Drawing on Homer's The Odyssey and the story of the “lotus eaters,” I frame these experts as “truth eaters,” preoccupied with collecting victim narratives for the purpose of personal gratification. As they engage in the repeated collection of particular elements of the victims’ truth—elements predicated on the demands of the field of transitional justice—the truth eaters are oblivious to the root causes of the war. I explain how attention to root causes through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens can avoid the effects of the dominant liberal modes of truth seeking reflected in the work of these truth eaters.

This essay examines the unfinished as both a diagnostic and a tactic for how we engage with the terrain of international criminal law (ICL). The diagnostic: recognizing that justice struggles against a five-hundred-year racial-capitalist world order are unfinished and ongoing. The tactic: seeking opportunities for strategically interrupting ICL procedures to keep the ends of justice an open question. In articulating this notion of the unfinished, this essay analyzes the implications of this diagnostic for challenging and troubling how justice is defined and delimited within the terms of ICL, while also exploring the strategy and tactics of “unfinishing” in reframing the ends of ICL.