International criminal justice has by many accounts a long and chequered past. Histories of that past have tended to be dominated by narratives of the institutional development of international criminal justice. The great diplomatic conferences, jurisdictional initiatives and adoption of treaties that have accompanied its existence at regular intervals are emphasized. The historical-legal narrative that dominates the scholarship is that of linear evolution from custom to conventions, noble plans to concrete institutions, from ad hoc to permanent. The undertone often is that of celebration of the progress accomplished, but also perhaps more problematically one where the past is seen to merely foreshadow the present and thus read in that light. Much legal scholarship, perhaps understandably given its emphasis on legal and institutional form, errs closely to this genre.

The chapter addresses marginalisation and invisibility based on sex and gender in the histories of international criminal law. Two microhistories are sketched, starring contrasting types of individuals: the first a professional of international law, Katherine B. Fite; the second an intellectual with no legal background, Rebecca West. The chapter discusses ways by which an absence in the collective narratives of a significant past, in this case the ‘intellectual origins of international criminal law’ as an academic discipline and a political cause, can be countered. It reflects on the choices that matter in representing the rare presence against the canvas of an overwhelming absence. It interrogates the problematic aspects of representing individuals as ‘women’, deviant from a normative understanding of an ‘international criminal lawyer’. Analysing representations of Fite and West, it points to frequent tropes in narrating the ‘first and only’. Further, it inquires about the expectations with regard to ‘women’s’ participation and attitudes they may (not) have held towards current feminist causes, and concludes with reflections on why one asks the question on sex and gender of those who figure in our intellectual histories – what figures behind the act of asking.

Referring to the title of the first part of this volume – ‘setting the framework’ – Immi Tallgren explains that there is not one framework in which the ‘why punish’ question can be asked. Instead different frames are required to draw attention to the plurality of perspectives that could be taken on international punishment. Thus, in her comment, Tallgren pictures the landscape in which ‘why punish’ is asked and thereby sheds light on the contexts of that context of knowledge, its production, reproduction and subjectivities. While sketching out these frames – the frame of law, the frame of criminology, the moral frame, the frame of ‘fantasmatic logic’ and the frame of politics – Tallgren makes visible the outside of the chapters ‘setting the framework’ and discusses what aspects of the ‘why punish’ question are missing in this volume, and whose voice is excluded from our debate.