Resistance consciousness and the people’s tribunal, 1945-1990

• In Event: Genocide and Imperialism

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the U.N.’s approach to criminal responsibility for genocide reflects and re-inscribes the sentiments of would-be génocidaires into law rather than expressing a genuine effort to hold them to account. To make this argument, I compare how prevailing U.N. doctrine that requires 'specifc intent' conceives of what it means to be responsible for genocide against judgements rendered by different people’s tribunals between 1945 and 2025. I recover a rich and global history of people’s tribunals that have been systematically ignored in scholarship about the social and political effects of genocide and its relationship to law, which tend to argue that people’s tribunals are not "real" institutions of criminal justice or that they disrupt the "proper" functioning of international criminal law by staging it as political theater. I show how contrary to disciplinary belief, people's tribunals stage critiques from the margins of the U.N.’s so-called international legal order in its own vernacular of responsibility; and in their judgements, advance the idea that responsibility for genocide depends on the 'intent to destroy' rather than the theory of liability that dominates UN law in the present moment. In these performances of people’s justice, I trace the formation of what one participant called "resistance consciousness"—the need for ordinary people to recognize and resist the relations of imperial violence to which the people are collectively subjected.

Author

• Megan Manion, University of Minnesota