Internationalized Justice and State Authority

Keywords: legal geography, human rights, CICIG, Guatemala
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

This paper analyzes universal human rights alongside the concrete, grounded politics of law by examining the creation of the United Nations-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). In their agreement, CICIG’s founders framed it as an innovative institution that would guarantee human rights, dismantle and help prosecute criminal groups charged with human rights abuses, and help the Guatemalan government fulfill its obligations under national and international law to protect human rights. Critical legal geography helps expand our attention beyond a discussion of the success or failure of law to deliver rights, towards a discussion of law and legal mechanisms as embedded in and productive of spatial politics in which state actors seek to define their authority in and over particular geographies. By focusing on the political and legal developments that led to the CICIG’s creation, I show how the CICIG was as much about consolidating and contesting acceptable forms of Guatemalan state authority as it was about creating innovative forms of internationalized law designed to guarantee human rights. As I discuss, if human rights law promises accountability, it must take seriously the forms of colonial state authority which define the terms of its implementation.