Abstract
This thesis considers what it means to meaningfully address impunity. In so doing, it articulates the content of notions of impunity and its counterpart, anti-impunity, while also introducing the concept of impunity governance to describe institutional responses to impunity and its management.Impunity is best understood as a phenomenon which arises from perpetrators’ unmet or under-met desert of sanction for their wrongdoing, but which also implicates victims, who suffer the injustice of impunity, and the state, which bears ultimate responsibility for impunity. By nature, an accusation of impunity implicates each of these actors and makes certain normative claims. This thesis explores these claims with reference to four key dynamics: accountability, responsibility, judgment and justice, each of which can be understood in a myriad of ways.
Anti-impunity is a concept which predominantly serves rhetorical and political purposes. Anti-impunity operates as a mobilising and framing device to cast impunity as wrongful, and by framing impunity as a problem, it also presupposes that the norm has been broken. Often, this occurs via binaries presented in direct opposition to each other; for example, dyads of injustice and justice or lawlessness and legality. The presumptive moral clarity that such dichotomous framing suggests, however, proves elusive on closer examination.
Existing policy positions on impunity are largely grounded in legal standards on rights, remedies, reparations and state responsibility. From this vantage, impunity imposes parallel obligations on states with respect to perpetrators and victims: the former must face due investigation and punishment without exception, and the latter must be afforded access to due forms of justice, remedies and reparations, without exception. Necessarily, amnesties and like measures which facilitate impunity and inhibit access to justice are considered incompatible with anti-impunity as a stance and technique. Increasingly, these expectations promote what can be termed an end-impunity imperative with a universalised vision of carceral criminal justice at its core. Though well-intentioned, this problematic for various reasons, including the narrowing and reductive implications it yields for how impunity is understood and treated.
Moreover, case studies illustrate that many of the practices designed to end or remedy impunity struggle to achieve these ends, and more fundamentally, struggle to meaningfully repair the deficits that impunity creates vis-a-vis accountability ,responsibility, judgment and justice. These practices can best be understood as tools of impunity governance which contribute to the management of impunity than roadmaps toa post-impunity nirvana replete with the rule of law, rights, reconciliation and other desirable goods.
| Date of Award | 13 Feb 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Jonathan Crowe (Supervisor) & Danielle Ireland-Piper (Supervisor) |