Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of a collaborative research project on the social and legal effects of the work of the International Criminal Court. Based at Leiden University’s Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, the project analyses the impact and effects of ICC interventions through drawing upon insights from multiple scholarly fields. Some of the contributions to this volume are based on discussions held at the project’s inaugural conference, ‘Post-Conflict Justice and Local Ownership’, which took place in The Hague in May 2011. The conference and the project were made possible with the generous support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
We would like to thank the contributors to this collection for their efforts to rethink existing narratives and conventional presumptions in international criminal justice. We also wish to express our gratitude to the many interlocutors who gave generously of their time and wisdom in Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Netherlands, including several of the volume’s contributors. Their insights into the workings of the ICC in practice helped to inform many of the claims contained here. Although our debts to individuals are too numerous to list, particular thanks are due to Josephine Atim, Maria Kamara, George Kegoro, Sarah Kihika, Betty Murungi, Godfrey Musila, Sharon Nakandha, Gabriel Oosthuizen, Michael Otim, Ronald Slye, Muthoni Wanyeki and Marcel Wetsh’okonda Koso.
This work would not have been possible without the support of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, which hosted the project. Valuable insights from Larissa van den Herik and Marieke Wierda, both Leiden colleagues and project collaborators, have contributed to shaping the work contained in this volume. We also wish to thank the members of the project’s steering committee – Barney Afako, Phil Clark, Refik Hodzic, Sally Engle Merry, Juan Mendez, Victor Peskin, Eric Stover and Ruti Teitel – who have followed this work since the project’s inception. We are particularly grateful to Luca Ferro, Madeleine Gorman, Teodora Jugrin and Yang Xie for their valuable editorial assistance in the finalization of the manuscript.
At Cambridge University Press, we would like to thank Finola O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Spicer and Richard Woodham for supporting this project and ensuring publication of the volume.
We hope that this work will contribute to broader discussions about the work of international criminal law across scholarly disciplines.