Book Review: Christine Schwöbel-Patel, Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806211026916 |
| Author | Julie Jarland |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 513
and satire. Resistance global justice is the insistence on agency, redistribution and inter-
national solidarity. It means to ‘disrupt dominant narratives not silently or quietly through
irony, but boldly’ (p. 263). It insists on the agency of the oppressed, and global solidarity
through action, not merely inaction or silence.
Marketing Global Justice is a well-written and thorough critique of the global justice
sector. The book does an excellent job of laying bare the contradictions, powers and
interests imbedded in the field, and presents them in a transparent, non-obscured and
accessible way. While there is growing attention both in scholarship and public debate on
the role of social movements within the neo-liberal world order, as companies and brands
are fighting for their customers’ attention as they pledge their support, the book turns the
attention inward to the global justice movement itself. Rather than simply pointing the
finger at the for-profit market and the adoption or appropriation of social justice causes
for marketing and branding, the book shows how the global justice movement is itself
taking part in and benefitting from the market economy and global inequalities. While
much of the focus of the book is on international criminal justice, and in particular the
International Criminal Court, it concludes by looking at how similar issues manifest
outside of the field of international criminal law in contemporary social justice move-
ments and their trajectories. This includes Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter
movement, and their potential to push back against the move towards marketization that
the author identifies. In the end, the book serves as a warning and a call to action for the
emerging social justice movements of our time.
Lisa Flower, Interactional Justice: The Role of Emotions in the Performance of Loyalty, Routledge:
Oxon, 2020; 220 pp.: 9780367248796, £120.00 (hbk), 978036764216, £36.99 (pbk),
9780429284854, £36.99 (ebk)
Reviewed by: Nina Törnqvist, Uppsala University, Sweden
Criminal trials are often depicted as emotionally challenging and taxing events, at least
when it comes to the defendants and the plaintiffs. In line with the cultural script of the
dispassionate jurisprudence (Maroney, 2011), the legal actors are assumed to stay objec-
tive and unaffected. While the ideological underpinning of this stance relates to the pro-
found division of rationality and emotionality, this image has started to fall apart over the
last three decades, inviting more and more researchers to take an interest in the emotional
world of legal actors (Bandes, 1999; Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2018; Maroney,
2015). With great clarity and analytical vigour, Lisa Flower’s Interactional Justice con-
tributes to the growing field of law and emotion and offers rich and novel understandings
of the interactional and emotional challenges that defence lawyers face in court.
Throughout the book, Flower convincingly argues that justice is to be understood as
an interactional accomplishment, where a fair trial is consolidated by defence lawyers’
loyalty to clients, prosecutors’ commitment to objectivity and judges’ dedication to
impartiality. The first two chapters contain a contextualization of the study and the
Swedish legal context. The Swedish legal system adheres to a mixture of inquisitorial
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