Critical stasis and disruptive performances: ICJ and the Anwar R trial in Koblenz

Date01 August 2021
DOI10.1177/13624806211008573
AuthorPetya Mitkova Koleva,Henrik Vigh
Published date01 August 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211008573
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(3) 437 –453
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806211008573
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Critical stasis and disruptive
performances: ICJ and the
Anwar R trial in Koblenz
Petya Mitkova Koleva and Henrik Vigh
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
This article explores the extraterritorial criminal court case against Anwar R, a high-
ranking member of the Syrian regime on trial for crimes against humanity in Koblenz,
Germany. Empirically anchored in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Koblenz and
with the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the article illuminates
the trial as a ‘disruptive performance’. The case against Anwar R punctuates two
instances of negative stasis and unsettles two accounts of chronicity, namely, those of
the Syrian conflict and of the field of international criminal justice. In order to illuminate
the trial as a disruptive performance, the article empirically situates the Koblenz
case both in relation to the Syrian war that it relates to, to the international criminal
justice apparatus that it is a part of and to the underlying compilation of evidence that
substantiates it. It thus clarifies both the symbolic potential and the constitutive process
that has brought it into being.
Keywords
crisis, ethnography, international criminal justice, performance, stasis
Introduction
Trials can be spectacles. While most cases amount to the routine work of bureaucratic
orders, the politicized few are often dramatic, boundary drawing events that punctuate
and differentiate the humdrum of everyday socio-legal orders by showcasing transgres-
sion, voicing objection and executing reprimand. While the unspectacular multitude of
Corresponding author:
Henrik Vigh, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, Kobenhavn, 1353, Denmark.
Email: hv@anthro.ku.dk
1008573TCR0010.1177/13624806211008573Theoretical CriminologyKoleva and Vigh
research-article2021
Article
438 Theoretical Criminology 25(3)
regular trials discreetly maintain societal life, the spectacular few instantiate or reinstate
normative orders.
This article analyses a case of the latter through a performative lens. It looks at the
mise en scene of an extraterritorial court case and elucidates the theatre of the trial with
an eye to the orders it unsettles and the dynamics it affects. More specifically, the article
investigates the field of international criminal justice (ICJ) and the ongoing trial of
Anwar R,1 a former colonel in the intelligence service of the Syrian regime. At first
glance, the trial could appear to be a mere show trial, politicized but inconsequential.
Held in a domestic courtroom in Koblenz, Germany, it examines the conduct of a former
regime operative turned refugee, during a 16-month period, at a regional branch of the
Syrian security-intelligence service. Yet, the trial of Anwar R is an unusual one. It is both
the result of a structural investigation by German authorities of the situation in Syria and
of criminal complaints filed in Germany by Syrian victims and human rights activists for
crimes committed in the course of an ongoing conflict in their home country. Brought
before the court under the principle of universal jurisdiction, the case is emblematic of a
novel attempt to secure justice provision in relation to the last decade of atrocities in
Syria. Efforts to establish an international tribunal in relation to the Syrian situation, or
secure a UN Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), have
been continuously blocked by regional and geopolitical disagreement. Moreover, as the
al-Assad led Ba’ath regime edges ever closer to military victory, extraterritorial trials,
such as the one in Koblenz, remain one of the only feasible avenues towards securing a
measure of accountability. It is no surprise, then, that the case is the subject of intense
international attention. Described as the first worldwide trial on state-sanctioned torture
in Syrian detention centres, the proceedings in Koblenz have captured the public interest
and spurred the hopes of the Syrian victims and survivors, who see the trial as a stepping
stone on the long path to justice. Extra-territorial and transnational, it has become a spec-
tacle, a public performance of culpability and accountability, that is seen to intersect the
deadlock of an ongoing war that has spanned most of the last decade. Yet how are we to
understand the significance of an extraterritorial trial, of a mid-level suspect, which
offers no certain prospects of deterrence against the ongoing violence in the country or
accountability for those most responsible for it?
In the context of the protracted conflict, we argue, the trial can be seen as an event that
punctuates a situation of critical stasis. Within the present situation of ‘terror as usual’ in
Syria (cf. Taussig, 1989), the case against Anwar R becomes a ‘disruptive performance’
on two different accounts. On the one hand, it has led to a refocusing of the international
society’s attention on a perpetrating order that has otherwise been removed from the
headlines and receded to the shadows of the global news flow (Perruci, 2009: 9). While
it will most likely not lead to radical change or reveal the unknown, its mere enactment
highlights a long-term practice of torture and mistreatment by regime forces. On the
other hand, its performance counters a decline in the number and standing of interna-
tional legal processes. After a surge in such activities, seen for example in the establish-
ment of the ICC, the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia, the special court in Sierra Leone and Cambodia, the hybrid-courts in
Cambodia and East Timor and the internationally assisted legal efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan (Drumbl, 2003: 263), the push towards international courts and adjudication

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