In the Summer of 2018, as part of a course entitled The Making and Unmaking of International Law, Professor Kamari Clarke, with the assistance of consultant, Sarah-Jane Koulen, hosted an International Law Summer School in The Hague, Netherlands. With participation from visiting scholars such as Professors Jill Stauffer, Sara Kendall and Siba Grovogui, amongst others, the course aimed to provide students with an immersive experience of international law in the making.
Inspired by the success of this program, the team collaborated with partners in Rwanda and at the University of Rwanda to create a similar immersive learning experience outside of Europe. With a commitment to exploring justice issues within African spatial geographies and social worlds, the result of this engagement is the development of a new summer program established with the collaboration between the Transnational Justice Project at the University of Toronto, The University of Rwanda, Haverford College and Kent Law School.
In the contemporary period, the term “justice” is often presumed to refer to legal justice, yet justice means much more than legality. This limited understanding of justice often results in consequential socio-economic and political conditions that contribute to people’s experiences and perceptions of justice being increasingly pushed aside in the international justice landscape. Nowhere is this more significant than in the Global South, where the focus has thus far increasingly been on the prosecution of crimes rather than the historical conditions that gave rise to them.