Mark Drumbl taught an intensive course on ‘Victims, International Law, and Mass Atrocity’ at Monash University in Melbourne Australia in August 2018. While there, he also had a chance to visit Griffith University in Brisbane Australia where he participated in a book launch and also gave a talk on a recent project he has begun that assesses the role of international law in protecting cultural property. Riffing off the 2016 sentence and 2017 reparations order issued by the International Criminal Court in a case called Al Mahdi which involved a Salafist extremist associated with ‘Al Qaeda in the Magreb’ who was convicted of destroying a set of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, Drumbl questions the intersection between the destruction of cultural property as a crime, on the one hand, and the place of revolution and resistance in justice movements, on the other. Audio of his talk is available here.
In September, he lectured in Prague, Czech Republic, at the European International Studies Association meeting in a special program on ‘International Law: Collected Stories’, presenting his work that looked at the use of film and stage plays to narrate the histories of atrocity that fall outside of the scope of courtrooms because the perpetrators are too tragic and the victims may be too imperfect. His other publications on this topic are here and here.
Drumbl then traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a keynote speaker at a conference held at Kenyatta University on the Twentieth Anniversary of the International Criminal Court. https://twitter.com/KenyattaUni/status/1042745599580405761. His remarks were entitled: “Sloped Shoulders and Shuffling Steps: Can the ICC Bear All that Weight?”. In his remarks, Drumbl urged a diversification of methods of justice beyond what is increasingly a focus on one institution that itself is hobbled.
