International crime and justice are powerful ideas, associated with a vivid imagery of heinous atrocities, injured humanity, and an international community seized by the need to act. Through an analysis of archival and contemporary data, Imagining the International provides a detailed picture of how ideas of international crime (crimes against all of humanity) and global justice are given content, foregrounding their ethical limits and potentials. Nesam McMillan argues that dominant approaches to these ideas problematically disconnect them from the lived and the specific and foster distance between those who have experienced international crime and those who have not. McMillan draws on interdisciplinary work spanning law, criminology, humanitarianism, socio-legal studies, cultural studies, and human geography to show how understandings of international crime and justice hierarchize, spectacularize, and appropriate the suffering of others and promote an ideal of justice fundamentally disconnected from life as it is lived. McMillan critiques the mode of global interconnection they offer, one which bears resemblance to past colonial global approaches and which seeks to foster community through the image of crime and the practice of punitive justice. This book powerfully underscores the importance of the ideas of international crime and justice and their significant limits, cautioning against their continued valorization.

International crime and justice are powerful ideas, associated with a vivid imagery of heinous atrocities, injured humanity, and an international community seized by the need to act. Through an analysis of archival and contemporary data, Imagining the International provides a detailed picture of how ideas of international crime (crimes against all of humanity) and global justice are given content, foregrounding their ethical limits and potentials. Nesam McMillan argues that dominant approaches to these ideas problematically disconnect them from the lived and the specific and foster distance between those who have experienced international crime and those who have not. McMillan draws on interdisciplinary work spanning law, criminology, humanitarianism, socio-legal studies, cultural studies, and human geography to show how understandings of international crime and justice hierarchize, spectacularize, and appropriate the suffering of others and promote an ideal of justice fundamentally disconnected from life as it is lived. McMillan critiques the mode of global interconnection they offer, one which bears resemblance to past colonial global approaches and which seeks to foster community through the image of crime and the practice of punitive justice. This book powerfully underscores the importance of the ideas of international crime and justice and their significant limits, cautioning against their continued valorization.

Four of the Chief Investigators from the Minutes of Evidence project-which combines research, education, performance, and public engagement to spark new ways of understanding structural inequalities in settler societies like Australia-closely consider the law's complex relation to the structural injustices of colonialism. This interdisciplinary book brings together the insights and approaches of history, criminology, socio-legal studies, and law to present a range of case studies of the encounter between law and colonialism. Through historical and contemporary case studies, it emphasizes the nature of colonialism as a structural injustice that becomes entrenched in the social, political, legal, and discursive structures of societies and continues to affect people's lives in the present. It charts the role of law in both enabling and sustaining colonial injustice and in recognizing and redressing it. Despite the enduring legacies and harms of colonialism, Keeping Hold of Justice contends that possibilities for structural justice can be found thorough collaborative methodologies and practices that actively bring together different disciplines, peoples, temporalities, laws, and ways of knowing into dynamic relation. They reveal law not only as a source of colonial harm but also as a potential means of keeping hold of justice.