Spatial Politics and the Creation of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG)

Abstract

Existing work in the critical geographies of human rights has shown how legal processes create spatial renderings of violence that enable individuals and states to assume or deny responsibility for atrocity. Less examined, however, is how human rights law is produced through historically constituted spatial politics. In this article, I focus on the cross-border legal and political conflicts that led to the establishment of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) in 2007. I argue that anti-impunity law does not merely seek to resolve impunity; it organizes the conditions through which the problem of impunity is made knowable. The case of the CICIG’s development illustrates how spatial politics determine the creation of law in ways that both reproduce power and fail to resolve the underlying conflicts that demand legal resolution.

Keywords

Critical geographies of human rights International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG)Clandestine Apparatuses Guatemala

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