Michael Shapiro's work constantly pushes against the boundaries of knowledge established within political science, rejecting separations between theory and empirics, war and peace, violence and justice, politics and pop culture. He has described his method as “postdisciplinary,” and his energizing refusal to be hemmed in by preestablished categories of analysis is on full display in his most recent book, War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice. Shapiro does not ask familiar, though difficult, questions about these topics, such as: What is justice? Should we classify this or that violent event as a war crime? Has justice been served in a particular criminal trial? Rather than aiming to establish universal definitions of justice, or seeking to determine the truth about a war crime and its perpetrators, Shapiro asks different questions: How does a specific violent event reveal the larger global apparatuses that enable war? What forms of justice are activated or foreclosed by war crimes trials? How might film or literary texts offer more reflective images of justice and accountability than the law? Drawing inspiration from the continental philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Shapiro is most interested in scrutinizing the mobile and contingent notions of crime and justice that emerge out of criminal political events, and in asking how aesthetic forms can offer more robust justice-related imagery than juridical forms of representation.
Shapiro contrasts the international trial and military institutions with what he calls the global justice dispositif and the war dispositif. The latter two not only encompass these institutions but also incorporate militarized police agencies, inequalities of resources across and within states, shadow markets, security protocols, affective sensations, commercial practices, environmental topography, residential patterns, philosophical inheritances, and other factors, in addition to state militaries, international peacekeeping efforts, and Geneva convention protocols. For instance, in Chapter 4, Shapiro carefully examines the film Miss Bala, which investigates drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States by focusing on a beauty contestant unwillingly dragged into it. While the standard narrative of the war on drugs is that international gangs cause drug violence and the border patrol stops it, the film portrays border agents who are part of the problem by increasing the drug traffic they are supposed to stop. The network of apparatuses that make up the border security dispositif in Miss Bala also includes weapons manufacturers, humanitarian agencies, news media, neoliberal economic circulations, the industry of beauty pageants, the army, patriarchy, and even the experience of the protagonist herself, who is meant to stand in for all victims of drug crimes. The film's aesthetic strategies for portraying this dispositif reveal the intricate networks of power that contribute to drug trafficking in ways that the policy provisions of the War on Drugs, for instance, cannot.
Power and responsibility in global justice are complex, and in some cases one form of global justice actively foments another global injustice. Shapiro shows in Chapter 1 that United Nations peacekeeping efforts often increase sex trafficking in the areas they are monitoring. Troops often pay for many illegal prostitutes while keeping the peace, but are simultaneously protected from criminal prosecution. The cessation of some war crimes thus encourages others, and peacekeepers engaged in both gain a “mobile non-juridical space within juridical space” that shields them from the international law they are tasked to uphold, and follows them on their missions. These overlapping cartographies of war crimes more robustly capture the global justice dispositif than does the prosecution of a couple of high-ranking military officers in international courts.
Shapiro argues that the complexity of justice is better addressed in literary texts and in film than in legal proceedings, and he follows Shoshana Felman in privileging “literary justice” over “legal justice.” The latter emphasizes closed cases, definitive judgment, and narrow definitions of crime and justice, while the former emphasizes continuous reflection and open-ended explorations of violence that can better attend to the shifting and expansive effects of war. Aesthetic texts can make visible certain forms of violence and accountability not available in legal texts, and can also reveal the forms of power and influence left out of legal determinations. In Chapter 3, Shapiro examines the Israeli film Lebanon, about an Israeli tank crew during the 1982 war with Lebanon, which highlights these differences. While official Israeli state discourses may have justified the war, and viewed the Lebanese by and large as enemy combatants, the film's cinematic techniques show how easy it is to dehumanize one's enemy from within the mechanic, narrow vision of an armored tank, and argue that official military policy could be considered an international war crime. Lebanon's literary justice depicts a tank command frayed by mutual distrust and an uncertain mission that commits terrible violence against the Lebanese population. It challenges legal justice, while also showcasing the possibility of “empathic vision,” a way of seeing that rehumanizes enemies to delegitimize military imperatives. The main character, Shmulik, after viewing the gaze of the Lebanese people he is supposed to target for destruction, refuses military orders for indiscriminate killing, and when his tank takes a Syrian prisoner of war, he treats him humanely.
Yet if the empathic vision of the film ends with one solider refusing to fire a tank weapon on innocent people and helping a prisoner of war to urinate gracefully, this is a slender image of justice. Counteracting state violence with empathic vision is not enough; one soldier's empathy on its own does not stop the impending massacre, or later hold anyone accountable for it, or offer a widespread challenge to state discourses at a collective level. Read in a different way, Shmulik's empathic vision may even exonerate the Israelis who participated in the 1982 war by positioning ethical Shmulik, not his superiors, as the stand-in for the body politic. Of course, Shapiro states at the outset that he is aiming to open lines of responsibility and accountability that are closed in legal justice, and empathic vision is helpful in this regard. But this it is also a vision that, I think, can still individuate responsibility and subjectivize war crimes. How can empathic vision translate into a political vision that can stop war crimes or hold widespread political actions accountable for them?
This line of questioning connects to the relation between legal and literary justice. Shapiro privileges the openness of the literary form and uses it to critique legal justice, but legal justice is eventually bereft of value or merit. The relation between these two forms of justice, however, may be more dialectical, if not symbiotic. Literary justice alone cannot bear the weight of adjudicating justice; it has no binding power, it is shifting, contestatory, unending—all qualities that make for crucial forms of expansion and critique—but it cannot enforce a collectively determined accountability for violence. Legal justice is like democracy, in that there are always winners and losers in its verdicts; literary justice sheds light on those losses, and opens different lines of accountability for them, but also relies on legal justice for its political and ethical critique.
As a whole, War Crimes, Atrocity, Justice makes a compelling and exciting case for the work that film and literature can do in opening up possibilities of justice, and in mapping the broader dispositifs in which war crimes are made. Shapiro's vital postdisciplinary mode of scholarship refuses to privilege official political narratives over aesthetic ones; it broadens what counts as a properly political text and the forms in which we can imagine global justice. Political science, no less than lived politics, should heed Shapiro's call.
