Abolition of International Criminal Law: A Marxist Critique

Black feminists in the United States have made sophisticated arguments for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, of which criminal law is a crucial component. This literature offers a materialist critique of the carceral system, demonstrating the centrality of prisons for processes of both dispossession of Black communities, and accumulation of capital through the extraction of Black labor inside prisons. In this essay, I explore the potential and limits of an abolitionist critique of international criminal law (ICL), and I argue that there is a danger of losing the radical edge of Black feminist scholarship if its insights are transplanted without its explicitly anti-capitalist politics.