Come and see? The power of images and international criminal justice

What kind of interdisciplinary approaches on images and international criminal justice (ICJ) are there to be explored? What could they bring to scholarship and institutional practice? This article provides a panorama of images and their roles, analysing the power of persuasion and attraction of images and its shadows. The power of images of suffering is discussed in light of critical scholarship on solidarity and humanitarianism. Another kind of power emanates from images by institutions and advocacy where justice is ‘seen to be done’. These powers are intertwined; images of suffering derive legitimacy and veracity from the format of their deployment, whereas images of institutional authority fuel on affects and their appeasement in the order the institutions aim at narrating, also by images. Engaging with interdisciplinarity, the article invites critical attention to what happens when images are powerful, and on the subjectivities and hierarchies involved, thereby reaching beyond the images.