Volume 3, Issue 1, 2022, pp. 54-93

ABSTRACT: This article argues that the victim-perpetrator binary to which International Criminal Law (ICL) remains committed is maintained and legitimised by the language of the International Criminal Court (ICC) judgment against Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and brigade commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Through minute, delicate choices, the judgment’s language sustains and legitimises a fragile binary upon which its findings depend. Drawing on literary methods of close analysis, and thereby extending possibilities for theorising ICL, I argue that the judgment creates a spiderweb-like structure of descriptions of suffering. Representations of individual testimonies encourage empathy, delineating figures of victims. Such personal testimonies are constantly knotted to a sense of the general, enabling a perception of collective victimhood. Against this spiderweb of victimhood, the court’s language casts one perpetrator. Ongwen stands in contrast, his complexities held at a distance from the reader’s perceptions and empathy. Caught like a fly, Ongwen becomes isolated and entangled within the court’s singular understanding of him. I present the ICC and its modes of operation as a powerful, patient spider, building this web and catching this fly by crafting its own language. Throughout my analysis, I point towards the injustice of the judgment’s tendencies towards unifying victim experiences and separating one perpetrator. These tendencies may reduce the accuracy of ICL’s representations of suffering, obscuring complexity and contradiction. This may limit the ICC’s ability to find and tell truths that reflect the individual experiences of those whose hopes for recovery and reconciliation it wishes to answer.