Teaching International Criminal Law from a Critical Perspective: Decentering the Law and the Teacher

International criminal law (ICL) scholarship has become increasingly self-reflexive and critical in recent years. In this chapter, I discuss my attempts to incorporate this critical turn into my teaching of ICL, notably by adopting a contextual perspective and by decentering the teacher. First, what would often be considered mere background and largely beyond the scope of analysis is foregrounded in my teaching: I suggest approaching ICL, its substance, procedures, objectives, justifications and impacts, through a contextual perspective that hence decenters the law. This helps reveal many of the blind spots of the field and allows exploring some of its inherent biases, hegemonic tendencies and power relations. Second, with respect to decentering the teacher – in other words myself – I draw on critical pedagogy, and specifically on Paulo Freire’s dialogic approach, and the fundamental ideas that learning is relational. My efforts are rooted in the claim that trying to be a critical scholar that questions dominant approaches and assumptions should also imply trying to be a critical teacher and encouraging genuine critical thinking among students.