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At the Paris Peace Conference, liberal internationalists maintained that the international system could be regulated by a new League of Nations and an international court to settle political disputes. This was not an international criminal court, however. Later, different European jurists adopted that project for liberal and conservative purposes. In 1920 Baron Edouard Descamps proposed a non-permanent international criminal court with jurisdiction over aggressive war and war crimes, but also over “crimes against the international order,” meaning socialist revolution. Romanian jurist Vespasien V. Pella wanted to create an international criminal court to prevent wars of aggression, as well as create a new tool that would allow states to protect themselves against transnational crime, revolutionary socialism, and terrorism. The movement to build the new field of international criminal law in the 1920s had very little success because it was out of step with other legal and political developments in the League and could not resolve jurisdictional conflicts among states. By 1929, criminological jurists had helped write an anti-counterfeiting convention, but they needed a new project that would attract state officials to their grand vision of creating an international legal system based on criminal laws. The rise of new forms of terrorism provided that opportunity.

More recently, jurisprudential cross-fertilization has kept on being pursued in particular by international human rights tribunals and international criminal tribunals. This is reassuring, as, despite their distinct jurisdictions, their work is complementary, in their common mission of imparting justice, in distinct domains of international law. Jurisprudential cross-fertilization fosters cohesion and the unity of law. Particularly attention is currently devoted to the preservation of the legacy of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals.

This chapter introduces the Bikindi case in detail, along with some necessary context. Having offered a brief overview of the Rwandan genocide, it summarizes the history and structure of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda before outlining the specifics of the charges against Bikindi, the three songs at the centre of his trial and the judgments eventually rendered. The chapter then addresses the response to the Bikindi case in the legal literature, in musicology, and in the media. This response, it is suggested, is symptomatic of the deafness of so much contemporary juridical thought. Finally, the chapter details the archival materials on which the study is based, along with the method brought to bear on them.

The introductory chapter locates the concept of civilian protection within existing doctrine and legal frameworks that guide international work on protection. It then raises a number of considerations that emerge in the field given the consolidation of a number of overlapping protection regimes at the international level, and the need to identify areas of both complementarity and gaps that are produced in the process of refining international regulation of protection that have developed rapidly since the late 1990s. This discussion is intended to qualify the orientation of the volume towards a recalibrated conceptualization of civilian protection in global political discourse and practice. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of the chapters in this volume.

This chapter introduces the Bikindi case along with the book’s main argument. It suggests that questions of sound and listening have been seriously neglected in contemporary legal scholarship and that there is a need, therefore, for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence. As a community of legal thinkers and practitioners, this chapter suggests, we must teach ourselves to listen to law, to attend properly to questions of sound in the administration of justice. The chapter then explains why the Bikindi case provides such a rich starting point in this respect. All legal thought and practice necessarily takes place in and in relation to sound, but what makes Bikindi’s trial particularly compelling for an acoustic jurisprudence is the extent to which it dramatizes this fact. The chapter ends with an overview of the book’s structure.