The Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) established in 2011 through European state funds is a private, non-profit NGO committed to amassing and preserving a large cache of material for future trials arising from the current conflicts in Syria and Iraq; the training of local lawyers in these two states (or, ‘capacity-building’); and generating expert legal briefs for possible trials. Unlike their well-funded international human rights organisation counterparts (particularly Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International), CIJA actively avoids public advocacy and is at pains to preserve its highly secretive profile. It has no website and locations for its European offices are suppressed. It has generated almost no publicly available reports. Reliance on the largesse of its personnel then is seminal in accessing this organisation and accordingly, I have pursued interviews with most of its key members. This data is rich and informs a variety of substantive socio-legal analyses about CIJA’s form of ‘entrepreneurial justice’ in the Arab world and beyond. This seminar, however, is not concerned with any of my substantive findings. Instead, I seek to use this forum as a way to reflect on the role of the scholar in generating ‘legitimate’ research from such partial and limited materials. The seminar will introduce debates about paraethnography and how to understand the construction of expertise within the overlapping settings of CIJA, its wider ‘accountability’ fields and scholarly fields of socio-legal enquiry.

Dr Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is a Research Fellow at RegNet (CAP) and a Lecturer in Public International Law at the University of Edinburgh Law School. Her research explores international law across the Arab world, especially in relation to Palestine.