Photographer and Rohingya refugee Omal Khair’s striking image which graces the cover of our book was taken in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The camp is home to more than 750,000 displaced people, mostly Rohingya, who fled alleged crimes against humanity and genocide in Rakhine State, Myanmar, with the largest influx arriving in 2017. Khair is a fellow with the Rohingya Media Fellows project, established in 2018 by the NGO Fortify Rights jointly with the media initiative Doha Debates.

We were drawn to this work by Omal Khair for several reasons. It was important to us that our cover image represented conflict outside the African continent, responding to critiques of the International Criminal Court’s concentration on that region in its initial investigations, compared with its limited response to atrocity crimes committed elsewhere in the world. Capturing the aftermath of atrocities committed in Myanmar helps demonstrate the tragic reality of the extent of war and destruction across the globe.

This cover image beautifully captures an everyday moment of people uprooted by the Myanmar conflict, as the photographer herself has been. We are drawn in by the placement of the people in the image, all exercising agency, strength, and resilience, notwithstanding the (literal and figurative) precarity of their position. A woman balancing herself and a child on her hip, men and boys labouring to construct the overpass while another wades underneath. Each appears to be following gendered patterns, though the reality of these relationships is unknown to the viewer and requires deeper investigation. Incorrect assumptions about gender relations in conflict and post-conflict settings, as this volume shows, add to misrecognition and interfere with justice and accountability. One message emanating from this book is that judicial decision making will improve through contextualising experiences and discarding stereotyped views of people’s lives across time and place.

Law limits its purview to specific instances of crimes, at specific moments, in specific places. By contrast, the photograph shows the cascade effect of conflict across borders and generations too often concealed by legal institutions. The bamboo scaffolding serves as a fitting metaphor for the legal scaffolding – the Rome Statute and other ICC rules – which both structure and constrain the reimagined judgments in this book.

The fragile structure of the bridge also represents for us the limits of international criminal law, as well as the reality of post-conflict life which requires survivors to balance precariously while constructing a new beginning. In this sense, the image shows the vulnerability of those forced to flee from conflict, but also provides some sense of hope for a better future.

In this book, we are privileged to be able to showcase more images from Omal Khair as well as two other Rohingya media fellows, Dil Kayas and Azimul Hasson, in the form of a photo essay in the Bangladesh/Myanmar section. Like our cover image, these photos speak to the limits of the law and the need to think creatively about how to express the costs of war and conflict, the burdens of survivorship, and the determination to rebuild shattered lives and seek justice and accountability, however it can be achieved.