The past is a foreign country

International criminal investigations are not only legal exercises but epistemological and cultural ones. Drawing on the author’s work across human rights practice, international tribunals, journalism and historical scholarship, this essay observes that the investigation of mass violence is embedded in cultural and historical frameworks that often sit uneasily with internationalised institutions. It questions the assumed universality of international justice and traces the recurrent misalignment between elite legal actors and the local, often non-Western settings in which they intervene. Organised around the heuristic limits of investigating atrocity, the distinct cultures of (1) criminal and (2) historical inquiry, and the foreignness of both time (the past) and place (other societies), it argues that the deepest divergence lies not between law and history but in the prosecutor’s orientation towards conviction rather than truth-finding, an orientation the historian or the investigative judge do not share. The essay makes the case for international investigation as a collaborative, historically grounded and culturally reflexive endeavour, one informed by culture and history as much as by law.