From Timbuktu to the International Community: Intertextuality, Expressivism and Legitimacy in the ICC’s Al Mahdi Trial

Abstract This paper examines the 2016 trial of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi by the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the lenses of discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology, with a focus on how trial actors navigated legitimacy challenges. Al Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, was charged with the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu, which were UNESCO World Heritage sites. This paper argues that the trial actors used a rhetorical “local-to-global parallelism” which sought to consolidate a global range of constituencies and legitimate the ICC’s actions both normatively and sociologically. The local-to-global parallelism served to “talk into existence” a broad-based victimhood, which reinforced the court’s symbolic authority and its claims to jurisdiction. It also relied heavily on intertextual connections between the ICC and UNESCO, thereby legitimating the prosecution of cultural heritage destruction as a grave international crime.