The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence, and the Darfur Conflict 1 Claudia Aradau King’s College London and Andrew Hill The Open University Drawing has been largely neglected in discussions of visuality, conflict, and violence. In 2007, the International Criminal Court accepted 500 children’s drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as contextual evi- dence for war crime trials against Sudanese officials. Starting from this event, and the attention that the Darfuri children’s drawings have gar- nered internationally, this article explores the role that drawings, and children’s drawings in particular, play in the visualization of conflict and violence. Rather than focusing primarily on the relation between image and text, the article argues that visuality needs to be understood as both an aesthetic and social object, whose production, circulation, and reception transform its political effects. It then shows how chil- dren’s drawings are both differentially produced, and productive of dif- ference and ambivalence, in the “truthfulness” of conflict. In November 2007, it was announced that 500 children’s drawings, depicting the conflict in Darfur and collected by the UK NGO Waging Peace, had been accepted as evidence by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the war trials for Ahmad Harun, the Humanitarian Affairs Minister in the Sudanese govern- ment, and Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed militia leader (Grice 2007a,b). In 2009, media reports further indicated that the drawings would be used in the case against the Sudanese President, Umar Hassan Al Bashir, after the ICC issued an arrest warrant against him on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. In 2010, a further arrest warrant was issued for Al-Bashir under the accu- sation of genocide. 2 1 Authors’ note: We would like to thank the participants to the 8th International Centre for Comparative Crimino- logical Research (ICCCR) Conference, “Constructions of Evidence,” for their comments, and Johanna Motzkau in particular for organizing a panel on drawing. We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with the piece. We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by Waging Peace to use the draw- ings included in this article. We also acknowledge the use of Human Rights Watch drawings under the Creative Commons license. Further details on Waging Peace’s work can be found at http://www.waginpeace.info/ index.php/sudan/8-sudan/147-the-drawings. For Human Rights Watch, see http://www.hrw.org/legacy/photos/ 2005/darfur/drawings. 2 At present, these cases remain stalled due to the lack of cooperation from Sudan. Aradau Claudia and Andrew Hill. (2013) The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence, and the Darfur Conflict. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/ips.12029 Ó 2013 International Studies Association International Political Sociology (2013) 7, 368–387