Despite being outlawed, attacks on cultural heritage remain a pervasive feature in atrocity contexts, the effects of which are compounded by a relative deficit of accountability at the international level. To remedy this gap, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued Policy on Cultural Heritage. However, crimes against cultural heritage are not fully articulated in the Court’s governing instruments. To leverage the protective scope of the Court, the Policy adopts a human rights understanding of cultural heritage which I frame in terms of distinctive relationships between heritage and atrocity crimes. The Policy fertilises a second argument shorthanded as world-building. Against world-destruction, the Policy erects an accountability architecture. Conceptually, it foregrounds an understanding of the world as a cultural construct around which social relations are organised. Crimes against heritage undercut the very notion of what it means to be human; disrupt cultural identification, transmission, and development processes; and deny present and future generations the ability to be specific kinds of cultural human beings. In those regards, this article adds to the world society research agenda of English School theory by examining how the Policy more fully develops the Court’s role as an agent for humanity.

This article develops a socio-legal approach to theorizing the construction of peremptory norms in international relations. It argues that due to its focus on formalism and abstract notions of rights, traditional legal treatments have failed to acknowledge the socially constructed nature of higher order norms. To address this shortcoming, the article transfers the concept of jus cogens into the realm of International Relations. Drawing on insights from constructivism and English School theory, it situates law in the context of society and conceptualizes jus cogens as part of international society’s constitutional structure. Proceeding from the assumption that the content and identity of jus cogens depends on the normative character of international society, the article then assesses two possible ‘normative logics’ through which the peremptory status of a norm may be generated. It rejects a solidarist logic, which sees universal norms as the manifestation of cosmopolitan ideas about inalienable rights. Instead, it argues for a pluralist approach to ethics and order that depicts jus cogens as key to the development of international society towards a social site marked by diversity and respect for difference.