Chapter 1 starts by illustrating the puzzle of American antagonism to the ICC. It then introduces the book’s three main questions: Why does the US fear the ICC? When, exactly, does the US oppose the ICC? And does the ICC’s track record justify American hostility? The rest of the chapter previews the book’s arguments, explains why the US–ICC relationship is of crucial importance for policymakers, and discusses how the book provides new insights into some of the big questions in international relations.

This chapter introduces some of the most important efforts of the post-Second World War period to protect human rights at the international level. We commence with discussing the successes and failures of two types of international interventions that have dominated international responses to war: humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping operations. Next, we turn to international courts, spotlighting the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. We discuss how they work, what kinds of cases they have handled, and what some of the common critiques have been. We then examine human rights conventions and various ways in which they have enhanced human rights protection, and where they have failed to do so. We also touch upon the strategy of ‘naming and shaming’, and assess whether it has been successful in improving human rights.

International law arose in the mid nineteenth century when European powers determined to codify and formalize customary law, to restrain the use of violence in armed conflict, and to create certain protected categories of people. The Hague and Geneva Conventions formed the core of the emerging laws of war and international humanitarian law. While the Conventions have been breached at times, they still form one of the most widely accepted and long-standing aspects of international law. International humanitarian law and laws of war clarify and formalize the differentiation between civilians and combatants, regular and irregular forces, lawful and unlawful combatants. While international laws attempt to make the demarcation of these boundaries as precise as possible, the realities of war always undermine and undo such delineation efforts. Recently, there have been increasing efforts to regulate these gray areas and create international laws and agencies to regulate groups that elude classification.

This chapter reflects on how international organizations may affect the legal position of non-members – and the international legal system more generally – by imposing or exporting norms. It considers the aspiration latent in universal international organizations to bend the outside world to their will, looking at examples from the practice of the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court. It then turns to the practice of the OECD and the EU to examine some of the ways in which regional international organizations may export norms to non-members through international cooperation and unilateral action, and some of the normative concerns that this form of engagement raises.

Uganda is a case of midrange institutional control in which transitional justice has been subsumed within existing state institutions through a strategy of containment. In this chapter I present the Ugandan government’s strategy wherein transitional justice is enmeshed within existing structures of power, which allows the government to monitor and control the risks of norm compliance. The chapter begins with a discussion of the history of armed conflict in Uganda, particularly the war against the Lord’s Resistance Army and the government’s abuse of Acholi civilians. I then examine the government’s adaptation of transitional justice to identify and evaluate the containment strategy in which the risks of accountability are managed by integrating transitional justice into government institutions controlled through patronage, functionally rendering impunity for the state. I explore the containment strategy through three components of transitional justice in Uganda: International Crimes Division, state-regulated customary justice practices, and the National Transitional Justice Policy. To explore the strategy beyond the case of Uganda, I examine transitional justice in Côte d’Ivoire.

The epilogue brings together a number of themes of the book and sketches some avenues for further research.

Each process to resolving intrastate conflicts requires different strategies and objectives. Yet, as conflicts continue to increase, researchers have asked if peacekeeping is truly possible. Furthermore, is peace from these approaches stable and durable? The role of third parties in ending intrastate wars or post-conflict instability is central to these processes, where organizations and states play a critical role in ushering in peace during and following civil wars. Over the last three decades a strong trend in third-party attempts to resolve intrastate conflict has emerged. Here, mediation and peacekeeping have played a pivotal role in addressing crises within various countries since the end of the Cold War. From mediation to peacekeeping, this chapter expands upon the different forms and interventions that prevent and resolve conflict, all of which incorporate various sociopolitical and international legal principles in the process. It highlights the benefits and consequences of each intervention, what institutions utilize these principles, and how international humanitarian law has changed since World War II.

This chapter takes the example of the International Criminal Court’s ‘Independent Expert Review’ (IER) of 2020 to reflect on the theory and practice of expert reform work. Taking actor-network theory’s prompt that systems – like international organisations – are neither static nor fixed, but ‘in a perpetual state of forming and reforming’, I read reform neither as rational science nor as a mere reproduction of hegemony, but as the expert reassembly of the ICC’s context, problems, resources, and priorities. In the IER example, the expert work of reform and reassembly effected nothing less than the recalibration of the relationship between the Court and its states parties. Through their work, experts knit together ideas of autonomy and accountability, their training, investigatory processes, documents, and resource and time constraints to centre the efficiency concerns of wealthy states parties in the judicial and prosecutorial function. In this way, expert reform work illustrates the power of expert articulation by putting abstract expectations, ideas, ‘realities’, constraints, and materials into organisational action in deeply distributive ways.

Atrocity crimes and grand corruption: the chapter argues that adopting a “corruption lens” is useful to characterize and understand patterns of crimes against humanity, especially whether acts are widespread or systematic, whether there is a state or organizational policy, how high-ranking actors are tied to crimes by subordinates (“modes of liability”) and whether specific acts constitute crimes under the ICC’s Rome Statute. The chapter uses examples from Mexico and Venezuela to illustrate.

Subsequent to adoption of the Convention, the International Law Commission studied legal issues relating to its interpretation and implementation in the context of its work on the Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. This included issues such as the nature of participation and the available defences. The Genocide Convention and the crime of genocide are addressed in several international treaties, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the non-applicability of Statutory Limitation, and the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid. The Genocide Convention was also studied in detail by the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities and the Ad Hoc Working Group of Experts on Apartheid. In the 1990s, the crime of genocide as defined in the Convention was incorporated in the statutes of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. These courts have all provided judicial interpretation of the definition of genocide taken from the Convention. The Elements of Crimes, adopted pursuant to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, further develop the definition of genocide.

The Genocide Convention states that persons charged with the crime may be prosecuted ’by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction’. At the time no such institution existed. The International Court of Justice held that the ad hoc tribunals established by the Security Council could be deemed to be such an international penal tribunal. They undertook a large number of genocide prosecutions. The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, constitutes such an international tribunal. It has only issued a single arrest warrant for genocide, against the former president of Sudan.

This chapter explores the design of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) permanent premises and the politics of movement on its grounds. Drawing on literature in the field of critical international criminal law, law and architecture, legal design, and feminist courtroom geography, the chapter rethinks how the architecture of this particular international court is in constant conversation with its surroundings and its visitors, and how it is entangled with questions of international (criminal) law’s legitimacy and its appeal to humanity, dignity, truth, and justice. My starting point is the constant tension between inclusion and exclusion already inherently present in the design concept of Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, who aimed to design a building that was to be “a landmark that conveys the eminence and authority of the ICC, while at the same time relating on a human scale." By providing a deeper understanding of the politics of design at the ICC’s permanent premises, this chapter aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation on international law’s opportunities, challenges, and possible alternatives.