Chapter 1 introduces President Donald Trump’s all-out assaults on the validity of the law of war. It argues that his behavior differs from other Western leaders in that Trump has been willing to openly challenge international humanitarian law (IHL) not “in the shadows” but “in the daylight.” Section 1.1 explains why the topic matters for political scientists and legal scholars. Section 1.2 discusses the significance of Trump’s impunity agenda for policy and governance. Section 1.3 argues that, regardless of whether Trump has technically violated the law of war in the past, his brazen attacks on the need for IHL distinguish him from other Western leaders. Section 1.4 claims that the constraints in Western democracies that largely prevent democratic leaders from publicly flouting IHL may be more perceived than actual. Section 1.5 justifies the case selection of Trump, explaining how Trump was presented with the “means, motive, and opportunity” to overtly defy the law of war. Section 1.6 previews the puzzles and arguments that guide the rest of the book.

Contrary to Central America, the politics of emergency remained an essential framework for solidarity activists with the Southern Cone. However, these activists mobilized an explicitly market-critical interpretation of the human rights problems in Chile and Argentina. Grassroots human rights advocates criticized the lack of thoroughgoing judicial accountability, and the continuation of the economic policies imposed by the outgoing military regimes. Government officials, conservative politicians, and market-friendly NGOs such as the IGFM rebuffed these demands. They endorsed market-friendly democratization, the cornerstones of which were a negotiated ending to military rule, continuation of the neoliberal reforms initiated by the military regimes, and the non-prosecution of most perpetrators of human rights abuses. Pro-Pinochet activists favored a protracted process of democratization in Chile to ensure the continuation of his economic policies. This clashed with the efforts of Christian Democrats Heiner Geißler and Norbert Blüm, who wished to speed up the end of Pinochet’s rule and endorsed the acceptance of left-wing political asylum seekers to the FRG on humanitarian grounds.

This chapter discusses the situation of contemporary disappearances in Mexico and explains how the heterogeneity of perpetrators and victims, especially the involvement of non-state actors in the commission of these crimes, poses conceptual challenges under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances. It specifically addresses two legal questions: the state’s failure to identify dead bodies as a form of enforced disappearance and impunity as a form of acquiescence. Following this, it presents the Committee on Enforced Disappearance’s 2023 Statement on Non-State Actors and examines how the definition of acquiescence provided by the Committee could impact the categorisation of disappearances in Mexico. It is argued that the Committee’s definition could and should be applied in such a way as to consider a large number of disappearances in Mexico today as enforced disappearances, as well as that a presumption of acquiescence would be appropriate in Mexican context, as it places the burden of proof on the state, thereby potentially overcoming a seemingly arbitrary classification of victims into two categories.

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection in order to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu). The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged as ‘dangerous insiders’. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation,’ and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimizes via a discourse of terrorism insecurity.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter explains the motivation for the study. A stark reality is that states often fail to provide justice in many communities enduring criminal group violence. Deaths from criminal group violence roughly equal deaths from war between states, intrastate conflict (namely, civil war and insurgency), and terrorism combined. Moreover, criminal group affiliates who engage in the violence do so with near impunity in many communities. Criminal groups’ ability to escape accountability means that these communities face what I term vacuums of justice. The chapter goes on to argue that justice provision is a core responsibility of the state and, by failing in this regard, states shirk one of their raisons d’être (reasons for existence) under the social contract. The chapter’s final section explains the link between justice provision and cooperation with the police, positing that the police’s reliance on information from witnesses often makes cooperation a necessary albeit insufficient linchpin for justice provision.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

This chapter analyses the connections between public funding, the rule of law, and multidimensional development. First, via simulation, we document a negative relationship between the budget size and the proportion of embezzled resources (or wasted resources due to inefficiencies). Second, our result suggests that reallocating public funds from other issues to programmes associated with the rule of law can mitigate corruption up to a certain point. Third, we find that the worse the country’s performance, the easier to remain in a development trap, as it becomes more cumbersome to realise a successful allocation profile (i.e., to decipher the proper mix of rule-of-law funding and overall budget size).

How does the cloak of immunity protecting foreign public officials under international law enable their impunity before foreign courts for the crimes they committed for private gain? This was the question with which the book commenced. In answering it, an interdisciplinary attempt was made to come to grips with the structural injustices created by international rules of immunity in preventing well-resourced and internationally protected political elites from accountability for trafficking in persons, corruption and money laundering, and drug trafficking. The ways in which these crimes are perpetrated by political elites constitute an advanced form of criminality in which the perpetrators abuse their authority and personal privileges as public officials and, in so doing, disguise misconduct in the official mandate and even under the pretense of law-abiding behavior. These are the ultimate economic crimes that occur at the nexus of power, privilege, and impunity.

The ICC was meant to end impunity for the world’s worst crimes, thus contributing to their prevention. But twenty years after its establishment, its “theory of change” remains unclear, and few studies focus on its impact on the ground. To assess the Court’s impact, it is necessary to define the assumptions underlying its establishment. While deterrence is one such assumption, to date the evidence that the ICC effectively deters crimes is lacking. Other assumptions can be found in the Rome Statute itself, or in the expressed intentions of the Assembly of States Parties or senior officials of the Court. Lessons can also be drawn from impact studies of other international criminal tribunals. These sources indicate that the ICC should play an expressive function by engaging in norm projection. The chapter identifies four intended effects of the Rome Statute and ICC, including systemic effect on domestic legal systems; transformative effect on peace processes; reparative effect on victims; and demonstration effect, relating to its expressive function among affected communities. These four effects form an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC.

Finally, the conclusion provides an overview of the argument and findings, which together call for a departure from the more traditional narrative around the governance gap. Instead, this research illustrates that while impunity does exist, there are many more efforts to hold corporations accountable than the governance gap narrative would suggest. The varieties of remedy approach focus on the real shortcomings associated with governing – the abilities to engage with an adversary, absorb contestation, and explore creative and possibly unorthodox solutions to find a better path forward. This chapter also addresses the generalizability of this work and shares some areas of future research.

What drives the increasingly violent impulses of Hindu nationalism in India? This chapter emphasizes the abyss between, on the one hand, its anxieties about Hindu minoritization and territorial dismemberment and, on the other, its retrotopian visions about revitalizing a purported Hindu golden age.

The Commission against Impunity in Guatemala was an unprecedented international partnership to build the rule of law in a weak state. Between 2007 and 2019, the CICIG contributed to important legal reforms, the creation of a specialized prosecutor’s office and “high-risk” courts, and investigations of more than sixty criminal networks before being shut down by a president whom it was investigating. The CICIG’s sponsorship by the United Nations and funding from international donors helped it to survive resistance from successive Guatemalan presidents. As the CICIG’s investigations and a stronger Guatemalan state threatened a broader array of previously untouchable powerful domestic actors – including in business, the military, and politics – domestic opposition became more obstructionist. The backlash against the CICIG was ultimately successful when an under-resourced and fragile pro-reform domestic coalition could not replace the international support that had lessened as a result of independent but simultaneous global political trends in the late 2010s. The CICIG experience suggests that rule of law reformers will struggle with backlash from those actors who would lose power and face punishment in a strengthened state and that backlash may be insurmountable as international allies move on.

The year 2011 should have been a watershed for Mexican human rights. Mexico’s Supreme Court historically strengthened human rights protections by adopting progressive doctrines grounded in international law, the country modernized its criminal justice system, and civil society united in its calls for justice. Despite these changes, one decade later Mexico finds itself in an unprecedented human rights crisis. How do we understand the spectacular and tragically costly failure of Mexico’s judicial system to strengthen human rights protections and break patterns of impunity over the past decade? The chapter argues that this disconnect stems from two intersecting dynamics: first, the Mexican state’s historically weak, fragmented, federal nature has resulted in the institutionalization of mechanisms that enable impunity, in particular through the work of a powerful and unaccountable Ministerio Público that is able to selectively apply, or defy, the law. Second, socio-legal mobilization has not coalesced around demands for effective implementation of progressive jurisprudence or basic tenets of the rule of law. Instead, human rights litigation proceeds simultaneously on two distinct tracks: strategic litigation of a small number of paradigmatic cases connected to, or in relation with, the inter-American human rights system; and the advocacy and collaborative investigation of cases by small, state-based organizations. The patterns create a critical disconnect, where impunity remains rampant despite Mexico’s embracing of progressive human rights norms and principles.