The Promise of International Criminal Justice Beyond Carcerality: Reframing Anti-Impunity for Atrocity Violence

• In Event: Rethink and Reboot: Reimagining the Logos of International Criminal Justice

Abstract

The international criminal justice project has long been critiqued for its selectivity, double standards, racial bias, neocoloniality, and imposition of Western-hegemonic conceptions of anti-impunity and accountability. Discourse over the project’s failures to address structural injustices and power inequalities on the global stage has mostly been marked by disappointment and mourning over the promise of ‘international criminal justice’. Those engaged in international criminal law critique have, however, come to plainly state that, rather than an ideal plagued by ‘constant crises’ and external (and extralegal) constraints, international criminal justice is, by design, a project entrenched in and reliant upon structures of inequality, least of which the carceral-punitive model of accountability. The makeup of those incarcerated for the commission of international crimes – along with the unequal access to accountability at the international level for victims of atrocities perpetrated by Western states and their allies – reveal how the carceral-punitive model perpetuates racial and class inequality, colonial legacies, and power asymmetries.
While the International Criminal Court has recently issued its first arrest warrant for a Western leader, it is at this moment that the deficiencies and politicized nature of international criminal justice seem most exposed and threaten the legitimacy and longevity of the project. This paper proposes, however, that this moment of ‘ultimate crisis’ could equally be one of opportunity: an opportunity to deconstruct carcerality in international criminal law, and to look for constructive alternatives in critical criminology and the abolitionist movement, in order to widen the scope of accountability and reframe anti-impunity beyond the carceral. Ultimately, this exercise seeks to interrogate whether the project’s reliance on an individualistic, violent and unequal model of accountability is restricting the promise of international criminal justice to address atrocity violence and condemning it to a perpetuity of legitimacy crises.

Author

• Marta Campos Pinto da Cruz, University of Amsterdam