Coercion at the ICC

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the history of international criminal justice, it has been the source of fierce debate whether institutions like the International Criminal Court (ICC) can prevent atrocity crimes from being committed by putting coercive judicial pressure on potential rule-breakers. Theories and insights drawn from the domestic literature on criminal justice have shaped much of this debate — based on the assumption that international criminal justice is essentially an internationalized version of domestic criminal justice (what I term the ‘domestic origin’ approach). The present article challenges this perspective by pointing out its shortcomings. It suggests that we should instead — or, at least, additionally — treat these international courts and tribunals as sui generis institutions imbedded in the world of international politics. From this perspective we can therefore draw on rationalist approaches to coercive power within the field of International Relations (IR) to analyse these institutions' coercive capacity. Unlike the domestic origin approach, this would allow researchers to draw on existing work on coercive power focusing on scenarios that play out in the kind of setting (major intra- or interstate conflicts) and involve the types of people (leaders of nations, armies and militias) which courts like the ICC were built to deal with.