A new historical bloc and the political economy of international criminal prosecutions at the international criminal court

Abstract

ABSTRACT Propagators and many critics of the effectiveness of enforcement mechanisms portraying the individual criminal positioned against the political and legal system as the main power modality are strange disciplinary fraternities reconstructing the goal of deterrence as the primary goal in law and granting it an exclusive role to the detriment of its alternatives. Starting with the debate on whether international criminal law can prevent mass-scale atrocities, this paper argues that treating deterrence as the ultimate goal in international law not only blurs but also prevents insights on how law’s power operates in different temporal and spatial domains in different forms. Through deconstructing the artificial and false dichotomies of the national versus the international and the state versus the international community, the paper displays the connection between international criminal prosecutions and the conditions of global political economy from a neo-Gramscian perspective. It does so by revealing that the deterrence of certain crimes accepted to be the main function of any legal system is an incomplete and even defective, if not superficial, depiction of the problem, and exemplifies this with the establishment and operation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). A reconnaissance of the transformations in state sovereignty as well as the juxtaposition of power modalities in a neoliberal design whereby meta-governance of the problem of global insecurity is operationalised unfolds how efforts to control crime and violence coincide with capitalist expansion.