Anti-Impunity as Governmentality

Abstract

The paper explores how the refocus of the practice of international human rights law around the goal of fighting impunity, has become constitutive of global governance. More specifically, the paper argues that although a turn to fighting impunity in the practice of the human right is an important milestone, its more transformative impact extends beyond the boundaries of what most human rights activists, academics and other interested actors consider as the boundaries of the field of their practice. The paper starts with an account of the legal/institutional transformations in international human rights law that many academics and practitioners consider as clear markers of the turn to fighting impunity. Although these specific and distinct legal/institutional transformations in the human rights field assume thick normative ideas about the best legal/institutional arrangements for governing societies, their regulatory function in global governance does not necessarily follow. The “humanization” of many regimes of global governance, in particular development assistance and international trade, gave the turn fight against impunity a regulatory function to condition and shape processes of national institutional transformations. The paper explores, with some detail, examples in which the fight against impunity has been embedded in official development assistance packages, trade agreements, and in the policy framework for managing the situations in countries described by international actors, in particular International Financial Institutions (“IFIs”), as fragile.