Between the duty to prosecute atrocities and domestic precedents of dealing with the past in the era of the International Criminal Court

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the global optimism in, and incentives for state default on the duty to prosecute atrocities in the era of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Drawing on the cases of Uganda and Kenya, the article argues that the construction of international criminal justice as a higher normative structure in overcoming the past is undermined by the appropriateness of familiar alternative frameworks, as enabled by inherent actor agency and power relations in analogous conflict societies. In so doing, the article goes beyond the dominant critiques of international criminal justice in the peacebuilding literature to demonstrate why and how it is resisted on the ground. This article’s arguments are instructive for wider debates on the limitations of international criminal justice in peacebuilding, against the backdrop of contestations in the nurture of transitions within the local, and between the national and the international.