Rebranding the State: Uganda's Strategic Use of the International Criminal Court

Abstract

When governments invite the International Criminal Court (ICC) to conduct investigations within their own borders, they seem to indicate acceptance of global norms of accountability for wartime atrocities. The first of these self-referrals came from Uganda, whose government requested investigation into its conflict with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a conflict within which it, too, committed large-scale human rights violations. This article argues that Uganda used the ICC to help solve a problem faced by many of the world's least powerful states, whose domestic politics are often structured through patron–client networks. Their rulers need to distribute basic state resources, including physical protection, to loyal clients without alienating donors who demand provision of these same resources by right to all citizens. By inviting external scrutiny and manipulating the investigative process, the Ugandan government received an international seal of approval for practices that the ICC would normally punish. This strategy has system-wide consequences in that repeated mislabelling of rights violations as compliant with international norms causes the meaning of compliance to become incoherent, and norms are less able to constrain the behaviour of all states in the long run.