Reflections on Global Justice: Norm Diffusion and Strategic Accommodation

Abstract

Prosecuting Heads of State. Edited by Ellen L. Lutz, Caitlin Reiger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 326 pp., $32.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-75670-9). Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans. By Jelena Subotic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 201 pp., $35.00 hardback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4802-7). On December 10, 2010, Ivo Sanader, Croatia's former prime minister (2003–2009), was arrested by Austrian police on a Croatian arrest warrant while attempting to flee to the United States (Jutarnji List 2010). Sanader's arrest on charges of financial corruption coincided with a new impetus to prosecute formerly untouchable Croatian elites from Sanader's ruling party and constitutes part of a growing global trend to confront crimes perpetrated by former ruling elites that range from financial embezzlement to crimes against humanity and genocide through courtroom prosecutions. Indeed, Sanader's December 2010 arrest can be situated within an emerging global justice norm that political elites responsible for serious wrongdoings should be held criminally liable for past abuses. This emergent global justice norm has been the focus of a growing body of literature that attempts to deepen our understanding of the extent to which prosecutorial confrontations with past abuses either advances or hinders transitions from authoritarianism, conflict, or both.1 Two recent books, Ellen Lutz and Caitlin Reiger's edited volume Prosecuting Heads of State and Jelena Subotic's Hijacked Justice , explore the emergence of global justice and its impact upon states in transition in what constitute two valuable contributions to transitional justice and international relations literature. As illustrated by Sanader's recent arrest, the ever-growing ranks of heads of state or government who enter the doors of international, domestic, or hybrid courts as defendants attest to the deepening entrenchment of a prosecutorial norm in international society. Yet, parallel to the proliferation of prosecutorial responses to past abuses, social scientific investigations of the impact of courtroom prosecutorions upon societies in transition, or societies in conflict, raise troubling questions regarding the relationship between criminal justice and transitional justice (Peskin 2008; Lamont 2010). It is within the above context that Prosecuting Heads of States and Hijacked Justice concisely …