State Nobility in the Field of International Criminal Justice: Divergent Elites and the Contest to Control Power over Capital

Abstract

Abstract Criminal law was long considered as the sovereign domain of the state. However, after the end of the Cold War, states created new international criminal courts. These courts are part of a wider field of international criminal justice in which different elites work to develop, support, and critique legal ideas and practices that either complement or challenge the state. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and based on a multiple correspondence analysis with sixty-four modalities, this article contributes a critical analysis of 365 elite agents active in this field. The analysis shows how different types and volumes of capital structure relations between these elites as well as between the field of international criminal justice and the state. Because these relations can turn state nobility against its national origins, international criminal justice poses a potential challenge to the state’s social fabric which goes beyond legal and political controversies: International criminal justice is emblematic of a competition over the value of and control over capital which plays out at the borders between the national and the international. This contest underlines that the state does necessarily control power over state capital and that, when its elites no longer reproduce its meta-capital, the state loses the semblance of being a unified actor on the world stage. Whereas the intensity of this contest over capital might be particular to the field of international criminal justice, similar battles of control are likely to affect the relations between the state and other globalized fields of law, justice, and politics.