When Justice Leads, Does Politics Follow?

Abstract

Abstract One of the arguments for international prosecution of criminal violence regardless of political context is the presumed normative pull of global justice, which can stigmatize targeted leaders to both international and domestic audiences, leading to their marginalization. However, the examples most closely associated with this argument — Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić (arrest warrants issued in 1995), Slobodan Milošević (arrest warrant unsealed in 1999) and Charles Taylor (arrest warrant unsealed in 2003) — are false positives since they were empowered by a political commitment by powerful states to remove those actors from power. In contrast, when powerful third parties prefer to engage regimes whose leaders are subjected to criminal scrutiny — either because of shared interests or a diplomatic approach to conflict management — the stigmatizing impact of criminalization is limited, as demonstrated by the failure of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to prosecute commanders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the problems the International Criminal Court has encountered in its Darfur and Kenyan investigations. The findings point to the realist limits of the shaming function of international criminal tribunals, whose ability to sideline abusive leaders is dependent on parallel political strategies to achieve the same ends.