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International Relations: Between Theory and Practice, the National and International

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War Crimes Trials and Investigations

Part of the book series: St Antony's Series ((STANTS))

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Abstract

The study of war crimes trials in the context of International Relations (IR) has been focused on the relationship between the establishment of the post-World War II international criminal tribunals and the classical notions of sovereignty, namely the principles of juridical equality between states and domestic non-intervention. By directly establishing individual criminal responsibility for atrocities under international law, international criminal justice challenges the classical image of international politics as interactions between states that have equal status to each other and are impenetrable from the outside. While the existing theoretical and methodological tools of IR have resulted in a series of valuable insights on the role of transnational norms regarding responsibility for mass violence, on the role of power politics in establishing international criminal tribunals, and on the function of international criminal justice in solving a series of cooperation issues between and within states following widespread instability, this chapter argues that further interdisciplinary insights are required to both specify and nuance the effect of international criminal trials, including war crimes trials, on international politics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter adopts a broad definition of IR as the social-scientific study of international politics. It differentiates the modern study of international politics from the more classical study of politics, such as that of Thucydides. The question of whether IR is a separate discipline or a sub-discipline under Political Science has been a matter of continuous contention within the discipline itself. This debate is partially rooted in the different historical developments across different countries as well as institutions (although this has been largely limited to the West). For example, IR was institutionalized as a separate discipline in the United Kingdom after World War I, while in the United States, Germany, and France, it was considered as a sub-discipline of Political Science. For further discussion regarding the disciplinary boundary of IR and its intellectual history, see: Brian C. Schmidt, “On the History and Historiography of International Relations,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons (London: Sage, 2002), 189–206; Ole Waever, “Still a Discipline after All These Debates?,” in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, ed. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 300–332.

  2. 2.

    Michael Barnett and Kathryn Sikkink, “From International Relations to Global Society,” in Oxford Handbook on International Relations, ed. Chris Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 63.

  3. 3.

    Officially known as the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE)

  4. 4.

    David A. Lake, “The State and International Relations,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, ed. Chris Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41–61.

  5. 5.

    Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26–27.

  6. 6.

    Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity and Culture in International Security,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms, Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 54.

  7. 7.

    Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011).

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 246.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 248.

  10. 10.

    Gary J. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Christopher Rudolph, “Constructing an Atrocities Regime: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001): 655–691.

  11. 11.

    Rudolph refers to this as the ‘atrocities regime’; this would generally include international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and specific aspects of international human rights law focused on bodily harm.

  12. 12.

    Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, 20–23, 28–36. Keck and Sikkink, in a study of transnational advocacy for human rights , reached a similar conclusion that in general, states with liberal, law-based traditions have difficulties resisting normative arguments for legalist accountability measures. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 117–119, 207–209.

  13. 13.

    Bass, Stay the Hand, 8.

  14. 14.

    Aryeh Neier, War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Times Books, 1998), 129. See also: Caroline Fehl, “Explaining the International Criminal Court: A ‘Practice Test’ for Rationalist and Constructivist Approaches,” European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 3 (2004): 373; Eric Neumayer, “A New Moral Hazard? Military Intervention, Peacekeeping and Ratification of the International Criminal Court,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 5 (2009): 659–670.

  15. 15.

    Rudolph, “Constructing an Atrocities Regime,” 683.

  16. 16.

    David Bosco, Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  17. 17.

    Zachary D. Kaufman, United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2016), 5–6; 42–64.

  18. 18.

    See above section.

  19. 19.

    Victor Peskin and Mieczysław P. Boduszyński. “Balancing International Justice in the Balkans: Surrogate Enforcers, Uncertain Transitions and the Road to Europe,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 5, no. 1 (2011): 53–54.

  20. 20.

    Benjamin N. Schiff, Building the International Criminal Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 213. See also: Jacqueline Gies and Alex Mundt, When to Indict: International Criminal Indictments, Peace Processes, and Humanitarian Action (Groningen: Brookings-Bern Project on International Development, 2009).

  21. 21.

    Stern argued that, in the context of establishing opinion juris, involves two different kinds of rationale, depending on the individual state’s ‘position of power within the international order.’ While more powerful states are likely to feel freely bound to international law , other weaker states will ‘feel bound because they cannot not want to be, because the rule is imposed upon them.’ Brigitte Stern, “Custom at the Heart of International Law,” trans. Michael Byer and Anne Denise, Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 11, no. 1 (2001): 108. See also: Michael Beyers, “International Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, ed. Chris Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 624; Martti Koskenniemi, The Politics of International Law (Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing, 2011), 222.

  22. 22.

    Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, Global Justice: The Politics of War Crimes Trials (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 13. On the argument that human rights norms in general is an example of a pervasive Western ‘world-culture,’ see also: Martha W. Finnemore, “Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology’s Institutionalism,” International Organization 50, no. 2 (1996): 325–347; Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, “The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction,” in The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, ed. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Rapp, and Kathryn Sikkink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–38.

  23. 23.

    Rationalism on the broadest level is a methodological approach that explains ‘both individual and collective (social) outcomes in terms of individual goal-seeking under constraints.’ This broad notion of Rationalism provides the baseline methodological foundation for multiple IR theories, including neo-liberalism/neo-liberal institutionalism (theory of state cooperation and international institutions) and neo/structural-realism (structural theory of state behaviour under the condition of anarchy) Duncan Snidal, “Rational Choice and International Relations,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons (London: Sage, 2002), 87–88.

  24. 24.

    Kenneth W. Abbott, “International Relations Theory, International Law, and the Regime Governing Atrocities in Internal Conflicts,” The American Journal of International Law 93, no. 2 (1999): 361–379; Jamie Mayerfield, “Who Shall be Judge?: The United States, the International Criminal Court, and the Global Enforcement of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2003): 93–129.

  25. 25.

    Abbott, “International Relations Theory,” 374–375.

  26. 26.

    Fehl, “Explaining the International Criminal Court: A ‘Practice Test’ for Rationalist and Constructivist Approaches,” 369–370.

  27. 27.

    Beth A. Simmons and Allison Danner, “Credible Commitments and the International Criminal Court,” International Organization 64, no. 2 (2010): 225–256.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 234.

  29. 29.

    Courtney Hillebrecht and Scott Straus, “Who Pursues the Perpetrators? State Cooperation with the ICC,” Human Rights Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2017): 162–188.

  30. 30.

    Yuna Han, “International Criminal Justice and the Global South: Extraversion and State Agency,” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2016); “International Criminal Justice as Political Strategy: Asymmetry of Opportunity?” in Human Rights and Justice: Implementing and Accessing Justice, ed. Kurt Mills and Melissa Labonte (London: Routledge, Forthcoming).

  31. 31.

    United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, vol. II (New York: United Nations, 2002), 196 (para. 34). For statements by individual states, see or example: Ibid., 65 (para. 21; Norway), 185 (para. 68; Norway), 187(para. 11; Spain), 195 (para.2 1; USA).

  32. 32.

    United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, 191 (para. 63).

  33. 33.

    Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 13.

  34. 34.

    Kirsten Ainley, “Responsibility for Atrocity: Individual Criminal Agency and the International Criminal Court,” in Evil, Law and the State. Perspectives on State Power and Violence, ed. John T. Perry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 4.

  35. 35.

    Jelena Subotić, “The Paradox of International Justice Compliance,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 3 (2009): 370–371.

  36. 36.

    For example: Adam Branch, “Uganda’s Civil War and the Politics of ICC Intervention,” Ethics and International Affairs 21 no. 2 (2007): 179–198.

  37. 37.

    Han, International Criminal Justice and the Global South: Extraversion and State Agency; idem, “International Criminal Justice as Political Strategy: Asymmetry of Opportunity?”.

  38. 38.

    Beth A. Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12. Emphasis original.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 513–553.

  41. 41.

    Ibid.; Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 03 (1988): 427–460; James D. Fearon, “Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Theories of International Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 1, no. 1 (1998): 289–313.

  42. 42.

    Schmidt, “On the History and Historiography of International Relations,” 6.

  43. 43.

    The criminological implications of mass atrocities and individual responsibility have been considered from the perspective of international law . See: Mark Drumbl, Atrocity, Punishment and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  44. 44.

    Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  45. 45.

    Summary of the relationship between the ICC and Kenya can be found here: http://www.iccnow.org/?mod=kenya

  46. 46.

    A ‘hybrid’ tribunal refers to a court where both the institutional apparatus and applicable law combine international and domestic aspects. International judges and prosecutors work alongside domestic counterparts; domestic law and international law is applied. See: Laura A. Dickinson, “The Promise of Hybrid Courts,” The American Journal of International Law 97, no. 2 (2003): 295; Sarah Nouwen, “‘Hybrid Courts’: The Hybrid Category of a New Type of International Crimes Courts,” Utrecht Law Review 2, no. 2 (2006): 190–214; Suzanne Katzenstein, “Hybrid Tribunals: Searching for Justice in East Timor,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 245–278. Also referred to as ‘internationalized’ tribunals.

  47. 47.

    Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Jedediah Purdy et al., eds., “The Revival of Empire,” Special Section, Ethics and International Relations 17 no. 2 (2003): 34–88; Nico Krisch, “International Law in Times of Hegemony: Unequal Power and the Shaping of the International Legal Order,” European Journal of International Law 16, no. 3 (2005): 369–408.

  48. 48.

    Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire. The Burden,” New York Times Magazine (2003); Robert Hunter Wade, “The Invisible Hand of the American Empire,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003): 77–88. For a summary of the neo-imperial argument see: Jean L. Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty? Empire versus International Law,” Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2004): 2.

  49. 49.

    See, for example: Stephanie Neuman, “International Relations Theory and the Third World: An Oxymoron?,” in International Relations Theory in the Third World, ed. Stephanie Neuman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998); Carlos Escudé, “An Introduction to Peripheral Realism and Its Implications for the Interstate System: Argentina and the Condor II Missile Project,” in International Relations Theory in the Third World, ed. Stephanie Neuman. On hierarchy in international relations in general see: David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  50. 50.

    Christopher S. Clapham, Third World Politics: An Introduction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 3–5; idem, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4–7; Jean-François Bayart and Stephen Ellis, “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,” African affairs 99, no. 395 (2000): 218–219; Jean-Pascal Daloz and Patrick Chabal, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Curry, 1999), xix–xx.

  51. 51.

    President of Uganda Refers Situation Concerning the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to the ICC International Criminal Court (January 29, 2004): http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/press%20and%20media/press%20releases/2004/Pages/president%20of%20uganda%20refers%20situation%20concerning%20the%20lord_s%20resistance%20army%20_lra_%20to%20the%20icc.aspx

  52. 52.

    Payam Akhavan, “The Lord’s Resistance Army Case: Uganda’s Submission of the First State Referral to the International Criminal Court,” The American Journal of International Law 99, no. 2 (2005): 403.

  53. 53.

    Tim Allen, Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), 83.

  54. 54.

    Phil Clark, “Law Politics and Pragmatisim: The ICC and Case Selection in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda,” in Courting Conflict? Justice, Peace and the ICC in Africa, ed. Nicholas Waddel and Phil Clark (London: Royal African Society, 2008), 43

  55. 55.

    Schiff, Building the International Criminal Court, 199

  56. 56.

    Adam Branch, “Uganda’s Civil War and the Politics of ICC Intervention,” Ethics & International Affairs 21, no. 2 (2007): 179, 183.

  57. 57.

    Sarah M. H. Nouwen and Wouter G. Werner, “Doing Justice to the Political: The International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan,” The European Journal of International Law 21, no. 4 (2010): 949.

  58. 58.

    Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, “Introduction,” in The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality, ed. Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot (London: Zed Books, 2010), 16.

  59. 59.

    “Kony War a Forgotten Crisis,” The Monitor, 11 November 2003.

  60. 60.

    Human Rights Watch, “Uganda in the Drc: Fueling Political and Ethnic Strife,” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001).

  61. 61.

    J. Oloka-Onyango, “New-Breed’ Leadership, Conflict, and Reconstruction in the Great Lakes Region in Africa: A Sociopolitical Biography of Uganda’s Yoweri Kaguta Museveni,” Africa Today 50, no. 3 (2004): 2.

  62. 62.

    Sabiti Makara, Lise Rakner and Lars Svåsand, “Turnaround: The National Resistance Movement and the Re-introduction of a Multiparty System in Uganda,” CMI Working Paper (2007), 5.

  63. 63.

    Allen, Trial Justice, 73.

  64. 64.

    Joshua B. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 84.

  65. 65.

    Sverker Finnstrom, Living with Bad Surrounding: War and Existential Uncertainty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda (Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 2003), 133.

  66. 66.

    Aili Mari Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010), 161.

  67. 67.

    Refugee Law Project, “Behind the Violence,” 23–24.

  68. 68.

    Adam Branch, Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92.

  69. 69.

    Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: 166.

  70. 70.

    Allen, Trial Justice, 74.

  71. 71.

    Joshua B. Rubongoya, Regime Hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 84.

  72. 72.

    For example, a number of journalists were prosecuted because their phone numbers were allegedly found on the body of a dead LRA commander. Northern Uganda: Understanding and Solving the Conflict (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2004).

  73. 73.

    Charles Etukuri and Emmy Allio, “Besigye Denies Lra,” New Vision, 7 July 2007

  74. 74.

    Frank van Acker, “Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: The New Order No One Ordered,” African Affairs 103, no. 412 (2004): 353–354.

  75. 75.

    An internal audit by the UPDF in 1997 estimated that there were about 10,000 non-existent soldiers on the payroll, known as ‘ghost soldiers.’ Ibid., 354

  76. 76.

    Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda, 65.

  77. 77.

    Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda, 24; Carbone, No Party Democracy?, 41.

  78. 78.

    Allen, Trial Justice, 52.

  79. 79.

    Branch, “Uganda’s Civil War,’ 184.

  80. 80.

    John T. Holmes, “Principle of Complementarity,” in The Making of the Rome Statute: Issues, Negotiations, Results, ed. Roy S. Lee (Cambridge: Kluwer Law International, 1999), 47.

  81. 81.

    Branch, “Uganda’s Civil War,” 190.

  82. 82.

    Schiff, Building the International Criminal Court, 199.

  83. 83.

    Branch, Displacing Human Rights, 187.

  84. 84.

    Ibid.

  85. 85.

    Immi Tallgren, “The Sense and Sensibility of International Criminal Law,” European Journal of International Law 13, no. 3 (2002): 561–595; Bosco, Rough Justice.

  86. 86.

    Han, “International Criminal Justice as Political Strategy: Asymmetry of Opportunity?”.

  87. 87.

    Clark, “Law, Politics and Pragmatism,” 42–43.

  88. 88.

    Allen, Trial Justice, 91.

  89. 89.

    Allen, Trial Justice, 84–85; Branch, “Uganda’s Civil War,” 184–185.

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    Yuna Han

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Han, Y. (2018). International Relations: Between Theory and Practice, the National and International. In: War Crimes Trials and Investigations. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64072-3_8

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