The implementation of decisions taken by the international criminal jurisdictions is a major challenge for both their effectiveness and legitimacy. It is also at the heart of considerations relating to their autonomy. This issue is particularly sensitive to the International Criminal Court, which, as a treaty-born international organization, rests on a delicate balance between state sovereignty and prerogatives assigned to a supranational court. It remains therefore highly dependent on states, in terms of budgetary and operational management, but also to conduct its investigations and execute its arrest warrants.
Relations between states and the Court have fueled a lively debate among theorists of international relations. The main analytical frameworks employed remain however insufficient to explain the behavior of states and to determine the criteria for their cooperation with the Court.
This article proposes to use another way of understanding international institutions : the political sociology of international relations that considers the international phenomena as both political and social facts and focuses on the actors, their practices, their relations and their integration in an institutionalized and binding environment.
Based on the Franco-British experience towards the ICC, it argues that cooperation with the Court and the enforcement of its decisions are not the doing of a unitary and monolithic state, which all decisions can be explained rationally, but of multiple actors, parts of the state apparatus, affected by different and sometimes unpredictable logics and perceptions.
The sociological perspective allows, at one hand, crossing the contributions of the various theories of international relations and play on their complementarity, and on the other hand, going beyond these approaches by considering the implementation of international criminal justice as a result of initiatives and positioning of specific diplomatic actors, their discourses and practices, within a complex logic of interactions that does not always produce the expected results.
