Global Justice in the Shadow of the International Criminal Court

Recent decades has seen a significant increase in the number of prosecutions and trials targeting actors in armed conflict. The fight against impunity for international crimes is in many ways a fight for individual criminal accountability in armed conflict. As illustrated by the complementarity principle in the Rome statute, there has been a move towards encouraging justice to take place closer to the sites of conflict, rather than in international courts such as the ICC. Data on justice processes in armed conflict show that the majority of criminal trials targeting conflict-related violence take place in domestic jurisdictions, alone or alongside international prosecutions. Global justice, promoted by powerful narratives of human rights and accountability primarily come into being outside international courts. Often this means bringing justice processes back into domestic justice systems in countries that are, or have recently experienced armed conflict. To understand this dynamic and its impact, we need a multi-level approach which takes into consideration the global development of criminal accountability during and after armed conflict across different sites, combined with a detailed look at how it operates in specific contexts. This paper does so by combining analysis of global, large-n data on organized violence and judicial processes involving conflict actors, with a case study on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As a country still recovering from what has been referred to as Africa’s world war, DRC has a history of ICC intervention going back to the early days of the courts existence. How does global justice, and narratives of justice and accountability for conflict-related violence play out beyond international courts, and what impact does it have on conflict-related violence?