Elite Strategy in Conflict: Selective Accountability for Abuses

Despite the rise of the anti-impunity norm as a sovereignty-constraining force, governments curiously engage with the norm, even during internal conflicts in which their very legitimacy is in jeopardy. How and why does the usage, or ‘deployment,’ of the anti-impunity norm by elite actors influence the political dynamics of internal armed conflicts? This paper answers this question through case study analysis of the conflicts in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, in which governments implemented anti-impunity measures nationally and invited the International Criminal Court to investigate. It argues that national authorities used the anti-impunity norm as a resource to further the government’s political objectives in the context of internal conflict. This was achieved through norm exploitation, a concept coined here, or how actors can draw benefits from the norm’s specific features and functions in order to further a given objective. Capitalising on the state’s centrality within the norm’s enforcement, officials strategically and selectively deployed measures that both supported and undermined the imperative to prosecute grave abuses in order to help shape power relations between parties. This opened parallel paths of accountability for some and impunity for others. This paper thus shows how elite actors in these cases set the parameters of accountability and impunity in light of their objectives within the political bargaining processes, rather than strictly as a function of external pressure or internalisation of the ‘oughtness’ of the norm. The concept of norm exploitation, presented in this paper, offers a lens to analyse how and why the deployment of accountability results in inconsistent implementation of the norm. It offers a way to integrate several key yet under-studied factors - namely the political value of key actors in the conflict as well as the norm's internal features - in order to shed richer light on the causes and significance of this inconsistency.