Chapter 3 details how, after controversies over the African-led deployment to Mali, political and bureaucratic elites from South Africa and the African Union Commission (AUC) introduced the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises (ACIRC), an arrangement for robust military interventions. The chapter analyzes how ACIRC challenged the established spatial semantics of the African Standby Force (ASF) that divided the continent into five regions. By bypassing regional organizations, the cornerstones for multilateral deployment, member states would be able to negotiate military coalitions among themselves and directly with the AUC, giving individual states more control. ACIRC created a relational space not constructed on geographically contiguous regions, but on a network of member states with the self-image of being committed to joint independent military action. In African military politics, ACIRC was an attempt by President Jacob Zuma to position South Africa as a continental military leader that was willing and able to guide interventions. The chapter ends by analyzing how in 2015 ACIRC was discussed as potentially providing the military response to Boko Haram violence in West Africa. This revealed political tensions between Nigerian representatives (that were critical of ACIRC) and South African and Tanzanian representatives.

The Court’s historic movement from theory to practice came with a round of investigations targeting specific conflicts and identifying specific suspects, centered mainly in Africa. The powers and constraints of the ICC Prosecutor were closely monitored by judges as the Court issued its first arrest warrants. The first three suspects to arrive in The Hague were Congolese men from the peripheral Ituri district; and a fourth Congolese suspect was soon apprehended for alleged crimes in the Central African Republic. Lasting more than a decade, each trial faced a series of crises and reversals, indicating fault-lines in the original design. Mixed evidence made it surprisingly difficult for the Court to establish crimes involving child soldiers, as well as sex and gender crimes; and even more difficult to attribute criminal responsibility to the individuals accused. The interests of victims had to be balanced with the legal principle of fair trials. From an initial overview, the reader understands the many difficulties – both practical and institutional – facing the new Court and its ambitious mission.

The trial of Jean-Pierre Bemba grew out of a separate fact situation in the Central African Republic (CAR). Bemba was a powerful politician on the Congolese national stage, and was also the leader of an armed rebel force, a part of which had been sent across the border in a vain effort to halt a coup against the CAR President. Bemba’s men were accused of widespread crimes against civilians, including sexual crimes against both women and men. The trial tested a theory of criminal responsibility intended for remote commanders who fail to prevent or punish crimes on the ground. Although Bemba was convicted on this basis and sentenced to eighteen years' imprisonment, two years later his convictions were overturned by a bold Appeals Chamber majority. At stake on appeal were fair trial concerns about the need for greater specificity in criminal charges, which led the divided appeals panel to debate the meaning of core legal principles. Looking back to earlier judicial controversies, reversals, dissents, and acquittals, the dialogue surrounding Bemba’s successful appeal identified key questions for future judges to ponder.

While often presented as a diamond-infused ethnic conflict, Chapter 7 explores how the conflict in the Central African Republic has settled into a ‘war of roads’, where roadblocks figure as a key source of revenue and therefore of contestation between competing armed groups. For Central African rebels, control over one of these routes constitutes a key prize in the conflict -- exactly the same stakes that underpinned much of pre-colonial state formation in the region. Roadblocks, obligatory escorts, restrictions on who can participate in lucrative trade -- circulation is anything but free in the Central African Republic. Largely sharing the same practical limitations experienced by armed groups, the Central African government bears so many resemblances to armed groups that it vindicates Charles Tilly’s point that states can be likened to well-equipped mafia. While cattle-herders and traders who do business here have developed sophisticated strategies to evade all manner of armed actors, each of the parties to the conflict jealously keeps as tight a leash as possible on profitable long-distance exchange, lest the profits fall into the hands of competing Central African conflict entrepreneurs.

This chapter traces the sequence of events leading to the withdrawal of French forces from Chad in April 1980. It begins with the French decision to overthrew Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, leader of the Central African Empire, partly in response to his increasingly close relations with Gaddafi. However, the French-organized coup also fatally undercut their peacemaking strategy in Chad.Goukouni, now the president of Chad’s transitional government, became worried that France might attempt to overthrow him as well. This led him patch up his relationship with Gaddafi’s regime in preparation for an imminent struggle with Hissène Habré. This chapter examines these events, analyzing the rapid decline in the ability of French policymakers to influence the Chadian political scene. As fighting broke out between Habré’s forces and those allied with Goukouni, a sharp debate erupted among French policymakers about whether to intervene actively on the side of Goukouni or attempt to maintain an increasingly untenable neutrality. Instead, in April 1980, Giscard decided on a complete withdrawal, judging the risks of intervention too high, with little expected gain.

The Court’s historic movement from theory to practice came with a round of investigations targeting specific conflicts and identifying specific suspects, centered mainly in Africa. The powers and constraints of the ICC Prosecutor were closely monitored by judges as the Court issued its first arrest warrants. The first three suspects to arrive in The Hague were Congolese men from the peripheral Ituri district; and a fourth Congolese suspect was soon apprehended for alleged crimes in the Central African Republic. Lasting more than a decade, each trial faced a series of crises and reversals, indicating fault-lines in the original design. Mixed evidence made it surprisingly difficult for the Court to establish crimes involving child soldiers, as well as sex and gender crimes; and even more difficult to attribute criminal responsibility to the individuals accused. The interests of victims had to be balanced with the legal principle of fair trials. From an initial overview, the reader understands the many difficulties – both practical and institutional – facing the new Court and its ambitious mission.

The trial of Jean-Pierre Bemba grew out of a separate fact situation in the Central African Republic (CAR). Bemba was a powerful politician on the Congolese national stage, and was also the leader of an armed rebel force, a part of which had been sent across the border in a vain effort to halt a coup against the CAR President. Bemba’s men were accused of widespread crimes against civilians, including sexual crimes against both women and men. The trial tested a theory of criminal responsibility intended for remote commanders who fail to prevent or punish crimes on the ground. Although Bemba was convicted on this basis and sentenced to eighteen years' imprisonment, two years later his convictions were overturned by a bold Appeals Chamber majority. At stake on appeal were fair trial concerns about the need for greater specificity in criminal charges, which led the divided appeals panel to debate the meaning of core legal principles. Looking back to earlier judicial controversies, reversals, dissents, and acquittals, the dialogue surrounding Bemba’s successful appeal identified key questions for future judges to ponder.

Understanding the ongoing conflict in the Central African Republic is essential to assessing the Kimberley Process, a global diamond certification scheme that originated in 2003 to stop the trade in conflict diamonds. More evident than in any other country, diamonds have contributed to the conflict in the Central African Republic after the Kimberley Process was implemented. Thus, examining the influence of the Kimberley Process on the conflict in the Central African Republic is crucial to understanding whether the agreement is useful in its original goal of preventing conflict diamonds from entering the market. The existence of private diamond companies with preferences that are in line with Kimberley Process regulations are a necessary condition for Kimberley Process compliance. Unlike most diamond-producing states, large diamond mining companies have not been present in the Central African Republic. Thus compliance with the Kimberley Process has been minimal, even in comparison to other similar African states. The lack of feasibility in enforcing the monolithic regulatory framework brought about by the Kimberley Process in the Central African Republic demonstrates that the Kimberley Process is ill-suited to preventing diamonds from funding conflict in this case.

Strategic use of international courts by weaker states becomes a mechanism by which African states have taken advantage of the ICC. This instrumental use of norms of international justice shows that the argument about justice cascade may not be as convincing as previously thought. The supposedly widespread adoption of norms of individual criminal accountability and prosecutions in the wake of massive violation of human rights may actually be symptomatic of an instrumental adoption. Chapter 7 analyzes other ICC situations (DRC, CAR, Mali, Sudan, Burundi, and the Philippines) and South Africa’s and The Gambia’s attempts to withdraw from the Court to highlight the ways in which these cases also support the arguments developed in this book’s analytical framework.

The Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002. Judges, the Prosecutor and the Registrar had been elected by mid-2003. After signing the Statute at the end of 2000, the United States moved to a position of hostility towards the Court, then became more mellow as it determined that its vital interests were not threatened. The Prosecutor developed a strategy of encouraging ‘self-referrals’, whereby Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic sought the Court’s assistance in prosecuting anti-government forces. This led to the initial trials of rebel leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Security Council referred the situation in Darfur, Sudan to the Court but provided no further assistance in apprehending suspects, including the President, Omar Al-Bashir. Using proprio motu authority, the Prosecutor undertook cases of post-election violence in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire. For the first decade of its activity, the Court’s attention was essentially confined to the African continent. A malaise developed in Africa and a few African States attempted to withdraw from the Statute. By then end of the 2010s, concerns were being expressed about the future of the Court, with calls for major reforms.

The labels ‘state fragility’ and ‘civil war’ suggest that security in several African countries has broken down. While people do experience insecurity in some parts of conflict-affected countries, in other areas they live in relative security. Between 2014 and 2018, the author travelled to South Sudan and the Central African Republic during their ongoing civil wars and into Somalia’s breakaway state of Somaliland to gain insights from the people whose security is at stake. He develops the concept of a ‘security arena’, wherein he investigate security as the outcome of actors’ local political-ordering struggles on a fluidity–stability spectrum. He finds that neither stable nor fluid ordering per se creates security or insecurity. Security improves when actors seek to cohabit all parts of arenas by using varying ordering forms in a complementary fashion.

Chapter 2 provides the historical and local background to the analysis. It describes political developments in the Central African Republic (CAR), Somaliland, and South Sudan before, during, and after colonization. These changes shape the way these countries’ respective political systems function today. The chapter then moves to the local level and provides a brief description of the key actors and issues at stake in each of the nine local security arenas. These case descriptions on the national and local level will form the basis of the analysis that follows.