Chapter 3 offers an account of management’s introduction to, proliferation within, and influence upon the International Criminal Court from its inception until its twentieth anniversary year. This is the first of three scales of management dealing with the macro level of large-scale organisational optimisation. Efficiency arguments featured at various points during the early drafting stage, and management concerns loomed large in Rome. The nascent management frameworks of audit and minor restructuring exercises soon paved the way for court-wide strategic planning and the austerity politics of the post-2008 Global Financial Crisis. Throughout the court’s brief lifespan, management practices such as strategic planning, auditing, and performance indicators have been invoked, deployed, and critiqued by court officials, judges, scholars, NGOs, and external consultants. That process has also witnessed the narrowing of global justice down to what is deemed institutionally palatable, rather than anything more ambitious.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of historic efforts to criminalise the unlawful use of inter-State armed force, culminating in the adoption of the crime of aggression amendments at the Review Conference of the Rome Statute in 2010 and the activation of the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over the crime in 2017. In the course of tracing this history, the chapter explains the political and legal issues that prevented States from reaching earlier agreement over the inclusion of the crime of aggression under the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. The chapter also outlines the approach of the balance of the book.

International criminal justice began with efforts to prosecute Germans, including the former Emperor Wilhelm II, following the First World War. The first international trials took place at Nuremberg and Tokyo in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the early 1990s, the United Nations International law Commission submitted a draft statute for an international criminal court to the General Assembly. Subsequent work under the aegis of the Assembly culminated in the 1998 Rome Conference and adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It entered into force in 2002. Meanwhile, several temporary international criminal tribunals were set up for situations in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

Part II of the book applies the ideological model developed in Part I to reconsider the history of American ICC policy in its full ideological context. Each of the post–Cold War presidencies, up to that of President Obama, is analysed in terms of ideology’s impact on the three identified rule of law elements. Chapter 4 considers the Clinton administration (1992–2000), where US policy was characterised as contradictory for traversing from a prominent advocate of the project in the early years, to conspicuously voting against the final treaty establishing the court, then signing it, but warning against Senate ratification. The dominant conception of the international rule of law is shown to be liberal internationalism, combined with competing illiberal internationalist beliefs. Despite similar policy outcomes, this represented a shift from the primarily illiberal internationalist policy of the George H. W. Bush (Bush 41) administration. The design advocated by global advocates remained structured by legalist principles not recognised by US policymakers, such that US policy appeared contradictory for following internally coherent ideological conceptions of IL.