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.

This chapter examines the formation of a new anti-impunity Transnational Legal Order (TLO), its institutionalization, and its consequences. Socio-legal scholarship and recent research on responses to the mass violence unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan, beginning in 2003, provide insights into strengths and limits of the new anti-impunity TLO. Based on a comparative eight-country study, involving in depth interviews in four social fields (human rights, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, media) and an analysis of 3,387 media reports, I review judicial steps taken on Darfur, conditions supporting them, and their consequences, interpreting them in terms of the transnational legal ordering approach. The case of Darfur shows the anti-impunity TLO at work, displaying it as a force that delegitimizes mass violence. Yet, it also shows impediments to institutionalization in the form of hostile state actors, fields with potentially competing agendas, including diplomacy and humanitarian aid, internal contradictions, and lack of enforcement power. Nation-level forces filter cultural effects of intervention, resulting in diminished concordance between the international and the global realms and across nation states.

Many in the field of international relations have long viewed international law and regimes of international justice as epiphenomenal. But what explains the dramatic rise of international courts not only in terms of their numbers but also in terms of their relevance and the widening of their jurisdiction and competency? In other words, why would states, whether democratic or not, favor establishing or joining international regimes whose main purpose is to constrain their domestic sovereignty? Chapter 2 argues that a utilitarian frame explains states’ behavior in shaping, reshaping, and sometimes subverting norms of international justice, which they use strategically in pursuit of their interests. States – including those presumed to be weaker in the international system – use the ICC to advance their security and political interests. This argument provides a critique of the so-called justice cascade literature.

This chapter examines the obstacles to corporate accountability at the international level: unsettled international law regarding the binding and enforceable human rights obligations of business entities, the absence of international enforcement mechanisms to hold economic actors accountable, and the related lack of international pressure on states to deliver to victims of corporate complicity their rights to truth, justice, remedy, and guarantees of non-repetition.

It looks empirically at when and why international and foreign courts advanced corporate accountability and when they have not. Second, it discusses power and politics obstacles to the development of the key elements of international pressure: international enforcement mechanisms, binding human rights obligations in international law, and international accountability agency. It concludes with the argument that the absence of international pressure has not blocked corporate accountability. Instead, corporate accountability is underway via domestic processes in the Global South.