"Contesting an International Norm? Individual Criminal Responsibility in World Politics"

Abstract
Beginning with the mid’ 1990s, Ad Hoc international criminal tribunals have punished individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. From 2002 onwards, these international offenses fall within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which has the right to prosecute any person, irrespective if his or her official capacity. Article 25 ensures that any individual suspected of having committed the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole is liable for punishment under the Court’s Statute. Article 25 and the ICCs founding document have caused ripples among international policymakers. 1998 was hailed by some and criticized by others as the year in which an international criminal justice regime had at last emerged from the shadows of the Cold War. With individual criminal responsibility enforced by an international tribunal, many scholars, policymakers, and civil society activists expressed approval of an international standard of behavior banning certain actions from the legitimate repertoire of armed warfare and targeting individuals, rather than states. Yet, the complex reality of international affairs appears to undermine the effective enforcement of individual criminal responsibility. This project explores the difficult relationship between legalization and social legitimacy of by asking whether accountability for international crimes has become a „settled“ international norm. In other words: Is the legal norm of individual criminal responsibility accepted as a social norm by the international community? My research question is a bridge-building attempt between the disciplines of IR and international law. Although legal scholars have shown an interest in the broader social processes within which legal norms are embedded, few studies have explored international criminal law from a sociological perspective. A similar blind spot can be found in the IR literature, which has mostly ignored legal norms and constitutive processes of norm creation. The goal of this project is to close these research gaps by drawing on the constructivist theoretical premises shared by many (although not all) international norms researchers. I focus on the discursive interventions accompanying the acceptance or rejection of the legal norm in order to reconstruct the constitution of individual criminal responsibility as a social norm. The expected outcome of my research is the identification of an international standard of criminal behavior whose content should/or not match the above-mentioned legal norm.