8 - Conclusions and Recommendations

Summary

This final, concluding chapter summarizes the book’s key findings and concludes that the ICC’s interventions and complementarity are better understood as axes around which advocacy for a global accountability norm has turned. Rather than a catalyst in itself, it is the court’s mediated relationship with non-state actors that has had the greatest ‘catalytic effect’ on domestic accountability efforts. In this sense, civil society organizations are both object and subject of this effect: They seek to expand complementarity’s normative influence, while having themselves been transformed by it. The chapter also offers a number of recommendations for future inquiry and practice: It urges a critical rethinking of the ICC’s politics, greater use of the Rome Statute’s cooperation and dialogue regimes (rather than admissibility) as an approach to encouraging domestic accountability, greater experimentalism, and a reorientation towards international criminal justice as a project of global legal pluralism.