The Politics of International Criminal Law: Unravelling the constructions of crime, criminal accountability and the obligation to prosecute international crimes

The questions the paper addresses collectively seek to uncover the ideational forces that have informed the process of international criminalization. In doing so, it is informed by the premise that international society’s understandings of crime, responsibility/accountability and prosecutions at the international level are the result of historically-contingent processes of social construction. There is therefore a story to be told about how and why international society has attached international significance to domestic legal concepts of crime, criminality and prosecutions. The paper is guided by the overall aim of critiquing the dominant historical narrative of ICL. It seeks to show the various ways in which standard ICL texts fails to give adequate attention to the historical construction of ICL''s fundamental legal concepts. It furthermore seeks to demonstrate how this neglect has contributed to ICL scholars’ inability to account for a crucial dimension of the politics of ICL – the politics that lies behind the social, historical and legal construction of the concepts of crime, criminality and prosecution in the modern international legal order.