Governing International Criminal Justice: Managerial Practices and the International Criminal Court

Abstract

Managerial practices such as strategic planning, audit, and performance appraisal pervade global governance regimes, including the regime of international criminal justice (ICJ). The mainstream view is that such practices are objective tools which optimise institutional performance and thereby assist them in attaining their goals.

Against this view, I offer an alternative understanding of managerial practices. Viewing international criminal justice as a technocratic imaginary, and defining managerial practices as tools of power/knowledge, I explore the discursive effects of management upon the contemporary project of ICJ. I problematize the assumptions inherent in the mainstream approach to managerial practices, relying on critical international law and critical management scholarship to provide a comprehensive sociology and history of management. Employing a genealogical method, I trace the historical journey of managerial practices from the steel factories of the American Midwest to the structures of the United Nations after decolonization. This genealogy reveals the political significance of management as a set of tools deployed to reinforce extant distributions of institutional power.

At the International Criminal Court (ICC), I trace the expansion of managerial practices and find them to have certain reality- and identity-making effects on the organisation and its professional staff. Managerial practices produce the court as an efficient, modern institution, reinforcing the image of ICJ as the optimal allocation of institutional resources by experts. Such practices also produce the identity of the ICC lawyer as an efficient cog in the ICJ machine. Collectively, managerial practices enact a discursive closure around an institutional and expert-driven ICJ project. That discursive closure is illustrated further in two detailed studies: the ICC Presidency and the reorganisation of the Registry. Demonstrating the mechanics of managerial knowledge, the thesis reveals how international criminal justice is governed.