Christopher K. Lamont

International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance

International Criminal Justice integrates theoretical debates on compliance into international justice scholarship. Through the use of three models of compliance, based on coercion, self-interest and norms, International Criminal Justice explores the domestic and international politics of compliance with ICTY orders on the part of states and international organizations in the former Yugoslavia and efforts by external actors such as the European Union, the United States and the Tribunal itself to induce compliance outcomes. Through a comprehensive exploration of the politics of compliance in Croatia, Serbia (formerly the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, International Criminal Justice demonstrates that that compliance with ICTY orders can only be understood through both material and ideational incentives. Moreover, International Criminal Justice imparts that compliance outcomes often do not translate into a changed normative understanding of international criminal justice on the part of target states.

Defiance or Strategic Compliance? The Post-Tuđman Croatian Democratic Union and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

This contribution explores Croatian cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with a special focus on the post-Tuđman Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) under Ivo Sanader and Jadranka Kosor. Ever since Croatia’s first post-communist elections in 1990, the HDZ has remained Croatia’s largest parliamentary political party and only found itself in opposition from 2000 to 2003. As such, the HDZ provides an opportunity to examine elements of continuity and change in Croatia-ICTY relations during the Tuđman and post-Tuđman years that illuminate Croatia’s strategic compliance with ICTY requests and orders. In the case of post-Tuđman HDZ led governments, legalistic engagement with the ICTY was framed as consistent with the party’s attempt to defend the governing party’s jus ad bellum understanding of the 1991-1995 war in Croatia, known domestically as the Homeland War. Strategic compliance permitted Zagreb to pursue legalistic strategies of defiance within ICTY institutions, which limited Croatia’s exposure to third party sanction.

Contested Governance: Understanding Justice Interventions in Post-Qadhafi Libya

ABSTRACT This contribution reflects upon the nexus between transitional justice and peacebuilding through a study of how transitional justice practices in post-Qadhafi Libya interacted with broader efforts to establish governance institutions in the aftermath of Libya’s 2011 armed conflict. It argues that dominant practices of transitional justice, promoted by external actors, prescribed narrow state-centric justice interventions that were ill-suited for a polity in which the state was highly contested. In fact, transitional justice proved divisive in Libya because attempts to project state-centric liberal justice practices were limited by their targeting of weak institutions that lacked local legitimacy and their inability to reconcile alternative normative frameworks that challenge the modern state. In addition, the weakness of Libya’s state institutions allowed thuwwar, or revolutionary armed groups, to dictate an exclusionary form of justice known as political isolation. Drawn from fieldwork conducted in Libya, this contribution provides lessons for both peacebuilding and transitional justice practice that call for a rethinking of teleological notions of transition and greater engagement with notions and concepts that fall outside dominant practices.

Introduction: Croatia after Tuđman: Encounters with the Consequences of Conflict and Authoritarianism

This Special Issue reflects upon Croatia in the decade after the autocratic rule of Franjo Tudjman. Contributors explore wide-ranging themes from citizenship to popular music and efforts to deal with the legacy of violent conflict.

Humanitarian Action: Global, Regional and Domestic Legal Responses

Humanitarian assistance occurs when local or regional crises prompt international action to alleviate human suffering. In contrast to development aid, humanitarian aid is defined by its short-term focus and the immediacy of intervention. Given its crisis management character, humanitarian assistance presents a pressing challenge for international law because the provision of assistance operates under circumstances which depart from common state-centric understandings of how inter- national politics and international law usually work.To be sure, in the context of humanitarian emergencies processes of inter-state negotiation and consensus-building are dramatically limited by the urgency of the need to assist populations vulnerable to the consequences of natural disaster or armed conflict. Humanitarian Action: Global, Regional and Domestic Legal Responses directly responds to this pressing challenge by providing the first in-depth exploration of legal problems posed by contemporary humanitarian practice. Through two points of departure – one which explores the law and politics of humanitarian action, and the second which explores normative frameworks – this book provides legal professionals, scholars and policy-makers with a unique multidisciplinary resource that will help inform the theory and practice of humanitarian assistance.

The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform

which represents a ‘ticking time bomb’ (chapter 4) and the threat of a renewed revolt by the Shi’ite minority (chapter 9). Since Saudi Arabia remains an enigmatic state, so does its politics, which is the basis which Aarts and Roelants use on which to posit their predictions or ‘scenarios’. One scenario is ‘social explosion’, especially as low oil prices could threaten the rentier state dynamics. Another posits ‘the king’s dilemma’, in which any possible reforms might lead to un-ending demands for more. The two other scenarios are ‘severe repression’ by the state supported by strong and even popular religious institutions, which have maintained an historic alliance with the rulers since the eighteenth century (chapters 2 and 12), and ‘total implosion’, in which the state would disintegrate geographically, in the style of Syria. These scenarios are all bleak, but their variability, based on a wealth of information and the lively narrative of first-hand interviews, keeps them within the bounds of plausibility. Nevertheless, this practical broadness still lacks a theoretical conceptualisation which could have better situated these ‘ingredients’, belonging to disciplines as different as political economy, IR, education and feminism.

Book Review: Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn (eds), The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath

which represents a ‘ticking time bomb’ (chapter 4) and the threat of a renewed revolt by the Shi’ite minority (chapter 9). Since Saudi Arabia remains an enigmatic state, so does its politics, which is the basis which Aarts and Roelants use on which to posit their predictions or ‘scenarios’. One scenario is ‘social explosion’, especially as low oil prices could threaten the rentier state dynamics. Another posits ‘the king’s dilemma’, in which any possible reforms might lead to un-ending demands for more. The two other scenarios are ‘severe repression’ by the state supported by strong and even popular religious institutions, which have maintained an historic alliance with the rulers since the eighteenth century (chapters 2 and 12), and ‘total implosion’, in which the state would disintegrate geographically, in the style of Syria. These scenarios are all bleak, but their variability, based on a wealth of information and the lively narrative of first-hand interviews, keeps them within the bounds of plausibility. Nevertheless, this practical broadness still lacks a theoretical conceptualisation which could have better situated these ‘ingredients’, belonging to disciplines as different as political economy, IR, education and feminism.

The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath

which represents a ‘ticking time bomb’ (chapter 4) and the threat of a renewed revolt by the Shi’ite minority (chapter 9). Since Saudi Arabia remains an enigmatic state, so does its politics, which is the basis which Aarts and Roelants use on which to posit their predictions or ‘scenarios’. One scenario is ‘social explosion’, especially as low oil prices could threaten the rentier state dynamics. Another posits ‘the king’s dilemma’, in which any possible reforms might lead to un-ending demands for more. The two other scenarios are ‘severe repression’ by the state supported by strong and even popular religious institutions, which have maintained an historic alliance with the rulers since the eighteenth century (chapters 2 and 12), and ‘total implosion’, in which the state would disintegrate geographically, in the style of Syria. These scenarios are all bleak, but their variability, based on a wealth of information and the lively narrative of first-hand interviews, keeps them within the bounds of plausibility. Nevertheless, this practical broadness still lacks a theoretical conceptualisation which could have better situated these ‘ingredients’, belonging to disciplines as different as political economy, IR, education and feminism.

Book Review: Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn (eds), The Libyan Revolution and Its AftermathThe Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath by ColePeterMcQuinnBrian (eds). London: C Hurst & Co, 2014. 320pp., £30.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781849043090

which represents a ‘ticking time bomb’ (chapter 4) and the threat of a renewed revolt by the Shi’ite minority (chapter 9). Since Saudi Arabia remains an enigmatic state, so does its politics, which is the basis which Aarts and Roelants use on which to posit their predictions or ‘scenarios’. One scenario is ‘social explosion’, especially as low oil prices could threaten the rentier state dynamics. Another posits ‘the king’s dilemma’, in which any possible reforms might lead to un-ending demands for more. The two other scenarios are ‘severe repression’ by the state supported by strong and even popular religious institutions, which have maintained an historic alliance with the rulers since the eighteenth century (chapters 2 and 12), and ‘total implosion’, in which the state would disintegrate geographically, in the style of Syria. These scenarios are all bleak, but their variability, based on a wealth of information and the lively narrative of first-hand interviews, keeps them within the bounds of plausibility. Nevertheless, this practical broadness still lacks a theoretical conceptualisation which could have better situated these ‘ingredients’, belonging to disciplines as different as political economy, IR, education and feminism.

Negotiating justice: from liberal legalism to war crimes realism?

When the United Nations Security Council authorized the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1993, there was widespread scepticism that the world’s first international criminal court since the post-Second World War tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo could establish itself as a formidable regional actor. To be sure, early scholarship on the ICTY was tinged with pessimism and within wider International Relations (IR) literature the excitement amongst legal practitioners and human rights activists that followed the Security Council’s creation of the ICTYand later the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was met largely by silence. Nevertheless, by the early 2000s, the coming into effect of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court and the transfer of a former head of state, Slobodan Milošević, to The Hague brought about renewed interest in international criminal justice. In 2001, Rudolph noted the need to introduce IR perspectives, which explicate ‘the political dynamics that shape outcomes’ into international criminal justice literature, which was hitherto dominated by international legal practitioners and scholars, who largely emphasized precedent and procedure.2 The failure to clearly identify variables and extrapolate causality led to the uncritical attribution of war crimes tribunal foundational assumptions, such as the