Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics,

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) became operational in , it was hailed by the human rights community for its ability to end impunity through the globalization of law. Conversely, it was opposed by the George W. Bush administration for its potential to criminalize the means through which the United States uses force abroad. Looking at this debate from the vantage point of , neither the hopes of activists nor the fears of the U.S. government have been realized. To date, the ICC has limited its formal investigations to Africa and, further, to situations on that continent that do not impinge significantly on U.S. or other great power interests. But even in such environments the ICC has often been frustrated by domestic resistance and a lack of international support, most recently demonstrated by the suspension of its investigation in Darfur and the collapse of the trial of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta. David Bosco’s Rough Justice is the best account so far of the trajectory of the ICC from its optimistic origins to the more constrained court of today. Through extensive interviews with court officials, diplomats, and activists, the book examines the reciprocal relationship between international prosecutors and powerful states. In so doing, it makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between global justice and international politics and to the explanatory power of realist and norm-based theories of compliance with international law. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book should be of interest to the nonspecialist as well. Bosco’s conceptual framework lays out a typology of strategies that states and prosecutors can adopt in interacting with each other. States can pursue a strategy of acceptance, identifying their interests with the legal and normative framework of the court. However, when judicial intervention can adversely affect their interests, states generally try to limit its scope. One means of doing so is through marginalization, where states either actively seek to weaken the court as an institution or passively deny it support. Another option is a strategy of control wherein states use the court’s dependence on their cooperation to steer the prosecutor toward investigations that support their interests or away from those that might interfere with them. Prosecutors also have a range of choices in responding to states. At one end of the spectrum is an apolitical stance where prosecutors speak law to politics, even in the face of powerful opposition, in order to use the moral authority of the court to increase its autonomy. At the other extreme is a captured court that takes direction from those states on which it depends for its effectiveness. Bosco found that ICC prosecutors most often adopted two intermediate approaches: acting pragmatically, by initiating investigations only where state support was likely to make them successful; and acting strategically, by building relationships with states to persuade them that the court’s mandate supports their interests. The primary focus of the book is the relationship between the United States and the ICC. U.S. opposition to the court had