Commodifying Global Justice: Economies of Accountability at the International Criminal Court

The field of international criminal law operates on multiple overlapping registers, including the ideological, the economic and the political. As part of a symposium exploring the claim that international criminal law constitutes a form of ‘global justice’, this article takes up the relationship between the political interests and material conditions of possibility that inform and sustain the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC). As the field’s sole permanent institution, the ICC relies upon annual funding from its member states, producing a shareholder economy that draws upon managerial logics and reflects the interests of its constituency. This article considers the implications of regarding states as ‘shareholders’ of global justice, as well as the effects of the ICC’s ethos of austerity at the level of practice. It argues that international criminal law risks diminishing its value as a public good through turning to the logics of the private realm.