Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, by David Bosco
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | Sara Dezalay |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702014564545 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
International Journal
2015, Vol. 70(1) 159–183
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702014564545
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Book Reviews
Book Reviews
David Bosco
Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 312 pp. $29.95 (cloth)
ISBN 978–0–19–984413–5
Reviewed by: Sara Dezalay, Goethe Universita
¨t, Frankfurt/Main
The African Union’s decision in early July 2014 to exclude sitting African heads of
state from the jurisdictional mandate of the yet to be operationalized African Court
of Justice and Human Rights epitomized the backlash against the International
Criminal Court (ICC). Yet the promise of a new world order in which state power
is constrained by international legalism, embodied by the operationalization in
2002 of this first permanent criminal court with global jurisdiction, has also been
belied by its powerlessness in the face of great power interests, and worse still, its
confinement to dealing with state violence at the periphery: on the African contin-
ent. As underlined in David Bosco’s Rough Justice, however, such logics of double
standard cannot be reduced to a clash between the realities of politics and the
idealism of justice. On the contrary: in this energetic, well-written, and genuinely
informative volume, Bosco recounts a continuous process of mutual accommoda-
tion between the court and the major powers, foremost among them the United
States. Based on an ‘‘elite interview strategy’’ (9n20),
1
this volume narrates the
history of the ICC from the genesis of war crimes institutions in the aftermath
of the Second World War through to the first years of the present court’s oper-
ation, focusing on its prosecutorial strategies.
Bosco, a senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine and assistant professor of
international politics at American University’s School of International Service,
traces the geopolitical factors and evolutions at the domestic level within powerful
states that account for the—in retrospect—startlingly swift opening of the ICC in
2002 as much as for the ‘‘uneven jurisdictional landscape’’ that has curbed its
operations since.
2
The immediate end of the Cold War provided a unique
1. Bosco incorporates the views of an impressive roster of informants that includes pundits of US
politics as well as the players within the ICC.
2. David Bosco, ‘‘Why is the International Criminal Court picking only on Africa?’’ Washington Post,
29 March 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-is-the-international-criminal-court-
picking-only-on-africa/2013/03/29/cb9bf5da-96f7-11e2-97cd-3d8c1afe4f0f_story.html (accessed 22
October 2014).
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