Christopher K. Lamont. International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance. Farnham: Ashgate Pub., 2010. xiii + 220 pp. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7546-7965-3.
Reviewed by Jelena Subotic (Department of Political Science, Georgia State University)
Published on H-Human-Rights (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root (Ramapo College of New Jersey)
The Reality of Compliance with International Criminal Courts
What good do international criminal tribunals serve if states fail to comply with them? Or if states comply with international court orders unwillingly, reluctantly, or in a way that undermines the norm of international criminal accountability the courts are supposed to promote? Lamont’s timely International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance engages these questions by by providing a well-documented, profoundly researched, and accessibly written account of many variants of compliance, noncompliance, and semi-compliance exhibited by states of the former Yugoslavia in their interaction with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Lamont’s principal argument is that compliance with international criminal courts occurs “in the context of a complex bargaining process that relies heavily on the deployment of material incentives and disincentives by external actors and not an acceptance of the legitimacy of the ICTY’s prosecutorial mandate” (p. 2). In other words, states of the Western Balkans complied with the ICTY not because they believed in the institution, agreed with its purpose, or saw its normative value--but because complying granted them rewards and not complying led to punishments. To put this bluntly, the book’s premise is somewhat obvious. The expectation of noncompliance or reluctant compliance is built into the practice of international criminal courts. This is why the ICTY has so intensively lobbied international actors, such as the European Union (EU), to tie cooperation with the court to desirable rewards, the most coveted of them being EU accession. As Lamont demonstrates, this policy of issue-linkage, or conditionality, has produced results in Croatia and Serbia, but at a cost of widespread popular delegitimation of the international court in both countries.
The value of this book, therefore, is not necessarily in its principal observation that international justice compliance is shallow and normatively disappointing. This we know. The real value of the book is in its meticulous tracing of the different modalities of compliance that states of the former Yugoslavia have engaged in over the past fifteen years.
The book begins with a useful overview of the existing theories of compliance, with the focus on compliance with international criminal justice. The literature overview is very competent and informative, but could perhaps have used a bit of updating. The most important work on this topic, which Lamont mentions only in passing, is Victor Peskin’s International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation (2008): it covers much the same ground as this volume. It would have been useful if Lamont had directly compared his own interpretation of compliance with the ICTY to that of Peskin. Quite a few differences might have emerged.
After the literature overview, Lamont tests existing compliance theories on five empirical cases--Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo--before he concludes the study with a chapter on lessons learned and avenues for further research on international justice compliance. The inclusion of Macedonia and Kosovo is especially important because these two states have been persistently understudied in the scholarship on international justice. Lamont’s could be the first systematic analysis of types of compliance and motivations for compliance with the ICTY that Macedonia and Kosovo have displayed over the past fifteen years. That in itself is a wonderful addition to the ICTY scholarship. The analysis of Kosovo is coupled with that of Bosnia in an exploration of modalities of compliance with international justice regimes by non-states. As Lamont rightly points out, most compliance theories focus on state compliance with international rules. In the cases of Kosovo and Bosnia, of course, the compliant authorities are non-state actors or quasi-state actors. This makes for a different compliance dynamic and leads to different compliance outcomes. Lamont correctly argues that our compliance vocabulary needs to adjust to accommodate this difference among actors, both at the domestic and the international level.
The inclusion of Macedonia, however theoretically sound, makes for some empirical overreach in Lamont’s argument. While it is certainly true, as Lamont argues, that the Macedonian government cooperated fully and quickly with the ICTY in arresting and transferring the indicted Macedonian official, Lamont is perhaps too quick to argue that this compliance is an example of normative acceptance of international rules. Yes, the Macedonian government was very keen on sending a positive message to the international community and presenting itself as a democratic and pro-European state, and generally it was quite willing to play by international rules in areas other than international justice. But, its job was incomparably easier than that of governments in the other former Yugoslav states. As Lamont himself shows, the Macedonian government had to deal with only one war-crime suspect of relatively little public renown. This is much less of a political problem than dealing with indictments of former heads of state, army chiefs of staff, or popular local heroes. In that sense, the Macedonian case is not even comparable to the rest of the pack and is probably not the best case to test a norm internalization hypothesis.
These small issues aside, International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance is an excellent piece of scholarship and writing. The book will be of great value to scholars on the ICTY, compliance, and the politics of post-Yugoslav states more broadly.
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Citation:
Jelena Subotic. Review of Lamont, Christopher K., International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance.
H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30174
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