Born posthumously: rethinking the shared characteristics of the ICC and R2P

The shared characteristics of R2P and the ICC are considered in the light of their emergence as institutional responses to the problems of liberal interventionism in the late 1990s. Both these institutions are often understood by their advocates as having belied the universalist promise of their birth. This discursive understanding of the limits of R2P and the ICC as being due to the shifting international culture post-9/11 is challenged through re-reading their establishment as an attempt to limit and evade the asserted responsibilities of Western powers in the post-colonial world. The article also traces the shared articulation of this process of limitation and evasion through the development of an institutionalist outlook, which encourages indirect forms of intervention, held to be empowering or capacity-building the post-colonial state, rather than directly undermining its sovereignty. It notes that R2P, operating as a moral norm rather than as a legal mechanism, was better able to make this transitioning than the ICC, and that latterly the ICC has been illustrating a similar shift in priorities and approach