This article seeks to conceptualize the relationship of the International Criminal Court to the events collectively known as the “Arab Spring.” It suggests that an impact of international criminal justice in this context cannot readily be assumed but that the Court has had more of a role than its limited interventions in the region suggest. The article focuses in particular on the work of international criminal justice in connection to the Arab Spring as resulting from the criss-crossing strategies of various actors. It analyzes some of its impacts on the dynamics of war and intervention, in distributing blame, in fighting impunity and on transitional justice more generally. The article concludes with a few thoughts on how the encounter with a macro-social event such as the “Arab Spring” shapes what can be expected of international criminal justice.
This Essay was initially presented at the 16th Annual LatCrit Conference as part of the plenary panel on “Race, Resistance, and Solidarity in the International Order.” It is an early effort to make sense of external (particularly American) responses to the Arab uprisings of 2011. We argue that much of the American approach is premised on a vision of Arab political sovereignty as provisional and dependent on the state’s position in existing regional alliances. Indeed, we contend that such provisional sovereignty is a wider feature of the current global order, and speaks to pervasive substantive limitations on the capacity of weak states to shape domestic decision-making. Our discussion focuses on five transitions (Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain) presently underway in the region and the role of international actors in shaping political possibilities and outcomes. In particular, we emphasize how — regardless of whether the United States and its allies are promoting “orderly transition” or more revolutionary overthrows — international actors are “intervening” continuously throughout the region in ways that reinforce the conditional nature of Arab self-determination.
The idea of “promoting democracy” is one that goes in and out of favor. With the advent of the so-called “Arab Spring”, the idea of promoting democracy abroad has come up for discussion once again. Yet an important recent line of thinking about human rights, starting with John Rawls’s book The Law of Peoples, has held that there is no human right to democracy, and that nondemocratic states that respect human rights should be “beyond reproach” in the realm of international relations. This is, for obvious reasons, a controversial view, especially given the powerful and important arguments purporting to show that democracies do significantly better than nondemocracies in promoting internal peace and equality, and in engaging in peaceful international cooperation. Both proponents and opponents of the Rawlsian view of human rights have argued that the view implies that democracies may not “promote democracy” in nondemocratic societies. But, given that all parties to this dispute agree that democracy is necessary for justice, and given the important instrumental goods provided by democracy, the Rawlsian view has seemed deeply implausible to many.
In this paper I blunt this challenge to the Rawlsian view by showing how, even if there is no human right to democracy, we may still rightfully promote democracy in a number of ways and cases. Showing this requires investigation of what it means to “promote democracy”, and a more careful inspection of when various methods of promoting democracy are appropriate than has been done by most political theorists working on human rights. When we look carefully, we can see that in some instances acceptable forms of promoting democracy are compatible with the Rawlsian view of human rights, and that this view is therefore not vulnerable to the “instrumentalist” challenge. We also see how, if political philosophy is to be useful, it must be less abstract and look closely at actual cases.
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