The Politics of International Institutions: A Path-Dependent Analysis of the ICC-AU Interface

Abstract

After many unsuccessful years of deliberating the establishment of a permanent ICC, the end of the Cold war critical juncture would foster processes, as liberal ideological principles took center stage in international politics. Not only that, but this specific juncture also triggered a declining state of inter-state wars and an increase in intra-state conflict, posing a threat to the global order. This necessitated the adoption of new institutional measures (ICC) to combat the increasing levels of intra-state wars, the impunity associated with it, and further deter future occurrences. As positive as the role of the ICC in global governance may be, translating from theory into practice has been marred with turbulence, as Africa, the continent with the highest number of signatories; in different phases, has declared a non-cooperation policy with the Court through the AU until now. This leads to a range of theoretical and practical issues that need to be explored to explain why the AU-ICC interface has been plagued with turbulence over time. As a result, this research work has examined the historical narrative of the ICC-AU interface through the Path dependent to explicate the temporal events and dynamics of politics in this interface. The results of the study showed that the reasons behind the AU’s move to not cooperate with the ICC until today is because of series of causatively connected events, which is best explained through the reactive path-dependent model. Through the lens of this research tradition, it emerged that the popular narrative of ‘Africa is against the ICC’ is false, that it is only a few powerful African countries who used their privileged asymmetrical power relations and historical locked-in advantages to shape the ICC-AU interface to their interest. At the other end of the spectrum, the study also identified that the institutional design of the ICC emitted certain unintended consequences on the ICC-AU interface through the lens of increasing path-dependent dynamics. Whilst the ICC is a fully-fledged court with full legal responsibilities, through this research tradition, certain dynamics of politics were explored in the ICC-AU-UNSC relations.