Thinking Institutions in 3-D: Ideas, Interests, and Power in the Creation of the International Criminal Court

In this dissertation, I argue that the creation and adoption of the Rome Statute resulted from the successful entrepreneurial role of a group of states predisposed to support a strong, independent international criminal court because of a combination of ideational and material variables. Norms shaped the national security interests and security policy of states, creating incentives to cooperate through institution building around the issue of core international crimes. States with a pro ICC identity (high values in Westernness, Legalism, and Post Westphalian Sovereignty and low values in Proximity to the Core) with enough resources to realize their preferences and without excessively high levels of Participation in Militarized Interstate Disputes, created an alliance, the Like-Minded Group (LMG), to advance the creation of an effective international criminal court. These states advocated for a strong and independent court, with complementary jurisdiction that could effectively prevent, and prosecute, core crimes under international law– i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. This would also include a court that is independent from the Security Council, with automatic jurisdiction (as opposed to opt-out mechanisms) over core crimes triggered by territoriality and active nationality, and a Prosecutor with propio motu powers. The LMG accomplished this by persuading the vast majority of states, which did not develop early preferences towards the ICC, to support, or at least acquiesce to, a Statute that reflected this ideal. The process of negotiation that led to this outcome followed a path dependent process, with every instance of the negotiation being conditioned by the previous instances, consolidated in evolving drafts and in the collective memory of the delegations. The end of the Cold War was a necessary precondition to the definition of international crime as a common goods problem, and to the establishment of cooperation around it.

To prove my argument I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, specifically ordinal regression, process tracing, and case studies. In addition to presenting a general explanation of the negotiation process, I examine four case studies (Germany, France, Argentina and the US) using a 'most similar case' design to better understand how the relevant variables affected particular states' behavior towards the ICC.