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Abstract

This article examines the multiple ways that international criminal law (ICL)—the body of international law that seeks to impose criminal responsibility on individuals for international crimes—has impacted the conflict in Ukraine. Most violations remain unpunished, and ICL’s legal accountability mechanisms continue to face significant obstacles. But even absent prosecutions and trials, which remain contingent on an array of shifting factors, ICL has affected the Ukraine conflict in multiple ways.

The article focuses on how ICL has helped shape narratives about the war in Ukraine. In doing so, the article cautions against a strict law/politics dichotomy and instead focuses on the more dynamic and multi-faceted interaction between international law, policy, and politics. It offers some broader conclusions about the opportunities as well as the challenges that a reliance on narrative presents for ICL’s overarching aim of holding individuals accountable for mass atrocities through prosecutions. As the article explains, narrative can advance ICL’s goals, but harnessing narrative’s full potential requires a more consistent commitment to ICL’s norms and principles, especially from the most powerful states. Further, an overreliance on narrative, without judicial enforcement, carries significant risks, particularly in today’s digital world, where facts can be distorted, stories manipulated, and disinformation widely and rapidly disseminated. Extensive reliance on narrative, moreover, can dilute the norms on which ICL is based, weakening its status as law and breeding cynicism. Thus, the more disputes about atrocity crimes are resolved through competing narratives rather than by courts, the more blurred the distinction may become between ICL’s regime of individual responsibility and the world of international power politics.

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