The International Criminal Court and the Justice Cascade

We present an original interpretation of the justice cascade theory developed by Kathryn Sikkink and her coauthors as it pertains to the icc’s engagements with African states since 2004. In doing so, we challenge a prominent and acclaimed critique of this theory: Oumar Ba’s States of Justice. Ba presents four qualitative case studies informed by fieldwork, focused on the admissibility challenges, selective cooperation, and obstructionism involving Uganda, Libya, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire. We closely examine the key publications in which the justice cascade theory is introduced, refined, and critiqued, identifying misinterpretations of this theory in Ba’s work and elucidating its empirical implications. Furthermore, we perform a citation analysis of States of Justice, demonstrating that the book, by virtually omitting primary sources of any type, misimplements its own empirical strategy. We introduce fresh legal analyses of compliance with the Rome Statute of the icc in the four relevant cases, revealing the dearth of evidence of noncompliance in all but the Kenyan case. Finally, we discuss legal analysis as a means of testing theories of international law and courts, and we illustrate the relevance of the justice cascade theory to current debates on the establishment of new international tribunals.