The Justice Factory: Management Practices at the International Criminal Court - Dr Richard Clements

Dr Richard Clements

Richard is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Tilburg Law School and Faculty member at the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School. Richard is also a co-convenor of the International Law & Politics CRN at the Law & Society Association. He completed his LL.B. in law with politics at Queen’s University Belfast (2012) and his LL.M. in International Law at Leiden University (2015). Richard has conducted internships at the ICTY and ICC and completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020. He was a Residential Fellow at IGLP from 2019-2021.

The Justice Factory: Management Practices at the International Criminal Court (2024)

Book Blurb: Spend time at the International Criminal Court, and you will hear the familiar language of anti-impunity. Spend longer, and you will encounter the less familiar language of management – efficiency, risk, and performance, and tools of strategic planning, audit, and performance appraisal. How have these two languages fused within the primary institution of global justice? This book explores that question through an historical and conceptually layered account of management's effects on the ICC's global justice project. It historicises management, forcing international lawyers to look at the sites of struggle – from the plantation to the United Nations – that have shaped the court's managerial present. It traces the court's macro, micro and meso scales of management, showing how such practices have fashioned a vision of global justice at organisational, professional, and argumentative levels. And it asks how those who care about global justice might engage with managerial justice at an institution animated by forms, reforms, and the promise of optimisation.

What made you write on this topic?

There are two stories here, one personal, one scholarly. The personal reason is that when I was completing an internship at the ICC in 2015/16, I was struck by how easily legal officers moved from speaking about procedural rules, evidence and mass atrocities to speaking about strategic goals, performance appraisals and management. Though my initial sense was that the latter might be problematically encroaching on the former, I soon began to wonder whether the relationship between the anti-impunity and management discourses might not be more closely intertwined than I initially thought. The scholarly reason for writing on this topic was that one of the first books I read when I commenced the PhD was Yuval Shany’s Assessing the Effectiveness of International Courts (2014). I was both surprised and slightly frustrated by how easily the ‘rational’ ideas of measurement, optimization and indicators could be applied to something as complex as ‘global justice’. It was in this attempt to keep complexity on the table that I wanted to prize open the seemingly objective and benign ideas and practices of management that Shany endorsed.

How long did it take to produce your book from initial conception to publication?

About seven years. I began thinking about this, as I say, at the start of my PhD in 2016. After defending the thesis in January 2020, I let things sit for a while to get a bit of distance and really only took up drafting the manuscript in mid-2021 again, once my teaching duties had died down slightly after my first semester at Tilburg. Much changed in the redraft(s) – one chapter removed, a new one added, method more clearly articulated (I hope) – and it may be easier to say that it’s taken about seven years for the book to produce me and my ideas on management and international criminal law.

What is the most difficult part about writing for you?

Letting the materials speak for themselves, in a way that isn’t too theoretically determined. I am sure I am not alone among my academic colleagues in wanting to assert an almost authoritarian level of control over the materials and texts with which I am working when I write. This of course usually results in a lot of control being exerted over the reader too: sit down, be quiet, listen to what I have to tell you. I think in my writing since The Justice Factory, I have become more aware of writing’s abilities to open up rather than to close down, and maintaining that balance requires a sort of relaxed vigilance.

Why should people read your book?

I shouldn’t be under any illusions that the people reading my book will likely be scholars, practitioners and other folks interested in international criminal law and the ICC. But if I dreamt big, I would say: there is almost no area of daily life that is not saturated with managerial discourses and tools, from your annual performance review to McKinsey’s role in the opioid epidemic in the United States. Universities are a (sadly) prime example of this managerial turn: top-heavy behemoths that use ‘the student experience’ to subject teachers, researchers and administrators to a deluge of forms, accreditations and strategic plans. If you are looking to make sense of these changes and how they also implicate the ‘primary institution of global justice’, then maybe give the book a read.

What book is currently on your bedside table?

I had to check! There are two: One is the last instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, about the rise of Henry VIII’s trusted advisor, Thomas Cromwell (a government manager if there ever was one!). The other is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – mystical, gender-bending, boundless: everything I enjoy in fiction.

What are you working on now?

I was lucky enough to have been awarded a Veni grant by the Dutch Scientific Organisation (NWO) which has just begun this year. This research will take me away from anti-impunity, but sticking with the phenomenon of management as it arises and shapes international legal work in other governance spheres. I have begun in the area of global health law and the ‘risk management’ of pandemics, but the project will also look at the role of management practices in the governance of marine plastic pollution and migratory birds (both of these areas have turned to strategic planning to facilitate their work). It is a topic that seems only to become more pressing, particularly for areas confronting health, pollution and biodiversity crises.

Note (RC): Such a large portion of the thinking and writing that paved the way for The Justice Factory took place at the Lauterpacht Centre that it would be remiss not to acknowledge its role in the completion of the book. With thanks to the LCIL team.