Managerial Practices at the International Criminal Court: Enhancing efficiency or reinforcing hegemony?

Managerial practices such as auditing, indicators, and performance appraisal are ubiquitous at the International Criminal Court. With the resort to such practices has come a certain understanding of their ontology and teleology. Managerial practices are portrayed as objective techniques designed to enhance efficiency and generally improve organisational performance. Yet this view of managerial practices is shorn of context, recognising nothing of the origins, strategic usage, or constitutive power of this body of knowledge. In this talk I begin to construct an alternative vision of managerial practices as originating in the Western capitalist model and deployed strategically by Western states at the ICC in order to reinforce their hegemonic status within the institution. Specifically, these practices act as disciplinary technologies which internalise the efficiency logic within international criminal lawyers. In this way, the court comes to regulate itself, foreclosing those legal and policy developments which might begin to challenge Western hegemony. With this new vision in mind, I close by considering its potential impact for our understanding of the court’s power dynamics and its future work.