Premise and Claim

 Introduction 

The International Criminal Court’s concentrated attention on former President Rodrigo Duterte functions less as a straightforward mechanism of neutral accountability than as an institutionally performative gesture aimed at demonstrating impartiality. This pattern reveals an anxiety within global legal governance: to be seen as universal and legitimate the Court must show it can reach beyond Western capitals and prosecute leaders from the Global South. That performative imperative risks transforming accountability into a spectacle that reproduces colonial hierarchies under the veneer of legal technicality. This essay argues that the ICC’s posture toward Duterte exemplifies a juridical desperation that seeks a visible, racialized emblem of fairness, and that resisting the expansion of such a judicial empire requires legal, political, and epistemic interventions anchored in decolonial principles. 

Historical and institutional context 

International criminal law and institutions like the ICC were constructed within a modern international order shaped by asymmetric power relations, imperial histories, and postwar political bargaining. The Rome Statute and the ICC’s mandate emerged from a mixture of normative aspiration and geopolitical compromise. The Court’s claim to universality depends on a narrative that internationalized accountability in response to atrocities that transcended national remedies, yet that claim sits alongside persistent limitations: constrained resources, selective case initiation, state non-cooperation, and the political leverage of powerful states. Under these structural conditions, case selection cannot be insulated from geopolitical dynamics. 

The Court’s need to demonstrate impartiality operates within these constraints. To maintain legitimacy in global public opinion and among member states, the ICC must show both that it pursues cases in varied locations and that it does not shy away from politically sensitive prosecutions. That institutional calculus incentivizes high-visibility cases involving non-Western leaders. When those cases involve charismatic, populist, or polarizing figures, the Court’s actions are more easily read as a bid for symbolic credibility than as purely juridical determinations grounded exclusively in neutral prosecutorial criteria. The result is an institutional posture that can appear desperate to produce evidence of evenhandedness by pursuing visibly emblematic targets. 

Colonial patterns reenacted through legal formalism 

Legal formalism can mask deep normative choices and reproduce hierarchies that mirror colonial relationships. Doctrines such as complementarity, gravity, and admissibility are framed as neutral tests, but they function within a system of unequal states whose investigative capacities, political will, and international influence vary widely. The assumption of equal juridical subjecthood obscures material disparities between states that determine which cases are investigated and which are effectively impossible to pursue. 

When the ICC concentrates prosecutorial energy on a postcolonial leader, that concentration can take on a double valence. It addresses credible allegations that warrant international scrutiny while simultaneously signaling to global audiences that the Court’s reach is not parochial. This dual function risks turning justice into an instrument of global governance: international judges and prosecutors become the external disciplinarians of postcolonial sovereignties. The juridical vocabulary—detached, technical, and procedural—becomes the medium through which power is exercised, producing compliance and discipline in spaces where domestic institutions may have been delegitimized by historical and structural inequalities. 

This juridical disciplining mirrors older patterns of imperial governance in which metropolitan authorities justified interventions by invoking universal principles while neglecting the historical processes that generated the problems they aimed to correct. The ICC’s language of neutrality and universality can therefore serve as a conduit for the rearticulation of external authority over domestic political affairs, especially when redistributive or structural transformations are not part of the prosecutorial agenda. 

Politics of narrative and representation 

The portrayal of a high-profile defendant within international legal processes constructs a public narrative that extends beyond the courtroom. Judicial filings, press briefings, and international commentary cohere into a representational frame that often emphasizes personal culpability, performative leadership, and exceptional violence. These narratives can simplify complex domestic contexts into tropes that make sense to international audiences: a theatrical leader, an unruly polity, and a crisis requiring corrective international oversight. 

Such representational politics does normative work. It constructs the territory of legitimate adjudication and establishes the idioms through which accountability is understood. The symbolic effect of prosecuting a non-Western leader is not limited to the defendant; it shapes how entire societies are perceived in the global imagination. This symbolic politics can provide a vicarious sense of moral repair for audiences who seek visible manifestations of international justice while simultaneously occluding the socio-economic, historical, and political dynamics that engendered state violence. 

Representation also interacts with resource allocation and advocacy networks. Cases that capture international attention attract funding, investigative capacity, and legal expertise, while less visible or geopolitically inconvenient patterns of violence remain under-resourced. The political economies of attention thus shape the Court’s docket in ways that correlate with symbolic visibility rather than purely with legal gravity. 

Limits of legalism and the demand for structural accountability 

Criminal adjudication has a limited capacity to address the structural conditions that generate widespread violence. Trials focus on discrete acts and individual responsibility, translating systemic patterns into prosecutable counts. This translation is valuable for deterrence, moral condemnation, and establishing historical record, but it is inadequate as a policy for comprehensive social repair. Convictions do not automatically produce reparations, institutional transformation, or sustainable reductions in structural violence. 

Decolonial critiques insist that accountability must move beyond the retributive paradigm to include reparative, redistributive, and restorative processes shaped by affected communities. Justice must be plural and locally anchored, responsive to cultural forms of redress, and attuned to socioeconomic redistribution as a form of prevention. International prosecutions that fail to link individual culpability to systemic reform risk isolating the problem in discrete personalities rather than transforming the institutions and policies that enable abuse. 

A genuine commitment to preventing recurrence requires investments in domestic accountability mechanisms, police reform, community-led truth initiatives, and socioeconomic programs that address marginalization. International institutions should play a complementary role that supports these domestic processes, rather than substituting themselves as the primary agents of justice in contexts where they cannot deliver the broad remedies that affected populations demand. 

Strategies of resistance: legal, political, and epistemic 

Resisting the reconstitution of colonial authority through international legalism requires a plural set of strategies. Legally, reformers must push for transparent, consistent, and politically insulated case-selection criteria that reduce the incentive to pursue symbolic cases for reasons of institutional legitimacy. Reforms should include greater engagement with local investigative actors, improved mechanisms for resourcing domestic proceedings, and clearer pathways for reparative outcomes linked to prosecutions. 

Politically, resistance takes the form of reasserting democratic sovereignty while building transnational solidarity networks that center victims’ voices and priorities. Civil society must be resourced to lead truth-telling and reparative initiatives. International actors should commit to subsidiarity: supporting rather than supplanting domestic processes, channeling funds directly to affected communities, and prioritizing capacity-building for local institutions. 

Epistemically, resistance requires contesting the normative assumptions embedded in international legal discourse. This entails amplifying non-Western jurisprudential traditions, indigenous practices of accountability, and context-sensitive transitional justice mechanisms. It also means interrogating the genealogies of international legal norms and acknowledging how those norms were shaped by imperial histories. Legal education, comparative research, and collaborative scholarship should aim to decenter Western doctrinal dominance and elevate plural conceptions of justice. 

These strategies are interdependent. Legal reforms without political support will flounder; political mobilization without epistemic shifts may reproduce the same normative limits in different forms. A combined approach that integrates procedural reform, political empowerment, and epistemic pluralism offers the most promising path for resisting juridical empire while preserving the capacity to address mass abuses. 

Conclusion 

The ICC’s intensive focus on a prominent Global South leader functions as an institutional performance that seeks legitimacy through visibility. That performance risks rearticulating colonial hierarchies under a legalistic idiom, transforming accountability into spectacle and moral signaling rather than substantive transformation. The appropriate response is not to deny victims their claims to justice but to insist that justice be reimagined: plural, locally anchored, reparative, and attentive to structural causes. 

Decolonial resistance demands that international legal institutions accept limits, cede space to domestic and community-led processes, and orient their practices toward reparative outcomes rather than institutional prestige. Reform must combine rigorous procedural safeguards with political and material support for local accountability, and with epistemic humility that recognizes the colonial origins of many international legal categories. Accountability that dismantles structural violence will not emerge from juridical spectacle; it will emerge from sustained, solidaristic, and context-sensitive practices that transform the conditions producing harm.