Chapter 8 concludes that the ICC’s existence has not resulted in a short-term reduction in atrocities. It is not a shortcut to Utopia, but its long-term preventive impact is too early to assess. Through its expressive function, the Court is having normative impact. In terms of “systemic effect,” the Court may have the most impact where it is the least needed, or its impact may be hindered by “parallelism.” At the same time, there is potential in the internalization of the Rome Statute by domestic legal systems over time. In two peace negotiations, a measure of punishment for perpetrators was included, although this did not necessarily mean imprisonment. However, its normative impact is undermined by its lack of societal impact, including a lack of impact on victims. In this respect the ICC represents “law” rather than “justice.” Victims’ rights are recognized in the Rome Statute, but these have not yielded concrete remedies. The Court also suffers from negative perceptions among affected populations. To move from law to justice, the Court should seek to maximize its impact, through a better understanding of the local context and through a focus on fewer situations. However, justice has no “universal formula” and may require approaches beyond the ICC.

The International Criminal Court seeks to end impunity for the world’s worst crimes, in order to contribute to their prevention. But what is its impact to date? This book takes an in-depth look at four countries under scrutiny of the ICC: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya and Uganda. It puts forward an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC on four levels: on the domestic legal systems (systemic effect); on peace negotiations and agreements (transformative effect); on victims (reparative effect); and on the perceptions of affected populations (demonstration effect). It concludes that the ICC, through its expressive function, is having a normative impact on domestic legal systems and peace agreements, but it has brought little reparative justice for victims and it does not necessarily correspond with affected populations view justice priorities. The book concludes that justice for the world’s worst crimes has no “universal formula” that can easily be captured in law.

Chapter 3 further expands on systemic effect and argues that impact of the Rome Statute on domestic legal systems is better described as “internalization.” Internalization is the process whereby states demonstrate compliance with international law. The chapter examines internalization in Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya, and Uganda. Indicators of systemic effect, in the form of internalization, include implementation of domestic laws covering the Rome Statute crimes; the establishment of new or specialized investigative units or chambers to investigate or prosecute Rome Statute crime; or (genuine) national proceedings for Rome Statute crimes. The chapter concludes that “internalization” is taking place in all the countries under study. Laws have been amended, and new institutions established. National proceedings took place in all four countries. However, domestic proceedings in Colombia and Uganda demonstrate that it can be complex to assess for “genuineness.” In fact, most domestic proceedings are taking place in Colombia, a country with a robust legal system. This may mean that the Court has the most impact where it is needed the least.

Chapter 4 discusses transformative effect, that is, the impact of the Rome Statute and the Court on political processes such as peace negotiations, in order to contribute to ending impunity. The chapter discusses the mechanisms of the Rome Statute that seek to balance peace and justice, including Articles 16 and 53 (the “interests of justice” test). It also discusses who determines the interests of victims in peace and justice. The evidence on whether arrest warrants facilitate or hinder peace negotiations is not conclusive, although in Uganda, they may have hindered reaching a final peace agreement. Moreover, in Afghanistan or Libya, amnesties were passed, in spite of the involvement of the ICC. The coming into force of the Rome Statute does not constitute a “paradigm shift” from impunity to accountability as such, but transformative effect may be seen in certain negotiations or peace agreements.

Chapter 6 assesses the reparative effects of the Court on victims, with an emphasis on countries under investigation (Uganda and Kenya). Indicators of reparative effects include: whether victims are able to participate meaningfully in ICC proceedings; and whether victims receive reparations or assistance, either through Court proceedings or through the Trust Fund for Victims. The chapter concludes that the reparative effect of the Court on victims in situation countries is minimal. Victim participation is under strain and should be reexamined. By definition, the legal proceedings become more exclusionary as they progress. The Trust Fund for Victims lacks sufficient resources to provide for proportional individual reparations, and will inevitably disappoint victims, in spite of its innovative, humanitarian approach on the ground. In any case, victims need more concrete solutions to improve their daily lives instead of waiting years or decades for Court decisions (which have included many acquittals).

Chapter 5 analyses the impact of the ICC on peace negotiations in Colombia and Uganda, including impact of the ICC (and the role of the Prosecutor) on the process of negotiations, on the role of the parties, on victims, and on the content of peace agreements arising from these negotiations (including the Ugandan Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation and the Legal Framework for Peace and Havana Peace Agreement in Colombia). The chapter concludes that there was a transformative effect in peace processes in Colombia and Uganda. These agreements adopted accountability provisions. However, they provided for alternative penalties for perpetrators rather than lengthy prison terms. They incorporated the views of victims into negotiations and allowed for various victim-oriented mechanisms in the agreements. In Uganda, however, unlike in Colombia, the final peace agreement was never fully implemented. The Colombian agreement may set new standards on how peace agreements may approach the balance between peace and justice in the future.

The stabilization of drone programs and their implementation as part of the normal functioning of the state deserve much more attention than it has received, since the power it conveys goes far beyond prompt lethal strikes in foreign territories. The institutionalization of a drone program not only means that the extensive warfare that drones bring about is stable, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, because a drone program consists of the constant surveillance of populations "living under drones." Behavioral changes (in addition to the evident psychological ramifications) of populations living under drones have been proven, at both the individual and community level. This chapter makes clear that a transborder drone program cannot be viewed as occasional interventions in self-defense. Instead, through an institutionalized drone program, a state performs rituals of governance and sovereignty over the populations it monitors. The chapter conceptualizes the extension of state power over the populations of third states and explores what it means for the international legal order that the law is essential to such an extension.

Describing drone programs as a network of interacting and interdependent factors including the contemporary technological capacities of drones, law and military strategy is one of the main aspects of this study. All chapters identify where and how these factors converge or diverge and examine the result of this interaction. This description shows that combat drone technology facilitates anticipatory warfare – the scope of which is indefinite in time and space – and that the law is rearranged around anticipation. Further examining the socio-techno-legal phenomena produced by drone programs, the book explores the long-term effects produced by drone programs over populations living under drones as well as the international legal order. This book can be thought of as an act of compiling the textual, bureaucratic, and material traces of these programs in order to lay bare the infrastructure that is extending warfare in time and space and exacerbating state power.

Drone programs in the counterterrorism context rest on the use of force in self-defense not against an (imminent) act, but against individuals in the light of their personal or behavioral characteristics. Because drone programs are motivated by the objective of permanently addressing future threats before they materialize, technology and legal rhetoric are used as instruments to authorize action against individuals who are not presently perpetrating terrorist acts, nor even clearly preparing, such acts. Some states active in the transnational war on terror have proposed a legal framework for the continuous anticipation of armed attacks against individuals who show signs of hostile intent. These changes in military strategy and legal discourse are not merely the result of how states decide to use force in the counterterrorism context, but also of what technology allows them to do. As such, drones facilitate and arguably intensify the phenomena of the individualization and dematerialization of the use of force. Although the interpretation of self-defense proposed by some states active in the war on terror is still highly contested on some points, the chapter shows that even if some limitations remain, concessions to the extensive interpretation of some limitations appear to have a direct cascade effect on the remaining checks because these limitations are interconnected.

This chapter demonstrates that drone programs – the combination of legal narratives, shifts in military strategy, and technological change – bring about an anywhere war. Combat drones have been deployed against non-state actors extraterritorially, including on the territory of non-belligerent states, because of the presence on those territories of members of terrorist groups. To allow this, drone programs have involved the creation of concepts such as “outside areas of active hostilities” or “outside hot conflict zones.” These non-legal concepts posit that jus in bello applies wherever the belligerent is, including on the territory of a state where the hostilities are not taking place. This practice, accompanied with supportive legal and political rationales, has sparked a heated debate among scholars on the geographical scope of armed conflicts under the jus in bello. Departing from the normative discussion for or against a geographical limitation of conflicts, the chapter shows that there is no such a thing as a legal geographical limitation of conflicts in the law and that its absence is exploited by drone programs, whose technological features eventually create the prospect of an anywhere war taking place wherever the enemy is.

How did the new kind of deterritorialized, dematerialized, and individualized warfare ‒ extensive in both time and space ‒ become durable? To what extent can it be considered as part of the normal functioning of the states that use drones? This chapter finds that the development of the use of drones in the US, in comparison with the use of France in the UK and France, is best described as one of institutionalization. The institutionalization of drone programs is defined as the process whereby drone practices become stable and durable activities embedded in the normative fabric of the state. This process derives from a combination of factors, from the formation of a bureaucracy – narrowly defined as the structured, harmonized, and depersonalized interaction of agents – to the formulation of legitimizing legal rationales, and the stabilizing force of the technology itself. The US drone program was stabilized through the creation of structures and bureaucratic interactions, a highly legalistic mode of justification, and narratives about drones being tailor-made to fight a transnational and polymorphous enemy.

The epilogue retraces the explanations, inchoate in the book, for the exacerbation of state power resting on enhanced technological capacities and de-/reconstructed legal frameworks. It suggests that the studied socio-techno-legal phenomena of extensive warfare and state power have developed because of the infinite enmity that characterizes the relationship between states and transnational jihadist groups and networks. This radical and unequal enmity reveals the dependence of norms, although they necessarily present gray areas and uncertainties, on concrete situations. When this concrete situation is replaced by other parameters, legal grey zones that never appeared to be problematic under the first scenario emerge as factors of infinite warfare. The epilogue formulates concluding thoughts on how the described phenomenon might evolve when technological capacities of drones are even further enhanced and they become autonomous, and how state power might accordingly evolve in the quest to annihilate members of jihadist groups, or infinite enemies.

Before developing the argument of the book, this chapter gives an overview of the contexts where combat drones have been deployed as a basis for the study. The description of the contexts in which drone operations have been conducted extraterritorially against non-state actors by the US, the UK, and France follow a chronological sequence, and draw some general common and diverging features of the different legal rationales crafted by these states.