Chapter 6 expands on African legal cosmologies by demonstrating what it is that the world has missed out on by not incorporating customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms from the Global South much earlier into the jurisprudence on sustainable development. The different senses of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development as embedded in non-positivist legal traditions and thinking about law differently have tremendous potential to ensure that the sustainable development becomes effectively local, a concern that must engage the attention of international law scholars. This is where eco-legal philosophies and ecological integrity interact to found ecological law which involves reorganising the law–ecology nexus by retrenching the overbearing dominance of Eurocentric law on the planetary community and its disproportionate dominance in the humanity–nature nexus. In this respect, the renewed normativity of sustainable development as ecological integrity recalibrates law as a subset of a universal whole where law is appropriately located within, and not external to, nature. This remedial task is made possible by forging a beneficial interconnection between customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms guided by the awareness that sustainable development reflects legal pluriversality and a significant feature of alternative legal ontologies.

Chapter 3 analyses the normativity of sustainable development in international law and politics as expressed beyond the questions on its present (domestic) manifestations or the endless struggle to place the concept within general legal (normative) registers. It highlights how international law tends to subordinate non-Western experiences in its elevation of sustainable development into a global standard. What emerges from this process is that the more the world pursues sustainable development in its current form, the more we unwittingly contribute to the global dissemination of a particular strand of Eurocentrism. Sustainable development thus reveals itself as an amalgam of power and knowledge while simultaneously establishing itself as a vital component in international legal governance. What emerges in this chapter is that, although the concept of sustainable development is always at the forefront of international public discourse, little is done, in fact, to achieve its presumed objectives. Thus, while sustainable development’s quick ascent to become a universalist concept is central to this book, the concept’s character must be understood as quietly operating to mute global ecological violence that disproportionately affects marginalised peoples in the Global South.

In this chapter, I argue that international criminal law institutions must satisfy two criteria to justify their claim to legitimate authority. First, they need to ensure fair trials. But while fairness is a necessary condition for the legitimate authority of the international exercise of criminal justice, it is not a sufficient condition. Institutions need to answer the subordination complaint: When some rule, others are subordinated to their rule – and the point of legitimate institutions is to address how this fact can be reconciled with the equal status of persons. An adequate way to respond to the subordination complaint is to vest institutions with democratic procedures that ensure equal control over the coercive rule of an institution. In the final part of chapter five, I highlight two strategies that enable states and individuals to exercise equal control over the court. The first strategy involves a legislative assembly that deliberates and decides on questions of criminal justice and institutional design. The second strategy seeks to make judicial lawmaking, where it is inevitable, more accountable to the public.

In this chapter, I examine whether punishment is morally permissible. Criminal prosecution and punishment are the main functions of international criminal justice and lie at the heart of what institutions of international criminal justice – such as the International Criminal Court – do. To begin, I reconstruct Locke’s argument for the permissibility of punishment. Locke argues that we have a moral duty to ‘preserve humanity’ and we can discharge that duty by exercising our ‘natural executive right’ – that is, a right to punish – in the state of nature. Punishments are effective in enforcing rights because they deter crimes. I discuss several objections against the consequentialist structure of Locke’s argument. To counter these objections, I argue for a mixed theory that distinguishes between justifying the practice of punishment and justifying the distribution of punishment within that practice. To explain the latter, we must take into account considerations of normative individualism, egalitarianism, and pragmatic considerations. Taken together, these arguments imply that coercive punishment is permissible for natural rights enforcement.

In this chapter, I discuss how and why the sovereignty of states can be pierced. I presuppose that persons have basic human rights independently of their membership in any political community and that we all share a duty to enforce those rights for everyone. Normally, we discharge this duty through a system of just states in a moral division of labour. A state’s legitimate power over its people and territory depends on its performance in protecting those rights. But when states fail to protect the fundamental human rights of their citizens, not only is outside interference permissible, but the duty to preserve humankind falls back to everyone. In that situation, we all have an equal right to punish perpetrators of human rights crimes. Finally, I turn back to Locke to argue that since we are all equals in the state of nature, our natural executive right must be exercised competitively. But because such competitive punishment is incompatible with our equal status as moral authorities, we have reason to leave the state of nature and submit to an impartial institution that exercises the right on our behalf.

In the Conclusion, I offer some remarks about the relation between the argument I developed over the course of the book, and whether applying it to our structurally unjust real world leaves the argument vulnerable to a number of criticisms. I discuss two issues in more detail: first, whether the unequal distribution of international crime prosecutions taints the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and whether the ICC does in fact deter crimes. Both issues are serious, but ultimately, I conclude that they do not weaken my argument. I end the book by highlighting just how radically the project of international criminal justice departs from earlier strategies for dealing with war and human rights violations.