The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter explains the motivation for the study. A stark reality is that states often fail to provide justice in many communities enduring criminal group violence. Deaths from criminal group violence roughly equal deaths from war between states, intrastate conflict (namely, civil war and insurgency), and terrorism combined. Moreover, criminal group affiliates who engage in the violence do so with near impunity in many communities. Criminal groups’ ability to escape accountability means that these communities face what I term vacuums of justice. The chapter goes on to argue that justice provision is a core responsibility of the state and, by failing in this regard, states shirk one of their raisons d’être (reasons for existence) under the social contract. The chapter’s final section explains the link between justice provision and cooperation with the police, positing that the police’s reliance on information from witnesses often makes cooperation a necessary albeit insufficient linchpin for justice provision.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

This chapter analyses the connections between public funding, the rule of law, and multidimensional development. First, via simulation, we document a negative relationship between the budget size and the proportion of embezzled resources (or wasted resources due to inefficiencies). Second, our result suggests that reallocating public funds from other issues to programmes associated with the rule of law can mitigate corruption up to a certain point. Third, we find that the worse the country’s performance, the easier to remain in a development trap, as it becomes more cumbersome to realise a successful allocation profile (i.e., to decipher the proper mix of rule-of-law funding and overall budget size).

How does the cloak of immunity protecting foreign public officials under international law enable their impunity before foreign courts for the crimes they committed for private gain? This was the question with which the book commenced. In answering it, an interdisciplinary attempt was made to come to grips with the structural injustices created by international rules of immunity in preventing well-resourced and internationally protected political elites from accountability for trafficking in persons, corruption and money laundering, and drug trafficking. The ways in which these crimes are perpetrated by political elites constitute an advanced form of criminality in which the perpetrators abuse their authority and personal privileges as public officials and, in so doing, disguise misconduct in the official mandate and even under the pretense of law-abiding behavior. These are the ultimate economic crimes that occur at the nexus of power, privilege, and impunity.

The ICC was meant to end impunity for the world’s worst crimes, thus contributing to their prevention. But twenty years after its establishment, its “theory of change” remains unclear, and few studies focus on its impact on the ground. To assess the Court’s impact, it is necessary to define the assumptions underlying its establishment. While deterrence is one such assumption, to date the evidence that the ICC effectively deters crimes is lacking. Other assumptions can be found in the Rome Statute itself, or in the expressed intentions of the Assembly of States Parties or senior officials of the Court. Lessons can also be drawn from impact studies of other international criminal tribunals. These sources indicate that the ICC should play an expressive function by engaging in norm projection. The chapter identifies four intended effects of the Rome Statute and ICC, including systemic effect on domestic legal systems; transformative effect on peace processes; reparative effect on victims; and demonstration effect, relating to its expressive function among affected communities. These four effects form an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC.

Finally, the conclusion provides an overview of the argument and findings, which together call for a departure from the more traditional narrative around the governance gap. Instead, this research illustrates that while impunity does exist, there are many more efforts to hold corporations accountable than the governance gap narrative would suggest. The varieties of remedy approach focus on the real shortcomings associated with governing – the abilities to engage with an adversary, absorb contestation, and explore creative and possibly unorthodox solutions to find a better path forward. This chapter also addresses the generalizability of this work and shares some areas of future research.

What drives the increasingly violent impulses of Hindu nationalism in India? This chapter emphasizes the abyss between, on the one hand, its anxieties about Hindu minoritization and territorial dismemberment and, on the other, its retrotopian visions about revitalizing a purported Hindu golden age.

The Commission against Impunity in Guatemala was an unprecedented international partnership to build the rule of law in a weak state. Between 2007 and 2019, the CICIG contributed to important legal reforms, the creation of a specialized prosecutor’s office and “high-risk” courts, and investigations of more than sixty criminal networks before being shut down by a president whom it was investigating. The CICIG’s sponsorship by the United Nations and funding from international donors helped it to survive resistance from successive Guatemalan presidents. As the CICIG’s investigations and a stronger Guatemalan state threatened a broader array of previously untouchable powerful domestic actors – including in business, the military, and politics – domestic opposition became more obstructionist. The backlash against the CICIG was ultimately successful when an under-resourced and fragile pro-reform domestic coalition could not replace the international support that had lessened as a result of independent but simultaneous global political trends in the late 2010s. The CICIG experience suggests that rule of law reformers will struggle with backlash from those actors who would lose power and face punishment in a strengthened state and that backlash may be insurmountable as international allies move on.

The year 2011 should have been a watershed for Mexican human rights. Mexico’s Supreme Court historically strengthened human rights protections by adopting progressive doctrines grounded in international law, the country modernized its criminal justice system, and civil society united in its calls for justice. Despite these changes, one decade later Mexico finds itself in an unprecedented human rights crisis. How do we understand the spectacular and tragically costly failure of Mexico’s judicial system to strengthen human rights protections and break patterns of impunity over the past decade? The chapter argues that this disconnect stems from two intersecting dynamics: first, the Mexican state’s historically weak, fragmented, federal nature has resulted in the institutionalization of mechanisms that enable impunity, in particular through the work of a powerful and unaccountable Ministerio Público that is able to selectively apply, or defy, the law. Second, socio-legal mobilization has not coalesced around demands for effective implementation of progressive jurisprudence or basic tenets of the rule of law. Instead, human rights litigation proceeds simultaneously on two distinct tracks: strategic litigation of a small number of paradigmatic cases connected to, or in relation with, the inter-American human rights system; and the advocacy and collaborative investigation of cases by small, state-based organizations. The patterns create a critical disconnect, where impunity remains rampant despite Mexico’s embracing of progressive human rights norms and principles.

Chapter 10 addresses high-level corruption and the judicial response to those who are known to engage, or are widely suspected of engaging, in acts of corruption in contemporary Latin America. It shows that corruption is a persistent problem and that no sustained gains to counter it have been made. It also shows that the judicial response is, at best, mixed. High-level corruption is systemic, involving a network of powerful politicians, top-level public administrators, and high-level members of the judiciary. The chapter explores the causes of this poor record through an analysis of three cases (Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala) and draws several conclusions. The weakness of democracy prevents it from reining in corruption. The public administration has largely been a hindrance in the fight against corruption. The judiciary has been part of the solution to the problem of corruption when it has been independent and competent; however, the judiciary is frequently corrupt or politicized and thus part of the problem. Finally, civil society organizations have played a consistently positive role, putting pressure on politicians and the judiciary to fight against corruption.

This chapter identifies some of the broader effects of the social and legal invisibility of aesthetically unfamiliar atrocity processes beyond merely adding to the so-called impunity gap that afflicts international criminal justice. It does so by demonstrating how aesthetic biases favoring horrifically spectacular crimes not only undermines the goals and values ascribed to ICL itself, but also contributes to a variety of negative outcomes that go far beyond missed prosecutorial opportunities. ICL’s myopic focus on horrifically spectacular crimes raises a host of troubling questions concerning what harms are prioritized and whose interests are served by international criminal justice. This chapter considers some of these implications, specifically those relating to theories of punishment, and ICL’s role in shaping historical memory, how transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights issues are framed and pursued, along with global justice more broadly.

The principle of ne bis in idem is a fundamental right that bars the possibility of a defendant being prosecuted more than once on the basis of the same offence, act or facts. In view of the significance of the ne bis in idem principle for the AFSJ, this chapter offers an account of the sources and elements of that principle. The ne bis in idem principle in the AFSJ has seen spectacular developments over the past two decades. The Van Esbroeck/Zolotukhin line of case law represents a prime example of fruitful substantive judicial dialectics between the two European courts. The case law on the application of the principle to the interaction between administrative, criminal and tax law raises questions, however. The problem encountered here is perhaps not so much one of ne bis in idem, but of the fundamental relationship between criminal and (punitive) administrative law. The developments in the case law suggest that we may not find a clear answer to the question of how the ne bis in idem principle should be applied in the relation between criminal, administrative and tax law until we have a sufficiently clear notion of  the precise nature of that relationship.