The international legal system holds atrocity perpetrators accountable by prosecuting and incarcerating them. This approach also seeps into national and local legal systems. This seepage is animated by a number of factors, including internationalist pressures and the receptiveness of certain domestic actors to these pressures. Domestic actors often mimic international trendsetters, whose modern ideas they transplant to national and local contexts. The result is a diffusion of liberal prosecutorial and correctional models. This diffusion is entangled with the diffusion of Western legalism generally.

Punishment for extraordinary international criminals is deeply associated with core liberal legalist assumptions manifested in the ordinary operation of the criminal law in Western states generally, regardless of their provenance (i.e., ideal-type civilian or common law systems). In this regard, Rama Mani notes that international justice evidences a predominance of Western-generated theories and an absence of non-Western discourse. Most international lawyers are Westerners or members of Western-trained transnational elites. For Mani, this leads to “a troubling imbalance or ‘injustice’ in the study of justice,” insofar as “international lawyers … have largely referred to and replicated their own legal systems, rather than catered to and built on local realities and needs.”

The question I pose in this chapter is whether this association with Western law spells, in Mani's terms, a “troubling imbalance or injustice” when it comes to holding perpetrators of extraordinary international crimes accountable for their wrongdoing.