Spend time at the International Criminal Court, and you will hear the familiar language of anti-impunity. Spend longer, and you will encounter the less familiar language of management – efficiency, risk, and performance, and tools of strategic planning, audit, and performance appraisal. How have these two languages fused within the primary institution of global justice? This book explores that question through an historical and conceptually layered account of management's effects on the ICC's global justice project. It historicises management, forcing international lawyers to look at the sites of struggle – from the plantation to the United Nations – that have shaped the court's managerial present. It traces the court's macro, micro and meso scales of management, showing how such practices have fashioned a vision of global justice at organisational, professional, and argumentative levels. And it asks how those who care about global justice might engage with managerial justice at an institution animated by forms, reforms, and the promise of optimisation.

‘What to think of a ‘retreat on efficiencies’ for officials of the International Criminal Court that ends with a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau? In this eye-opening account, Richard Clements shows us what happens when management speak, thinking and practices become the framework within which ‘the fight against impunity’ is pursued. This management culture appears at least as important a factor as the Rome Statute in conditioning the ‘justice’ that the Court does and does not do.’

Saran M. H. Nouwen - Professor of International Law, European University Institute

‘A brilliant and provocative analysis, pathbreaking — should be on the shelf of every serious student of the world’s legal and institutional arrangements. The professional practices of ‘managerialism’ saturate our world. Projects launched in the name of justice, virtue, solidarity or repair of our natural world quickly find themselves measured, rearranged, implemented and professionalized in the language of effectiveness, assessment and good governance. How does that happen? What professional roles are brought into being? What can go wrong? Clements brings the insights of critical managerial studies to the International Criminal Court to find out. And he does — a fascinating, original and urgently needed assessment of global governance today.’

David Kennedy - Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Institute for Global Law & Policy, Harvard Law School

‘In this rich, deeply incisive, and beautifully written monograph, Richard Clements challenges us to read the International Criminal Court beyond the grain of the now conventional though important narratives of both critique and celebration. His sharply insightful analysis takes us through, and past, the discourses of justice and politics in which the Court is bound up, and brings us to a much more disconcerting realisation: What drives the Court is a much more quotidian discourse, of efficiency. How does the language of cost-cutting, time-saving, resource-optimisation, and performance-measurement take over the grand promise of anti-impunity? How does it illuminate concerns about the Court’s choices of situations, cases and policies? And what does it mean for those whose professional lives are invested in the Court’s success? Clements’s brilliant, searching, examination shows us the links that connect empire, managerialism and practices of justice in the present as much as in the past, and gives us a book that will be as defining for the field as it is for the Court.’

Surabhi Ranganathan - Professor of International Law, University of Cambridge