In this chapter, James Mehigan focuses on the contribution of international criminal law (ICL) to the peaceful settlement of international disputes. More specifically, this chapter looks at the aims of ICL and analyses how effective it has been at achieving its international law and criminal law objectives. It argues that ICL does not make the broader contribution to dispute settlement that many commentators hope for because it provides a form of retributive justice that does not necessarily engender a sense of justice for victims, nor contribute to reconciliation or fact-finding. After looking at the impact of ICL in the Former Yugoslavia, this chapter concludes that there is little evidence to show that ICL achieves any of its aims other than individualising guilt and punishing offenders – in other words, ICL’s contribution to the settlement of international disputes is minimal and should not be overstated.

Preamble: a moment of conference

When I started to attend criminology conferences nearly twenty years ago, I was treated to a rare moment of unintentional humour and collective self-awareness. In a large lecture theatre at the University of Portsmouth a rising academic star was presenting a paper on the penal climate in the Netherlands, renowned for its humane, parsimonious approach to incarceration. As Dr Francis Pakes put up a slide illustrating a newly built Dutch prison cell, chuckles could be heard rippling round the auditorium as academics recognised the cell's facilities and dimensions as almost completely identical to the university's student accommodation they had just vacated to attend the presentation. Like their rooms, the cell had an en-suite shower and toilet, a fitted single bed, work bench, wardrobe and storage facilities. Although delegates’ funny bones were tickled as they shared with each other the irony of their willingness to swap their conference accommodation for a prison cell, I felt an edge to this levity. Alongside these images a memory lurked; the cell I had been in some twenty years earlier in HMP Norwich had no sanitation and a battered steel bunk bed was crammed next to a single bed so as to accommodate three men in a cell designed nearly a hundred years earlier for a single prisoner.

The comparison entertaining the conference delegates was not lost on me but the apparent ease of the appraisal was troubling, the nerve it tickled also burned. It felt personally anchored in a serious criminological question, the one posed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s: ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’ (Foucault, 1979, p 228) Now, the relentless march of penal progress has advanced to include universities in this list of resemblances. And we find it more amusing than alarming.

In this chapter, James and I seek to extend the critical tradition of The Open University (OU) approach to questions of crime, punishment and social order by exploring the wider ramifications of imprisonment. We also seek to contextualise the OU's contributions to higher education in prisons and contribute to wider critical discussions about what universities are for (Collini, 2012; Connell, 2019; Dawson, 2019).

Have you been inspired by the stories in this book? Are you considering OU study yourself?

Unlike other universities, the OU does not have entry requirements to study most of its undergraduate qualifications and there are no tests to gain entry – in fact, more than 40 per cent of new OU undergraduate students in the UK don't have the formal qualifications they’d need to go through a traditional university application process.

The OU has changed the lives of more than 2 million people, bringing them new knowledge, skills, interests and inspiration, and helping them to achieve new goals. We are the UK's largest university, with more than 180,000 students. This includes learners in prisons and secure environments.

The OU offers qualifications in a broad range of subjects and provides access to a range of educational opportunities, from short introductory modules to longer, broader modules leading to degrees and other recognised qualifications.

For more information on courses visit our website www.open.ac.uk and for specific information about our work in prisons go to www. open.ac.uk/secure-environments or speak to your prison education manager.

The Open University: What's Stopping You?

They say you shouldn't judge a book by the cover but we are more than happy for this book to be judged that way. The cover art for this book was given to us by an artist in a Scottish prison. He got to hear about the book through the regular outreach work conducted by the Open University's (OU’s) Students in Secure Environments (SiSE) team. His work has been acclaimed and displayed by the Koestler Trust, a charity that promotes arts and humanities activities in prisons across the UK. Ruth McFarlane (see Chapter 2) invited ‘Ben’ to produce an image for the cover of the book. Without much briefing – except that it was about the OU's work in prison – he produced the stunning image on the front cover. We could not have asked for a more life-affirming image. As one of our contributors, Erwin James (see Chapter 14), a former prisoner himself, has said, ‘in prison you live in your head’ (James, 2013, p 3). Anyone who has been imprisoned knows the truth of that. Here, in ‘Ben’s’ artwork, that quality of imprisonment is invoked and subverted. The light of learning pours out of a radiant and smiling face. You can judge our book by the way it measures up to this image. It is not all about hope, transcendence and liberation, but the opening of life's potentials that Ben's image evokes has driven the OU's work in prison and propelled the contributors to this book, most of whom have been imprisoned themselves.

Academic publishing houses, such as Policy Press, invite independent academics to critically evaluate the strength and viability of the book proposals they receive. One of the academics reviewing our proposal commented “it reads a bit like a love letter to the OU”. We stand guilty as charged. Although the real history of The Open University is one of a tangled and contested mesh of competing narratives, as Dan Weinbren's Chapter 4 shrewdly attests (see also Weinbren, 2014), there is much to be loved and cherished about the OU.