Description
This paper conceptualizes the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) positive complementarity policy as a space of resistance, where civil society actors actively engage with, reinterpret, and at times resist the logics and structures of international law. Positive complementarity has been used as an umbrella term to describe a wide range of measures and activities aimed at encouraging and supporting domestic authorities in the investigation and prosecution of core international crimes. Yet, beyond its institutional framing, the discourse of positive complementarity has been increasingly appropriated by civil society actors who deploy its language and principles to advance their own visions of justice and accountability. Drawing on critical legal studies and postcolonial theory, this paper argues that grassroots engagement with the ICC has transformed positive complementarity from a top-down policy instrument into a contested arena of meaning-making. Within this space, civil society actors challenge the monopolization of justice by legal and political elites, reclaiming positive complementarity as a vehicle for participatory and locally grounded accountability. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper situates positive complementarity within broader debates on transnational power, local agency, and the politics of resistance. It highlights how everyday actors, far from being passive recipients of international law, actively contest and reshape the meanings and practices of justice from below.
