Description
Against the background of a global ecological emergency and demands for climate justice, the formal submission of an amendment criminalising ecocide under the Rome Statute signals a legalisation of the campaign against mass destruction of the natural environment. However, the narrow doctrinal focus of ecocide scholarship has diverted attention from criminalisation as itself a process through which ecocide is constituted as a problem for the international community. Bringing literature on international criminalisation and objectual IR (O-IR) into dialogue, this paper addresses this relationship by theorising criminalisation as an attempt to constitute, and to govern, ecocide through international criminal law (ICL). By situating criminalisation within an international context characterised by fragmentation, hierarchy, and competing sites of international legal authority, our approach permits a more nuanced and relational understanding of the rapidly developing politics of ecocide and the changing role of the ICC within the international system.
The second part of the paper moves to examine the relationship between criminalisation and the growing range of sites and contexts through which ecocide is mobilised and constituted by political actors with different relationships to ecocide and ICL. We provisionally identify and map four areas where criminalisation is having transformative effects: the changing role of Stop Ecocide International as a source of expertise, the role of the ICC in facilitating deliberation over ecocide norms, the pedagogical role of criminalisation in diffusing ecocide norms, and the co-constitution of ecocide with ecological jurisprudence in international law.
