Description
This paper provides a framework for studying international accountability creation. It argues that international accountability can create normative agency in three fashions: 1) a global-constitutionalism fashion embodying the meaning of a penalty for breaking the law that involves a collective action of a regional or global community to hold the wrongdoer accountable; 2) a deterrent fashion epitomizing the meaning of a preventive disciplinary form of correction; 3) and an expressivist fashion, in which accountability manifests as a materialization of knowledge production. To illustrate my argument, I investigate the accountability countermeasures taken in response to the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine as a case study. What Russia has attempted with Ukraine – an imperial takeover of a neighbour territory through forced occupation – marks a ‘watershed moment’ (Terlikowski et al. 2023) in the international system after the Second World War. I exemplify several accountability mechanisms by the EU: The Joint Investigation Team, International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression; The Core International Crimes Evidence Database, and trace the role which these initiatives played in the establishment of the Special Tribunal of Aggression against Ukraine.
