The Accountability Gap Reconsidered: International Criminal Justice, Selective Prosecution, and African Sovereignty

This article develops asymmetric accountability as an analytical lens for understanding the accountability gap: international criminal justice, selective prosecution, and african sovereignty. It argues that the unequal geography of international criminal enforcement is produced by political asymmetries in referral power, arrest capacity, complementarity practice, and the continued insulation of major powers and their allies from comparable scrutiny. Drawing on systematic analysis of all icc indictments 2002–2024; case studies of uganda, kenya, south sudan, and libya complementarity claims; discourse analysis of au assembly communiqués; comparison with icty/ictr to isolate africa-specific dynamics., the paper links the theoretical debates identified in international criminal law (rome statute; complementarity principle); global governance theory; third world approaches to international law (twail anghie; mutua; rajagopal). critically examines icc jurisdiction as a site of contested sovereignty and racial politics in international law. to a comparative and historically grounded reading of South Sudan and the related cases assembled in the research design. The article advances three core claims. First, the concentration of ICC cases in Africa cannot be explained solely by crime incidence; it also reflects the political economy of referrals, weak domestic insulation from external pressure, and uneven great-power exposure to court authority. Second, AU resistance evolved from episodic contestation into a sovereignty-centred critique of selective prosecution, particularly when sitting heads of state and high officials became targets. Third, complementarity often functions less as a ladder toward domestic justice than as a contested arena in which states perform institutional