‘From al-Bashir to Putin – what can we learn about ongoing contestation towards the International Criminal Court?’

Twice has South Africa, a champion of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the anti-impunity norm, confronted the prospect of having to execute the Court’s arrest warrants and chose not to, prioritising other commitments and competing normative demands. The literature has characterised this behaviour as norm contestation, which can be detrimental to the robustness of the anti-impunity norm and the standing of the ICC. This compels us to answer two questions: What form of contestation did South Africa engage in? How did it impact the robustness of the anti-impunity norm? This paper argues that in both instances South Africa engaged in norm withdrawal, a form of contestation that entails the creation of a hierarchy between competing norms, which did not fundamentally undermine the robustness of the anti-impunity norm. To do so, the paper further develops the concept of norm withdrawal, establishing the role of different factors, notably emotions, in the creation of norm hierarchies, and tests the argument using process-tracing.