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“Negotiating International Criminal Law” is a four-year study that examines the linguistic and discursive practices through which the International Criminal Court (ICC) operates.

The ICC is a permanent tribunal that is located in The Hague, the Netherlands, and that became operative in 2002. It prosecutes individuals charged with (a) genocide, (b) war crimes, (c) crimes against humanity, and (d) aggression. Unlike established domestic legal systems, the ICC represents an emergent, amalgamated form of criminal justice that is still under development. It faces unresolved uncertainties in fundamental law and procedure, and it administers justice over a multiplicity of linguistically and culturally diverse constitutions which often hold different expectations of the legal process. The context in which it operates is inevitably (geo)political, and as a result the court's legitimacy is frequently challenged by outside forces. It has also repeatedly been accused of being a 'political' or 'neocolonial' court.

This project combines linguistic anthropology and interaction analysis with socio-legal and legal-doctrinal expertise to tackle the tensions surrounding this emergent form of global adjudication. We examine how ICC trial actors manage these challenges in their situated courtroom conduct, and how they continually ‘consolidate’ the tribunal-in-emergence. Our research elucidates how adjudication incrementally unfolds over successful trial hearings by tracing the various texts and discourses that ICC actors produce and by charting their intertextual connections. This also includes the various unscripted spoken interactions produced live in the trial hearings, a 'black box' quasi systematically overlooked in legal-doctrinal analysis of international law. So far, these investigations have clustered around the following topics:

(1) The discursive production of legitimacy: ICC trial actors attend to external challenges to the Court's legitimacy by  the ongoing speech event and  with external audiences and constituencies (e.g., by in a Mali-related case about jihadists' destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu). Similar concerns feature in a methodological paper on how the court's architectural landscape and website project an image of .

(2) The interactional negotiation of the trial procedure: ICC trial actors often take ad hoc decisions to ensure that the compromise on paper also works out in practice. One such gray area pertains to the role that victims of atrocity crimes play in trial proceedings, and the between the witness-role and that of 'victim-participant', which greatly affects the way are presented before the Court.

(3) The ICC's response to cultural diversity and the plurality of normative orders: here we focus on evidence of Acholi's spirituality in the Ugandan LRA rebel movement submitted by the defense in the trial of former rebel leader Dominic Ongwen (sentenced in May 2021). We reconstruct the text trajectory of this 'cultural' evidence, from its production in oral exchanges between witnesses and defense counsels up to its assessment and eventual dismissal in the trial judgment, and show how the ICC's ambition of global justice is hampered by that fails to do justice to the complexity of navigating a civil war-like situation where multiple normative orders compete for legitimacy.