Crafting and Promoting International Crimes: A Controversy among Professionals of Core-Crimes and Anti-Corruption

Abstract

The emergence of new international criminal courts in the 1990s intensified an existing professional contest to define international crimes. This ongoing competition concerned which crimes should be termed international and consequently become the subject of international institution-building and prosecution. The article draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's analytical tool of the ‘field’ in order to investigate how legal professionals located in different fields of practice have crafted and promoted specific crimes as international, in successive phases. The focus of the analysis is on two stages of this development. The first is the protracted emergence of a field of ‘core crimes’ centred on a specific set of crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The second is an emergent contestation of this focus on ‘core crimes’ embedded in the careers of legal professionals engaged in the field of anti-corruption. By adapting the impactful narratives developed around core crimes, this second phase of contestation becomes a new frontline in the wider endeavour to define the role of criminal law in a larger international space of governance and politics.