Following the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli officials in November 2024, the United States has issued individual sanctions against many ICC officials and has also threatened to sanction the institution as such. When the same court had issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin nineteen months earlier, Washington praised it as a victory for international justice. The double standards, albeit predictable, are now unabashed. While the double standards of the Global North/Western states have been in the spotlight, and rightly so given the consequences that follow their decisions, due attention must also be paid to responses from the Global South states. It is not only about their inconsistent stances towards international (criminal/human rights) law, but also how they instrumentalise the critique of selectivity and bias to evade accountability, among other reasons. For instance, India has consistently pointed to the ICC as a “Western tool” and cited excessive Western influence as one of the reasons for not becoming a signatory to the court. While the concerns may not be unsubstantiated with respect to the Court as such, the rhetoric of a “colonial mindset”  is also used by the current Indian government to deflect any challenges to its treatment of minorities within the country.

This uncomfortable convergence reveals something: the critique of international criminal law as “Eurocentric” or “Western-dominated,” however historically, politically, and analytically valid and necessary, may have reached the limits of its explanatory power. Worse, contrary to its original intention and potential, it has become a rhetorical resource for the very states and actors it sought to challenge. The following passages reflect on the question of whether continuing to frame the problems of international criminal law (ICL) primarily through a Eurocentrism/West-dominated lens obscures more than it reveals, and whether we should move towards extending our critical analytical frameworks in the interests of the global majority.

The Exhaustion of the Eurocentric Critique

The critique of ICL as a Western project rests on historically and empirically solid ground. International criminal justice was born from victor’s justice at Nuremberg and Tokyo, scarred by an exclusive focus on atrocities by one side. Many scholars (here, here, here, and here) have documented how this asymmetry has persisted. Needless to mention that this critique has been intellectually and politically essential. It named what mainstream international lawyers ignored: that ICL’s universalist aspirations masked particular genealogies, that its language of rights and accountability carried colonial histories, that its practice reproduced North-South hierarchies. Without this work, we would lack the vocabulary to challenge ICL’s limitations and legitimacy, or imagine alternatives.

Yet something has shifted.

On the one hand, the critique has become so established, so predictable, that it no longer generates new insight or political transformation. We know the practice and institutions of ICL are dominated by the West. We have known this for decades. The question is: what does repeating this observation actually accomplish now?

On the other hand, former defenders of the court (including many EU countries, Canada, etc.) have now become critical or at least take an unsupportive stance in response to the decision regarding the arrest warrants in the Palestine situation. Given the lack of support by such states and other active threats against the ICC, some of the former critics have lobbied in its defence, despite the many structural limitations that have been pointed out in recent decades. Yet we risk entrenching these limitations if we simply retreat to the position that “perfect cannot be the enemy of good”.

This dynamic (critique that has become predictable, defense that risks entrenchment, and both being weaponized by cynical actors) suggests we are analytically stuck. The problem is not simply that we need better critique or more vigorous defense. It is that the “Eurocentric ICL” frame itself, albeit still valid and crucial, may no longer be sufficient for understanding how power operates through international criminal justice today.

The critique’s exhaustion manifests in what it can no longer explain. Why do some Western states support certain ICC actions while undermining others? Why do Global South states selectively embrace ICL when it targets their adversaries while invoking anti-colonialism when scrutiny turns inward? Why do elites across vastly different political systems seem to share interests in keeping corporate crimes, economic violence, environmental destruction, colonial violence, and other forms of state repression outside its scope?

When Exhaustion Becomes Obfuscation

An extension of the Eurocentric frame is not about denying colonial legacies or pretending that power operates equally across geography. Rather, it asks what becomes visible when we refuse to let geographic binaries serve as our primary analytical lens. The problem, then, is not geography as such, but how geographic and civilizational language continues to structure international legal critique in ways that obscure shared forms of state and capitalist power across contexts.

First, this framework obscures cross-cutting class interests. Elites everywhere (whether in Beijing, Berlin, Bamako, or Buenos Aires) share investments in certain forms of impunity. The violence that ICL systematically excludes is not coincidentally the violence that protects ruling class power: corporate crimes, economic dispossession, structural adjustment policies, militarized borders, carceral systems. Indian elites have more in common with American or Chinese elites (in their material interests, their mobility, their immunity from accountability) than any of them have with marginalized communities experiencing violence in their own states.

Second, the geographic frame misidentifies selectivity. ICL does not simply target the Global South while exempting the West. It targets weak states while powerful states evade scrutiny, whether in the West, where they are concentrated, or elsewhere. It prosecutes spectacular violence while rendering structural violence invisible. The framework struggles to name non-Western imperialisms. Imperialism and mass violence are not Western monopolies and selectivity as such is not “Western” in origin, it is power protecting itself.

 Finally, and most fundamentally, it treats the state form itself as neutral. The Eurocentric critique, or at least the most popular version of it, assumes that if different states controlled ICL (if it were less dominated by the West), it would function differently. But all states, regardless of their colonial history or geographic location, engage international law through logics of sovereignty, national interest, and the protection of elite power. This is not about cultural origin but about structural position. What if the problem is not which states dominate ICL but state-centric accountability itself and its incapacity to address the systemic, economic, and structural violence that states (all states) rely on?

Towards Post-Geographic Analysis

If the West/Eurocentric frame is insufficient, what analytics might be more productive?

Material structures over geographic binaries. Following scholars like Susan Marks, B.S. Chimni, Carmen Gonzales and Athena Mutua we might analyse how global (racial) capitalism shapes ICL’s possibilities and limits. Crucially, capitalism did originate in Western Europe, and its legal forms were exported through imperial expansion. In this sense, the materialist critique does not contradict the colonial critique; it deepens it. But capitalism has globalized to exceed its geographic origins. This explains selectivity more persuasively than geography alone: ICL protects certain property relations and economic orders. It explains convergence: why states with vastly different histories align on excluding corporate accountability, ecocide, and economic crimes from ICL’s scope. ICL prosecutes warlords for child soldiers but not corporations profiting from conflict minerals. Genocide is prosecutable; ecocide is not. Individual criminal responsibility is central; structural adjustment policies generating mass death remain outside ICL’s scope. These exclusions protect economic arrangements that powerful actors, whether in the Global North or South, have invested in maintaining.

Centering those who experience violence, not states that claim to represent them. People’s tribunals, for instance on Gaza and Afghanistan, do not fit neatly into simplistic geographic “West versus Rest” discourse on international law. They challenge all state power: Israeli, American, British but also of Afghan governmental actors. They refuse the state’s monopoly on defining what counts as harm or what justice requires. Communities affected by large scale violence do not primarily care whether their oppressors are held accountable by “Western” or “non-Western” mechanisms; they care whether accountability happens at all, and whether it addresses the structural conditions that enabled the violence.

Disaggregating monolithic categories. “The West” is not a unified actor. European states have different interests from the United States. Within Western states, there are significant differences between governments, civil society, and populations. Similarly, “the Global South” encompasses extraordinary diversity: authoritarian and democratic regimes, victims and perpetrators, elite capture and popular resistance. Treating either as coherent blocs obscures the actual lines of conflict and solidarity that matter.

The Eurocentric frame struggles to distinguish between these because it treats any challenge to Western dominance as potentially liberatory. But a world where the United States, France, Brazil and South Africa all have veto power over accountability mechanisms is not obviously better than one where only the United States does. The question is not which states dominate but whether state domination itself can be challenged. What such a post-geographic analysis ultimately enables is a clearer focus on transnational modes of economic and social harm, and the actors and structures that sustain them.

Pre-empting Misreadings

In order for this not be misread as an apology for Western power, let me be explicit about what I am not claiming.

This is not to argue that colonialism is irrelevant or that its legacies do not shape contemporary international law. They do, profoundly. Power does not operate equally across geography, nor is “everyone equally bad”. The United States’ global military presence, economic dominance, and its role in shaping international institutions create responsibilities and culpabilities that cannot be equated with those of less powerful states.

This is, instead, a plea to turn reflexivity towards our own analytical tools, not just the systems we critique. If postcolonial analysis or Third World Approaches to International Law taught us to interrogate international law’s silences and exclusions, then we must apply that same rigour to our own analytical silences and exclusions.

Finally, the charge of Western apologetics often forecloses difficult conversations. It assumes any move away from centering Western dominance must be a defense of it. But what if the most effective challenge to Western power is moving beyond the constant naming of it as the origin of all problems, and also analysing the actual mechanisms through which power operates today: including how non-Western states reproduce violence, how elites across geography share interests, and how our inherited critical vocabularies sometimes obscure rather than illuminate these dynamics?

Conclusion

There is something uncomfortable about arguing, as a scholar from the Global South, that the critique of Eurocentrism/Western dominance has become insufficient. Perhaps, it has always been insufficient and the current dynamics of how power operates and is diffused globally make it more apparent. Needless to mention that the Eurocentric frame carries moral authority because it names real violence, real exclusions, real histories of oppression. This is not a plea to abandon it entirely, but to recognise its limits and silences and the possibilities it forecloses. Reflexivity, which is one of the main themes of institutions such as the Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex engaged in these conversations, requires asking whether our critiques still serve the political and intellectual work we need them to do, or whether they have become something else: predictable gestures, protective shields, familiar performances that are no longer generative.

What would such an extension of the “West framework” look like? To ask not “is this Western or non-Western?” but “whose interests does this serve?” What violence does it render visible or invisible? What alternatives does it foreclose? What systems of domination and exploitation does it help sustain? To center not states and their representatives but communities experiencing violence and their own understandings of what justice requires. To imagine accountability mechanisms genuinely independent of state power, genuinely responsive to those most affected, genuinely capable of addressing systemic rather than just individual violence.