From Anthropos to Oikos in International Criminal Law A Critical-Theoretical Exploration of Ecocide as an ‘Ecocentric’ Amendment to the Rome Statute

This chapter engages in a tentative critical-theoretical exploration of ecocide as an ‘ecocentric’ core crime. For this purpose, I first provide a brief outline of the conceptual binary between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. The anthropocentric ontology of international criminal law (ICL) is then explored by retracing its permeation by interrogating two dominant conditions: the international community and the ideal victim. I argue that the contours of a green progress narrative become visible in ICL to remedy the accountability gap concerning large-scale environmental damage. A central thesis of this narrative is that ICL is failing in engagement with environmental damage due to its anthropocentric focus and should therefore move towards a more ecocentric approach by criminalising ecocide. The notion that an ecocentric core crime can redeem ICL’s anthropocentric conditions is problematised in this chapter. Rather than a pointing towards a profound oscillation between environmental ethics and ICL, I contend that this green progress narrative firstly obscures ICL’s anthropocentric ontology and secondly that it does not account for the complexities of translating environmental concerns into the discipline. Latour’s de-centred approach is introduced to disrupt this linear logic and to give impetus for a critical approach of a re-imagination of ICL which embeds the more-than-human in its framework.