No political scientist predicted that the world would witness the establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) by 2002, and as of yet, there are few compelling explanations for this phenomenon. Steven Roach addresses the next set of questions that the ICC raises for political scientists, namely, how it will impact international political outcomes, and how it will be forced to cope with pressures from states and other actors. Roach's work is an important first step toward a political understanding of the role of the ICC in world politics and demonstrates political scientists' growing interest in international law.

Roach has a political view of the imposition of international criminal law that may disturb legal purists, but for political scientists it should be natural. Chapter 1 develops an elaborate and useful conception of the politicization of the ICC, distinguishing between external and internal politicization. Under the former label, the author offers a careful discussion of the possibility of geo-political manipulation of the ICC by powerful Western states. He makes clear that this includes both states that seek to use the court to end war crimes, and/or (more ominously) to manage global order (the European Union), and states that seek to block the effectiveness of the court (the United States). The internal dimension refers to the need for the officers of the court, including especially the prosecutor, to act in politically sensitive ways to build the authority of the court over time. Roach develops the concept of political legalism (p. 8) to steer a path between radical critical theory and legal formalism. For him, this political legalism approach to the work of the ICC is not just a description and prediction but also a normative recommendation about how court officials ought to carry out their work. With his concept of political legalism, Roach addresses two questions in the book: whether or not the ICC can continue to evolve as an effective political actor for criminalizing international violence and whether we can understand the ICC as being constitutive of a new global political order (p. 9).

After a succinct history of major developments in international criminal law from the 1899 Hague Conference to the Rome Conference in 1998, Roach turns to an analysis of the ICC's legal structure. Chapter 2 explains how the ICC's automatic jurisdiction based on the territoriality principle provides a useful alternative to the universal jurisdiction theory of international criminal law, because it avoids some of the tensions between international criminal prosecutions and state sovereignty that would be inherent in a system based on the universal jurisdiction idea (p. 41). Legal scholars will likely be unsatisfied with some of the analysis of the Rome Statute. For instance, Roach offers an odd summary of Article 17, which lays out the crucial complementarity rules regarding when a case is admissible before the ICC if it has already been dealt with in a national legal system. He suggests that the ICC has the authority to take a case when a national proceeding has been biased against a defendant, presumably leading to a false conviction (p. 42). But in fact, the main intention of this article is to ensure that guilty parties would not escape judgment, not to give the ICC the power to review overzealous prosecutions in national courts. A direct reading of Article 17.2 would suggest that such a case is not even admissible before the ICC. This and several other odd legal interpretations, including the discussion of Article 98 agreements (pp. 124–26) and the claim that Arab states will have to follow the ICC rules of procedure in their national legal systems (p. 140), are the main weaknesses of the book. Still, these problems do not fundamentally detract from the project of applying political theory and international relations theory to understand and predict the tensions that will arise in the court's work.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Roach raises the profound question of the potential of the ICC to contribute to the development of a world society or cosmopolitan society on the basis of the court's universal values. He offers Barry Buzan's (2003) From International to World Society? as a framework for thinking about the ICC because “it exposes some of the key tensions between a society of states and world society, including the role of collective enforcement” (p. 83). Roach applies Isaiah Berlin's theory of value pluralism and David Held's cosmopolitanism to discuss the tension between the ICC's universal morality and the autonomy of national communities in an innovative way. He concludes that the ICC constitutes a weak form of cosmopolitanism with the potential to move global politics in a more cosmopolitan direction. He adds that the ICC faces the challenge of maintaining discursive legitimacy in a new global cosmopolitan society; otherwise it risks becoming the rigidly legalistic enforcer of a new repressive form of global governance (p. 94). This last concern vastly overstates the risk of growth in the ICC's power. The court was deliberately designed in a way that makes it dependent on cooperation from states, and so if at any point it loses broad consensual support, it may well be ineffective, but certainly would be unable to impose its will through coercion. Roach spends the bulk of his time on development of the normative theory, with a fairly limited discussion of its application to the ICC. His analysis of the cosmopolitan potential of the ICC is certain to frame subsequent discussion on this point if the court continues to grow in strength and authority.

The final chapters focus on particular challenges the ICC faces in reconciling its effort to ensure a universal end to impunity with national politics and legal cultural autonomy. Chapter 6 reviews the aggressive resistance of the court's authority by the United States, Chapter 7 addresses the tension between Shariah law and international criminal law, and Chapter 8 examines the potential for cooperation between the ICC and the UN Security Council. Each of these chapters concludes with innovative and interesting but also somewhat radical proposals for gradual accommodation between the ICC and its opponents. In the end, this book raises more questions than it answers for political scientists who want to understand the potential role of the court in world politics. It does offer a clear conceptual framework for analyzing the political role of the ICC as an institution. Future researchers will thus want to build on this work.