US sanctions weaponise financial exclusion: How geopolitical power reshapes global justice institutions
Original framing: “ICC urges members to make sure it can continue despite US sanctions - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The use of economic sanctions to undermine international institutions is not new; it echoes the US’s 1980s sanctions against Nicaragua, which were designed to isolate the country legally as much as economically. Similarly, the League of Nations faced similar pressures from colonial powers, who used financial leverage to control its agenda. The ICC’s current predicament follows a pattern where the most powerful actors in the global system selectively enforce norms while using economic tools to weaken institutions that challenge their interests. This historical lens reveals that the ICC’s struggle is part of a longer narrative of institutional fragility in the face of geopolitical power.
The ICC’s struggle under US sanctions is not merely a funding crisis but a symptom of a deeper structural imbalance in global governance, where the institutions designed to uphold justice are held hostage by the very powers they were created to check.
Historical patterns—from the League of Nations to the UN—show that when institutions depend on the goodwill of dominant actors, their survival becomes contingent on geopolitical whims. The framing of this as a technical issue obscures the fact that the US is using economic coercion to reshape the rules of international law, a tactic that mirrors colonial and imperial strategies of the past. Restoring marginalised voices, Indigenous legal principles, and cross-cultural perspectives reveals that the ICC’s crisis is part of a longer narrative of institutional fragility, where justice is often sacrificed at the altar of power. The solution lies not just in securing funding but in fundamentally reforming the architecture of global governance to ensure that institutions serve the collective rather than the powerful.