As the Trial Chamber vacated the charges against William Ruto and Joshua Sang on 5 April 2016 and thereby terminated the only remaining ICC case relating to Kenya's 2007/8 post-election violence (PEV), prospects have vanished that any senior figures will be held to account for their role in organising the violence which claimed the lives of more than a thousand people and injured and displaced many more. Serena Sharma's book offers a vivid account both of the dynamics that led to the opening of an ICC investigation in the first place and the factors that contributed to ultimately undermining it.
Drawing on the R2P framework, Sharma – a fellow in global politics at the London School of Economics – argues that although the situation in Kenya commenced with ‘the intention of delivering both protection and prosecution, it swiftly developed into the opposite – protection from prosecution for the suspected perpetrators’ (p. 13). A central argument of the book is that Kenya seemed to be a case where R2P and the ICC could be ‘genuinely complementary’, but some of the measures initially designed to protect the population in Kenya – notably the power-sharing agreement, encouraged by international powers as a way to end the crisis, under which both sides to the disputed election were included in a ‘grand coalition government’ – ultimately undermined the efforts to prosecute perpetrators (p. 11).
These are important lessons which raise profound questions concerning the timing and interplay between political and judicial solutions to election violence. Crucially, as Sharma writes, the failure to prosecute the masterminds of the PEV brings into question whether we should endorse the view that the outcome of the internationally led mediation process in Kenya was ‘a success story for R2P and an example of best practice for atrocity prevention in other contexts’ (p. 46). However, several other scholars have already made the argument that whereas power-sharing may be instrumental to end a crisis of the nature of Kenya's PEV, it is likely to complicate efforts to seek accountability (see e.g. Vandeginste & Sriram Reference Vandeginste and Sriram2011; Hansen Reference Hansen2013).
More generally, as opposed to developing novel arguments concerning the role of R2P and the ICC in Kenya, the main quality of Sharma's book is that it concisely – yet with an eye for important detail – describes the political and legal processes that followed the PEV, including the sometimes fluctuating roles of international and domestic actors. In so doing, Sharma mainly relies on secondary sources, but nonetheless provides for a nuanced analysis which will be of value for anyone interested in obtaining an easily accessible overview of the attempts to simultaneously pursue a political settlement of Kenya's 2007 election dispute, institutional and legal reforms and a criminal justice process.
