Investigation As Legitimisation: The Development, Use and Misuse of Informal Complementarity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article introduces the idea of informal complementarity. Where the principle of complementarity allows the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) to assess the admissibility of a particular case, informal complementarity is employed by states. It exists independently (or pre-emptively) of an International Criminal Court investigation. Appeals to informal complementarity speak fluidly of individual criminal proceedings and state-level investigations or inquiries. When a state appeals to informal complementarity, it is not immediately concerned with individual criminal liability or the admissibility of a particular case. Instead, informal complementarity serves to deny the state’s non-criminal responsibility. Appeals to informal complementarity constitute an emergent vocabulary. It increasingly features within the lexicon of states that engage in the use of force. It provides a novel means of asserting legitimacy. Within armed conflict, states are supplementing traditional appeals to international law and assertions of legal fidelity with claims of post-hoc legal accountability. Grounded within a study of Israel’s engagements with international law during and after the 2008-09 and 2014 Gaza wars, this article demonstrates that the post-war discourse has moved from exclusive assertions of legal compliance to include pronouncements of investigative willingness. Framed around the metaphor of the proleptic show trial, four phases of legal engagement are introduced that collectively constitute both an appeal to informal complementarity and an emergent means of asserting legitimacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".