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Cyanne E. Loyle, "Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.
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C
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Professor Cyan Loyal, who's the Political Science Board of Visitors early career professor of political science at Penn State University and a research professor at the Peace Research Institute at Oslo. Professor Loyal's new book is called Escaping Impunity for States Actors in the Age of Accountability. The book was published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Professor Loyal, thank you for joining us and welcome.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.
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C
Let's start with the puzzle at the heart of the book. You argue that we live in an age of accountability, as you put it. Things like international criminal courts, truth commissions, transitional justice mechanisms are all proliferating on a global scale. And yet, even in this age of accountability, impunity persists. You write, quote, despite international pressures for accountability, states can escape justice. End quote. What sparked your interest in this puzzle and what conventional wisdom are you challenging?
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A
Well, the conventional wisdom really focuses on the notion of something called a justice cascade. And this is the idea that in the last couple of decades, we've seen this proliferation of institutions that are designed to hold individuals, mostly individuals and states, accountable for the violations that they've committed. Mostly we focus on human rights violations on a mass scale. So this is things like civilian targeting and abuses, forced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detentions. But there's been this kind of wave of accountability in the last few decades. And I was watching this wave unfold kind of early in my career and was both kind of enthusiastic and impressed by it. And as a matter of fact, in 2004, I was part of a team that was working on the construction of the National Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. And this was kind of following the genocide and a super exciting time for justice and accountability. There was a lot of optimism in Rwanda at the time, time around something called the Gacacca process. This was in part a response to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda being a little too kind of far away, you know, not physically located or. Or proximate to the interest of Rwandans. And the Gacaca process was this local, community driven, kind of nationalized court process that was gonna hold lower rank perpetrators of the genocide accountable. And so being in Rwanda, being at that moment, I started to ask around and kind of talk to people about their experiences and. And whether or not they shared the same enthusiasm for GACAC did. And actually, in the book I Tell, my opening, two stories are about these two women that I met. And one was. Was named Yvette and the other was named Geraldine.
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C
And.
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And Yvette had kind of this very classic experience with the genocide. She had lost multiple family members. She herself had been in hiding. She had been displaced. And she was very in optimistic about the Cachia process. She had real questions that she wanted answers. She knew who the perpetrators of the violence that her family experienced were. She wanted them to be punished for it, and she wanted some so of kind of compensation or reparation for what she had experienced. And so she was looking, I want to. Don't say looking forward to, but she saw Gacac as a really positive development. But then in another part of the country, kind of up north towards the border with the Akagara National Park, I met a woman named Geraldine. And Geraldine's experience of violence was very similar to Yvettes. She had lost members of her family. She herself had been physically violated. And she had lost possessions, right? Parts of her home had been destroyed. But she was not enthusiastic about the Gacacca process. And that was because the harms and the crimes that she had experienced had been committed by the rpf, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which was the rebel group that was now in control of the government. And the Gacacca process was really only gonna focus on crimes of genocide. And so her crimes would be excluded. And different from just feeling excluded, she also felt resentment because people who experienced genocide crimes were getting all of these things, right? They were getting justice, they were getting information, they were getting funds to help rebuild. And she was completely excluded from that process. And so this led to the puzzle for me, kind of trying to understand how we got these two experiences. And when we had so much enthusiasm around a justice process, we could still have people in the population that were so incredibly disenchanted and so really upset by what was unfolding. I wanted to know why this was happening in Rwanda, but I also wanted to know if this was a global phenomenon that could help us understand the justice cascade a little bit better.
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C
Wow, that was very interesting. In the midst of what you described here, this justice cascade, you identify three different strategies that government use to escape justice. Coercion, containment, and concession. Governments choose, you argue, depending on their institutional control capacity. Can you walk us through one of your cases that really illustrates this logic?
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Sure. Let me. Let me start by kind of framing this for you. So there are these three different strategies, right? So coercion, containment, and concession is what I argue. And these are strategies that states can use to strategically adapt how they respond to the pressure to adopt certain norms. And this I focus on the norm of accountability for human rights violations in the book. But there are many other cases in which this kind of logic or this theory could apply. So there's pressure either internationally or domestically, to change your behavior as a state to do something. But often the doing something has consequences. It has costs that you would pay as a state. In the case of the norm of accountability, that cost may be legitimacy, maybe your international reputation may even be a kind of loss of political office at home. Because by holding individuals accountable, what you're saying is we committed human rights violations. Right? We did something wrong. And so states both have this pressure to comply with the norm, but they also have an incentive to try to not fully comply. And that's when they do something that I call strategic adaptation. Right. And there are other, as I mentioned, other cases and other authors that write around this topic. So when we think about Coercion. This is a strategy that is used by states who have a really high level of control over how they respond to the norm. So they're still under pressure to respond. They still have to respond, but they have a lot of control at home. And this could be domestic, this could be their own institutions. This could be their strength as a political party. But under those conditions, governments are able to stand up a relatively robust norm response, right? They're able to do something big, but they're able to do that because they know they can control it. It's not going to get out of hand. They're not going to pay the same costs. We have a middle category where a government's capacity to control its norm response isn't quite so strong. And this may be cases of a hybrid regime, right? So where there's elections, but still some authoritarian tendencies or a weakening political party. And here the government still has to respond, but they're going to respond by containing their norm response within an existing framework or institution that's under their control. So we're not going to see a big, robust, exciting response. We're going to see something a little bit more measured and within an existing institution. The case I talk about in the book here for this is Uganda, who responds to a normative pressure for accountability by creating the International Crimes Division within the judiciary. And this is an area of the. That the government actually has a lot of control over. They put in rules and regulations to kind of make sure they can still respond. So the International Crimes Division can investigate all these war crimes that happened in Uganda, but in practice is really under the control or constrained at least by the Museveni government. And then the third option is when a government's capacity to control its response is really pretty weak. Now, I'm not talking about weak state capacity. Often when I think about weak norm response, we're thinking about this in democratic contexts because democracies can't do whatever they want. There are checks and balances on their institutions. So here the government's being pressured to respond. They have to respond in some way, but they're really worried about the costs because they can't control their response. And so under these conditions, governments are likely to offer concessions. So they're going to do something and it's going to move forward accountability, but they're going to make sure that what that concession is shields their government from the costs of adopting that norm as much as possible. In the book, I talk about Northern Ireland and the way that the British government in particular created very specific institutions to investigate social, certain types of human rights violations during the conflict in this, you know, things like the Bloody Sunday inquiry, but made sure that that inquiry didn't extend to an investigation of the entire military and just cycling back to coercion. So that's the strategy that in the book, I think is probably the most clear. And that's the case of Rwanda. So when Rwanda adopted the Gacacca process, the rpf, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, had a ton of control over domestic institutions. And so they could create this really robust and dynamic local court process because they were never worried that those courts were going to eventually turn around and investigate them.
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C
Right.
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They knew that they could control the courts both from a repressive perspective, but also just from an information gathering perspective. The RPF has a lot of control over communities in Rwanda.
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C
So you told us, you explained to us how states have this pressure to comply from this justice cascade, but also incentives not to comply. You explained to us that they have three strategies, and they choose these three strategies depending on the level of control they have domestically. All in all, for our listeners, this is a very sobering argument that you're putting forward. Basically, the support of the international community for transitional justice can, in a perverse way, allow regimes to consolidate power, faking compliance while they fake compliance. Why does it matter that we understand this, Eleanora?
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A
It's incredibly important that we understand this. And it's because, you know, the international community, development agencies, global civil society, we put a ton of money and energy into promoting accountability. And we do it because we think that it's going to have these positive normative outcomes, right? That it's going to change things. And if we're getting that wrong, we need to know that. Now, I'm actually a proponent of justice and accountability institutions, right? I'm not anti transitional justice or the ICC at all. But I think that understanding this kind of faking or this facade is a really crucial first step to adopting better policy responses, to making sure that the institutions that we're implementing and designing are actually achieving the aims that we're trying to achieve. And from an academic perspective, it's a call, at least from my take, it's a call to study these processes much more holistically. So to understand what is actually being implemented, what are the components of the institution, how is it being manipulated or not, how is it being controlled or not? And can we use that understanding of the institution to study, from a social science, from an empirical perspective, to study the outcomes better?
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I'm glad you bring up this empirical perspective because the book is very rich. Empirically, you do extensive field work in three different countries. Rwanda, Uganda, and Northern Ireland. You just explained to us how each case speaks to a specific strategy that states can put in place to escape accountability. Tell us more about this fieldwork that you have done. How did you approach it, what does it look like, and what challenges did you face in documenting these dynamics?
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So for so for folks that know my earlier work, the book is kind of an interesting pivot. So I'm known primarily, I think, in my early work as a quantitative social scientist that collects global cross national data sets. Right on transition.
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C
I was grateful for that, but thank you.
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A
Work is a lot of ones and zeros, right? And I've collected those ones and zeros simultaneously with conducting all of this field work. And so it's, I don't know, it's been interesting kind of stretch for my brain to think about these questions in different ways. So for all three of these cases, I've been involved in the countries for many, many years. So Rwanda and Northern Ireland were both sites of my dissertation fieldwork About a decade ago. And I've been working in uganda since about 2012. And for that reason, I've got local connections in civil society and the universities there with the government, and that it is all those connections that really make this research possible. So much of my work draws on elite interviews, primary source material from the cases in Rwanda and Northern Ireland. I also collected non elite interviews of individuals who had experienced violations during the conflict. And it's some of those stories that I refer to a lot in the case studies in Uganda, because the proximity of the conflict, I primarily relied on focus groups. So that's an interview methodology where there's multiple people in a room together so that nobody feels like they're being asked a question kind of individually. It's, it's a strategy for making it a little bit easier for respondents and informants to participate in terms of the challenges in these areas. I mean, the politics around transitional justice in all three of these cases is definitely the largest challenge. You know, Rwanda, Uganda and Northern Ireland want the international community and international researchers to believe that they are adhering to the norm that they say they're believing, you know, that they're adhering to. Right. And so, but it's always a fun, it's a fun. I mean, you as an interviewer know this, right? Kind of thinking through how you structure the questions to kind of make some of those interviews possible and reading in between the lines, often triangulating information I would receive from government interviews with primary source material and then what I was hearing from civil society to kind of build out the process tracing story that I lay out in the book. You know, I spoke to a lot of individuals and anybody who has done work in conflict and post conflict environments will tell you that, um, it's, it's rarely difficult to get interviews with people who, you know about their conflict experiences. And that's because, you know, people have this inherent human need to tell their story, right? They, they desperately want to share, you know, their experience and what's going on. And so it was rarely difficult for me to kind of collect those stories. What was much more challenging is thinking about the appropriate ethical way of collecting that information and the way to approach kind of individuals who had experienced those events and the potential trauma that they had from those experiences. And Hailey Sweetland and Allison Smith and I actually have an article on research methodologies in restrictive environments in which we think through kind of the ways in which to structure interviews or surveys that make it both safer and more ethical for respondents, but also easier to collect different types of data. And so I've thought a lot about how best to do it. And I think that that's one of the things that kind of comes through in the book, or at least I hope comes through in the book.
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C
Yes, yes, absolutely. What strikes me about the book is this. I kept having this image of this person that goes to the field and gains all this knowledge with a very open mind and in a very thorough way, and then comes back with what is a controversial argument. You yourself write in the book quite. It is seemingly indisputable that there has been a worldwide shift in the way people, organizations and governments engage with violations of human rights. End quote. And yet you tell us, like, states escape justice all the time with different strategies. This is counterintuitive. And given your counterintuitive argument, where do you expect readers to push back?
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Yeah. So the biggest critique I've heard of my argument probably comes from international lawyers, and that's because law is a, you know, a field of study that often intentionally removes the politics. Right. Or is removed from the politics in certain environments. And, you know, lawyers tend to focus solely on the rules, both in their practice, but also in their field of study. That being said, it's getting way less common to hear the critique that transitional justice is not political from anybody. Right. Even the international lawyers. I think people are aware that I don't know that it's ever been possible to structure an institution independent of politics. Right. And we can think about that up and down the chain of all sorts of institutions. And so I think the biggest challenge that I have now, as I'm talking to people about the book, is not really a challenge about the political nature of justice institutions, but rather the opening premise of the argument about the strength of the norm of accountability. So I wrote this book and it came out before the second Trump administration. And that has real. That is an administration, and that has really shifted the way we think about global powers and their norms and how they plan to enforce those norms. If you had asked me 10ish years ago when I started thinking through the original premises of this book, would the US Ever completely withdraw from its role as a human rights and democracy defender worldwide, I would have had a really hard time thinking through that counterfactual. And we're living it now. And so I think the biggest critique of the book is, do any of these arguments hold if states are no longer under pressure to uphold norms of accountability? Now, I'm a little bit more optimistic than I may sound in that opening introduction, and that's because there's been a lot of work recently, just in the last couple of months, of people, Danielle Adano and others as Sarah Bush, who have investigated certain norms and are making the argument that first norms are sticky, which we have known, but that many of these norms, including accountability norms, benefit domestic civil society and other actors. And so these normative pressures may no longer come from global powers, but there's really still the chance for this pressure to come from below or from other global civil society actors. And I think that's what we have to hope for. But that is a core challenge to the book. Right. Because if we don't have a norm of accountability, do states need to adapt to norms?
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C
Yeah.
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Well, tell us.
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C
So you gave us a sense of what states do, how the international community tries to convince them to behave in one way, how they adapt, what happens to norms afterwards. Tell us more about the implications of this logic. You call for a way more nuanced approach to human rights advocacy that accounts for specific domestic political environments. You just told us institutions don't happen in a vacuum. What would that look like? What are the implications of the argument?
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Yeah, I think I have two sets of implications. So the first is for empirical social science. And again, I am well aware of the hypocrisy in which. When I say this. Right, but that is to be careful of ones and zeros. Right? So. So I think that we need to. There are definitely places where it makes sense to record the presence or absence of a transitional justice process. And that's what I mean by ones and zeros. Right? One for the presence of a truth commission, zero for the presence, zero if it's not there. And we do a lot of our, you know, quantitative analyses on. On. On ones and zeros. Right, on the presence or absence of a particular institution. But I think, you know, part of the implication of my argument is that certain research questions are going to require a deeper dive, a different way of thinking about how we record the presence of these institutions. I've tried in my own work to kind of think through what that would look like. You know, it probably starts with a mapping of the existing human rights violations and making sure that the mandate of a truth commission, for example, captures the full range of the violations that were committed. You're thinking about things like temporal scope, the actors that are actually tried. But this is a really intense level of data collection, and some folks have tried it. I don't want to give the impression that no one has looked at these things, but I think for certain questions and for certain arguments, a much more nuanced approach in how we think about these institutions is important. From a practical perspective, particularly a practitioner perspective, I think my argument leads us to thinking about a longer time horizon for monitoring. Many of the embassies and other organizations I've worked with put a lot of energy into the upstart, right, the founding or creation of a particular institution. But once the tribunal or the Truth Commission is up and running, then it's. They're on to the next thing, right? They move on to the next peace building initiative within a country, they move on to a different country. And I think my call is to make sure you're paying attention to the longer time horizon in terms of how these processes are implemented and what their long term effects are. I also think that in many of these situations, it will not be possible to hold everybody to account. It's one of the comments I get about the Rwanda case, which is in the face of certain so much suffering and such gross violations of human rights, maybe the best the Rwandan government could do was just to hold genocide perpetrators accountable. Maybe this, this was not a space where we could reckon with all the violations of the war. And so from a practitioner perspective, I would call us to then think about alternative programming to address the people who were excluded. Geraldine's story is not a throwaway story. It's actually a really important political story because Geraldine is angry, right? I should say was angry. I'm not. I can't speak to her current mental state, but when I spoke to her, right, she was angry and she was angry. She was withdrawing from the state. She was less interested in participating in politics. And many of these grievances are what we know to be the foundations of conflict. Right. And conflict reoccurrence in areas where we've already seen violence. So I would call on practitioners to think about what some of this alternative programming would look like to be able to address the needs and the grievances of individuals who will ultimately be excluded from these justice processes.
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C
So all these recommendations are hard pills to swallow. You're taking away ones and zeros. You know, you're asking for longer time. Arise for certain research questions, Right?
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A
For certain research questions.
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C
No, you should. You should. So this is, this is, this is. And it's a tough book to write about, an important, heartbreaking topic. And you like. And you went in there and you serious field work about it. Wow. And I want to ask if what for you was the most intellectually rewarding aspect of creating this book.
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A
Yeah. I mean, I Mean, this was certainly a labor of love and something that I worked on for a long time. But for me, the most intellectually rewarding part of it was really being able to tell the stories of the individuals that I met across my research. These are a lot of, I mean, these are folks you won't bump into right. As you're moving around in these countries, but they're folks that had really rich and important experiences and have thought deeply and critically about their own needs and about, you know, what the state is doing and is capable of. And I hope that with the book in some small way, Right. I advance these stories for a broader audience to share some of the, of their thinking and their.
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C
I think these characters stand out, these people stand out on characters, these people stand out in the book. And it's a gift for the readers too. Okay, if our listeners could take away just one core idea from the book, what would that be?
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A
Institutions. All institutions, even the most mundane or bureaucratic, are inherently political. That's my takeaway. And I think that applies to anything that we do, including the DMV in the United States, to international travel regimes, like all of these things. Right. They all are political in some way. And so it's up to us to understand who benefits and who loses from these institutions, both from a social science perspective and kind of drawing our research conclusions, but just as a global citizen perspective as we move around the world. Right. Where are the politics in these environments?
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C
There are big consequences in not understanding the political nature of these institutions. Do you agree? Yeah, that's a good message. That's a good message.
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A
Absolutely.
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C
We've taken enough of your time today. Professor Loyal, one last question. What's on your plate right now? What are you working on?
- [28:12]
A
Well, I'm on sabbatical in the fall and so I'm actually starting a new book. It's a book on alternative forms of justice and authority. So I'm going to be looking at armed non state actors, so rebel groups, criminal organizations, and trying to understand more about how they make rules and ultimately how they hold people accountable for violating those rules. So thinking about these questions of accountability from a non state setting.
- [28:37]
C
This is a great book and you must in the making. I'm excited about your sabbatical working on this book. You must come back and tell us all about it.
- [28:47]
A
Oh, I'd love to.
- [28:48]
C
Thank you. Thank you, Professor Loyal, for taking the time to talk with us today. My guest has been Professor Cyan Loyal. She's the author of a new book, Escaping Justice, Impunity for State Actors in the Age of Accountability. The book was published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci.
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