Introduction

When the Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) was expelled from the country in 2019, this heralded the end of a successful experiment in international cooperation. The commission was a unique governance arrangement in the rule of law sector that was embedded in a dense web of inter-organizational relations (IOR), interacting with organizations at different layers of governance, ranging from the global to the local. Anti-impunity commissions are part of a broader global trend towards hybrid governance solutions, which are located in the middle of a continuum, with purely international mechanisms (using international law, international staff and enjoying supranational powers) occupying one end of the spectrum, and domestic mechanisms (employing national law, local staff and ceding no sovereign privileges to external actors) occupying the other end.

This present contribution investigates the impact of this novel type of hybrid actor on the rule of law. More specifically, it inquires into how the new hybrids’ entanglement in a web of inter-organizational relations shapes their impact on the culture of lawfulness in their host state. The study of IOR is a relatively young subfield in the discipline of international relations (IR), and within this nascent subdiscipline, the inter-organizational relations of hybrid anti-impunity commissions have not been the subject of academic scrutiny. As noted in the introductory chapter, existing studies of IOR tend to be somewhat limited in terms of organizations and issue-areas studied – privileging relations between international organizations (IOs) in the fields of economic and security governance – and with regard to forms of interaction, in that existing studies tend to assume a binary distinction between cooperative and confrontational relations. The present contribution seeks to correct these biases: first, by introducing a new issue area – judicial cooperation; second, by focusing on a new type of organization – hybrid anti-impunity commissions and their manifold relations with IOs, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and state actors; and third, by demonstrating how hybrid anti-impunity commissions’ inter-organizational relations produce variegated and ambivalent forms of interaction that defy the cooperation vs conflict dichotomy.

Hybrid anti-impunity commissions are deeply embedded in their organizational environment, as they do not seek to supplant the justice system of the target state but fight impunity from within it.