Margaux Dandrifosse is a PhD-candidate in Political Science at Lund University. In her project, she explores the effects of international criminal justice on states' military, political, and discursive strategies of repression during conflicts. She is also interested in the effects on survivors and communities affected, as well as those working to document abuses.

How does international criminal justice influence state-based violence against civilians during ongoing conflicts? Existing studies provide tentative but mixed answers to this question. 

Most empirical studies of international criminal justice focus on aggregate countrywide levels of violence, yet civil-war scholarship has demonstrated that violence varies significantly at the sub-national level during conflicts. Margaux Dandrifosse brings these scholarships together to explore how the effect of international criminal justice proceedings on violence differs between different geographical areas within a country. She argues that international justice proceedings will have a weaker deterrence effect on violence in contested areas where capital-intensive natural resources are extracted. Because of the strategic value of violence in these areas, state and military actors will be less sensitive to international pressures. She also shows that the presence of transnational companies in the extraction area and the political regime of their home country mediates this relationship. 

The theory is illustrated with a statistical analysis and illustrative examples on the case of Sudan. The analysis combines a monthly dataset on international criminal justice events and geocoded data on violence against civilians and the location of capital-intensive resources extraction fields. This study demonstrates that the effects of international pressures on conflict dynamics can vary not only between but also within countries. Ultimately, it also exposes the links between global justice and the transnational and economic dimensions of violence at the micro-level.