Whenever the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an investigation into an ongoing war, versions of the following question will inevitably be asked: Does the pursuit of accountability risk leaving the warring parties with no incentive but to continue the fight?

The same question is again being asked now that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan has made the landmark decision to request arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders.

For years, I have tried to get to the bottom of what is often called the “peace versus justice” debate. I wrote a book about how that debate played out with the ICC interventions in Libya and Uganda. I have also published findings on the peace-justice relationship in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere. While responses to the debate are often driven more by assumptions and hypotheticals than incontrovertible facts, the reality is that there is no special key that helps unlock the relationship between resolving wars and achieving accountability for wartime atrocities.

There is no singular answer to this question that applies across different contexts. But here are a few things that are true: The ICC can complicate peace negotiations. But more “complicated” peace negotiations do not necessarily mean “worse” peace negotiations. Take Colombia, for example, where the ICC had a decade-long preliminary examination. Accountability processes negotiated during the peace process there translated into meaningful justice for many of the wartime atrocities committed by the government and........

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