Hard Rocks, Soft Law? Regulating Conflict and Conflict Diamonds with the Kimberley Process.

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme was created in 2003 to legalize the diamond trade and reduce diamond-fueled conflict in Africa. There has been a lack of scholarly analysis of how successful the Kimberley Process has been at meeting this goal. In this paper, I ask how effective the Process has been and in doing so ask how international law deals with the challenges of domestic implementation in conflict zones. I propose adding a new dimension to the legalization approach of legal domestication to capture the extent to which international law engages domestic institutions, laws, and measures and to more fully assess the strength of international law. Following discussion of the cases of Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo, I statistically analyze the role that the Kimberley Process and legal domestication has had on conflict levels. I find that the Kimberley Process alone has not significantly reduced conflict levels, although it has dramatically increased the legalization of the diamond trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]