International criminal law (ICL) is widely regarded as a field in crisis, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) now confronts unprecedented challenges. These struggles have unfolded against the backdrop of longstanding theoretical critiques, particularly those emerging from Third World and other radically critical perspectives. Yet the prevailing narrative of crisis has obscured a profound and consequential transformation within the practice of ICL: a revolution in evidentiary capacity that has significantly enhanced factfinding accuracy in mass atrocity trials. The global proliferation of smartphones, the ubiquity of social media, and the rise of open-source intelligence have radically altered the evidentiary landscape. Scholars have begun commenting upon the legal aspects of these contemporary forms of evidence; however, what scholars have not yet addressed is the transformation this evidence has wrought to reducing fact-finding uncertainty and proving international crimes. This article’s first contribution, then, is to fill that gap by detailing the way that modern forms of digital evidence have transformed ICL’s factfinding enterprise. By examining a host of cases decided in a host of courtrooms, this article shows that, thanks to open-source information and other forms of digital evidence, fact-finding in mass atrocity trials is now on a far firmer foundation.

At the same time, however, the institutional architecture of ICL has undergone a separate—and countervailing—transformation. Earlier tribunals concentrated on single conflicts and prosecuted hundreds of defendants, allowing them to develop deep expertise and cumulative evidentiary records. By contrast, today’s ICC and domestic universal jurisdiction prosecutions spread limited resources across many conflicts, prosecuting only a handful of cases in each. This dispersal limits institutional knowledge and evidentiary depth, offsetting many of the evidentiary gains from technological change.

As a result of these two transformations, fact-finding in individual cases may be more empirically sound, but the broader system is less able to generate comprehensive historical records, impose accountability on a representative range of perpetrators, or integrate complex evidence across related cases. This article concludes by situating these developments within the larger conception of ICL. This analysis reveals a central irony: when ICL’s fact-finding was most problematic, optimism about the field’s potential was at its zenith; now, with factual determinations better grounded than ever, the ICL enterprise as a whole is teetering on the edge of collapse.