Building on a growing body of scholarship that accentuates the communicative foundations and dimensions of international criminal justice, the article explores how defendants and their defence teams navigate the discursive battleground in the course of trials at the International Criminal Court (icc). Given the central role of narratives in the construction and (de)legitimation of identities, and their profound implications for perceptions about trial participants, the article seeks to understand what implications defences’ relative disadvantage vis-á-vis the prosecutions’ in terms of institutional support, access to resources and media visibility, have for their strategies of narrative control and positioning. To this end, the article charts the discursive battle sites at global, regional and local levels, maps specific strategies of narrative control in these sites, and zooms in on two prominent themes in the identity construction of defendants within and beyond the icc courtroom.