The international community, while being mysterious and elusive, is playing an increasingly significant role in modern-day international law. The International Criminal Court (ICC) took an innovative step to formally recognize the international community as a victim of crimes committed against cultural heritage, yet many crucial conceptual questions remain unexplained by the Court and underdiscussed in scholarship. This article critically examines the idea of the international community, per se, being a victim under the ICC system from different angles. First, this article briefly recalls the limited existing discussion on the international community’s victimhood and a selected set of discussions on the diversification of victimhood phenomena to underline the special difficulties in the international community’s key features. Secondly, this article explores the legal basis of the international community’s victimhood, including its (in)compatibility with the statutory definition of victim in the ICC context and the justifying rationale behind it; it further examines the limited potential such victimhood could realistically have in ICC proceedings, especially in reparations, and explores its autonomous contribution to justice. Thirdly, this article pays special attention to the question of ‘representation’ of the international community, which is a necessary precondition to the realization of such victimhood in the courtroom. While the ICC contends that the international community ‘is best represented by UNESCO’, this article argues that such ‘representation’ is not self-evident, entails inherent difficulties in its assessment, and risks placing overly heavy reliance on an external ‘representing’ body. This article theorizes the difficulties in ‘realizing’ the international community’s victim status as mainly the fundamental mismatch between its conceptual nature and the premise of the design of the ICC regime on victims. It calls for greater caution, as well as rigour, in the recognition of the international community’s victimhood in future practice.