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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes > General
Larry May argues that the best way to understand war crimes is as crimes against humanness rather than as violations of justice. He shows that in a deeply pluralistic world, we need to understand the rules of war as the collective responsibility of states that send their citizens into harm's way, as the embodiment of humanity, and as the chief way for soldiers to retain a sense of honour on the battlefield. Throughout, May demonstrates that the principle of humanness is the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, and is itself the basis of the traditional principles of discrimination, necessity, and proportionality. He draws extensively on the older Just War tradition to assess recent cases from the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia as well as examples of atrocities from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)--commonly called the Tokyo trial--established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through extensive research in Japanese, American, Australian, and Indian archives, Yuma Totani taps into a large body of previously underexamined sources to explore some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions that have persisted to the present day. Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totani disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in "victors' justice" in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg. This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law.
When does the waging of war become a criminal act? And who is in a position to judge? Ranging from the American Indian wars to the Civil War to World War I, and culminating with the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following the Second World War, Peter Maguire provides much-needed historical perspective on the crucial and ever more urgent issues of war and justice. His examples illustrate the gradations of political justice and the perpetual redefinition of war crimes across three continents and more than a century of American foreign policy.
In recent years, no modern democracy has taken more aggressive steps to come to terms with a legacy of dictatorship than has the Federal Republic of Germany with the crimes and injustices of Communist East Germany. In this book, A. James McAdams provides a comprehensive and engaging examination of the four most prominent instances of this policy: criminal trials for the killings at the Berlin Wall; the disqualification of administrative personnel for secret-police ties; parliamentary truth-telling commissions; and private property restitution. On the basis of extensive interviews in Bonn and Berlin over the 1990s, McAdams gives new insight into the difficulties German politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and public officials faced sitting in judgment on the affairs of another state. He argues provocatively that the success of their policies must be measured in terms of the way they used East German history to justify their actions. In 1997, A. James McAdams was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at University of Notre Dame, in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of East Germany and Détente (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton University Press, 1992), and co-author of Rebirth: A Political History of Europe Since World War II (Westview Press, 1999). McAdams is also editor of Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).
In recent years, no modern democracy has taken more aggressive steps to come to terms with a legacy of dictatorship than has the Federal Republic of Germany with the crimes and injustices of Communist East Germany. In this book, A. James McAdams provides a comprehensive and engaging examination of the four most prominent instances of this policy: criminal trials for the killings at the Berlin Wall; the disqualification of administrative personnel for secret-police ties; parliamentary truth-telling commissions; and private property restitution. On the basis of extensive interviews in Bonn and Berlin over the 1990s, McAdams gives new insight into the difficulties German politicians, judges, bureaucrats, and public officials faced sitting in judgment on the affairs of another state. He argues provocatively that the success of their policies must be measured in terms of the way they used East German history to justify their actions. In 1997, A. James McAdams was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at University of Notre Dame, in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of East Germany and Détente (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton University Press, 1992), and co-author of Rebirth: A Political History of Europe Since World War II (Westview Press, 1999). McAdams is also editor of Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).
Why do people participate in genocide? The Complexity of Evil responds to this fundamental question by drawing on political science, sociology, criminology, anthropology, social psychology, and history to develop a model which can explain perpetration across various different cases. Focusing in particular on the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, The Complexity of Evil model draws on, systematically sorts, and causally orders a wealth of scholarly literature and supplements it with original field research data from interviews with former members of the Khmer Rouge. The model is systematic and abstract, as well as empirically grounded, providing a tool for understanding the micro-foundations of various cases of genocide. Ultimately this model highlights that the motivations for perpetrating genocide are both complex in their diversity and banal in their ordinariness and mundanity.
In most societies, courts are where the rubber of government meets the road of the people. If a state cannot settle disputes and ensure that its decisions are carried out, for practical purposes it is no longer in charge. This is why successful rebels put courts and justice at the top of their agendas. Rebel Law examines this key weapon in the armory of insurgent groups, ranging from the Ireland of the 1920s, where the IRA sapped British power using 'Republican Tribunals' to today's 'Caliphate of Law' -- the Islamic State, by way of Algeria in the 1950s and the Afghan Taliban. Frank Ledwidge tells how insurgent courts bleed legitimacy from government, decide cases and enforce judgments on the battlefield itself. Astute counterinsurgents, especially in 'ungoverned space,' can ensure that they retain the initiative. The book describes French, Turkish and British colonial 'judicial strategy' and contrasts their experience with the chaos of more recent 'stabilization operations' in Iraq and Afghanistan, drawing lessons for contemporary counterinsurgents. Rebel Law builds on his insights and shows that the courts themselves can be used as weapons for both sides in highly unconventional warfare.
International Criminal Law provides a comprehensive overview of an increasingly integral part of public international law. It complements the usual accounts of the substantive law of those international crimes tried to date before international criminal courts and of the institutional law of those courts with in-depth analyses of fundamental formal juridical concepts such as an 'international crime' and an 'international criminal court'; with detailed examinations of the many international crimes provided for by way of multilateral treaty and of the attendant obligations and rights of states parties; and with sustained attention to the implementation of international criminal law at the national level. Direct, concise, and precise, International Criminal Law should prove a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of the discipline of international criminal law.
Literature and Justice in Mid Twentieth Century Britain: Crime and War Crimes examines how ideas about crime, criminality, and judicial procedure that had developed in a domestic context influenced the representation and understanding of war crimes trials, victims of war crimes, and war criminals in post-Second World War Britain. The representation of Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent British-run trial of its personnel are a particular focal point. Drawing on a range of source material including life-writing, journalism, and detective fiction, as well as criminological and sociological works from this period, this book explains why the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was sometimes brought starkly into focus and sometimes marginalised in public discourse at this period. What remain are glimpses of the events now called the Holocaust, but glimpses that can be as powerful and as meaningful as more direct or explicit representations.
What is Justice? Is it always just 'to come'? Can real experience be translated into law? Examining Cambodia's troubled reconciliation, Alexander Hinton suggests an approach to justice founded on global ideals of the rule of law, democratization, and a progressive trajectory towards liberty and freedom, and which seeks to align the country with so called universal modes of thought, is condemned to failure. Instead, Hinton advocates focusing on the individual lived experience, and the discourses, interstices, and the combustive encounters connected with it, as a radical alternative. A phenomenology inspired approach towards healing national trauma, Hinton's ground-breaking text will make anybody with an interest in transitional justice, development, humanitarian intervention, human rights, or peacebuilding, question the value of an established truth.
The Nuremberg trials after World War II constituted a landmark in the development of international criminal justice: presided over by jurists from the victorious powers, it set new standards for defining international war crimes. Set in motion shortly after the creation of the United Nations, the courts seemed to point toward a future in which the international community could more effectively prosecute crimes against humanity and advance the cause of justice and the rule of law throughout the world. However, the onset of the Cold War stymied all efforts to create an effective international criminal court. Neither the US nor the USSR was willing to face the possibility of being judged in a forum controlled by ideological adversaries. Despite the lack of progress, the dream of the court lived on through the 1980s, and when the Cold War ended, a new opportunity arose. After the UN's creation of temporary courts during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, a powerful grassroots movement championing a permanent international criminal court emerged. Facing stiff resistance from the US and other powerful states, the movement triumphed against great odds. The court was established in 2002, and it now has the support of over 100 states (but not the US). The US opposes it outright and the Russians and Chinese are skeptical of it for a simple reason: as the most powerful states, they have no intention of surrendering jurisdictional authority over their own citizens to lesser powers. As a consequence, the court has faced numerous setbacks, and many have questioned whether it has any real power at all. It has ended up focusing its energies on pursuing war criminals in weak states, typically in Africa. It is now caught on the horns of a dilemma: to pursue justice, it does what it can where it can, but it cannot actually prosecute figures in powerful states. Russia will never surrender troops who may have acted badly in Georgia, and America is not about to hand over soldiers who killed civilians in Afghanistan. Yet the court has had some minor successes, and we should remember that it is still in its very early days. As the years pass, its jurisdictional authority may expand, and the norms that it advances may achieve the status of common sense. Time will tell. In Rough Justice, David Bosco tells the story of the movement to establish the court and its tumultuous first decade. He also considers its prospects for the future, especially the very real challenges that it faces. This is an authoritative account of an international institution that is prototypical of the post-Cold War era.
Describes the effect on young Jews of Hitler's rise to power and recounts the experiences of those who attended an agricultural emigration training farm.
Famine is an age-old scourge that almost disappeared in our lifetime. Between 2000 and 2011 there were no famines and deaths in humanitarian emergencies were much reduced. The humanitarian agenda was ascendant. Then, in 2017, the United Nations identified four situations that threatened famine or breached that threshold in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Today, this list is longer. Each of these famines is the result of military actions and exclusionary, authoritarian politics conducted without regard to the wellbeing or even the survival of people. Violations of international law including blockading ports, attacks on health facilities, violence against humanitarian workers, and obstruction of relief aid are carried out with renewed impunity. Yet there is an array of legal offenses, ranging from war crimes and crimes against humanity to genocide, available to a prosecutor to hold individuals to account for the deliberate starvation of civilians. However, there has been a dearth of investigations and accountability for those violating international law. The reasons for this neglect and the gaps between the black-letter law and practice are explored in this timely volume. It provides a comprehensive overview of the key themes and cases required to catalyze a new approach to understanding the law as it relates to starvation. It also illustrates the complications of historical and ongoing situations where starvation is used as a weapon of war, and provides expert analysis on defining starvation, early warning systems, gender and mass starvation, the use of sanctions, journalistic reporting, and memorialization of famine.
The adage 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' is significantly inaccurate. Ignorance and mistake of law do, under certain circumstances, exclude responsibility both in national and international criminal law. This monograph updates the existing reviews of law and practice on the topic, aiming to go a step further: it takes the analysis of mistake of law as a starting point for systematic observations about international criminal law in general. First, the volume defines the contours of the defence of mistake of law in general theory of criminal law, distinguishing it from cognate defences and highlighting, most notably, its connection with superior orders. Secondly, it gives an overview of the possible approaches to the defence, offering examples from national law as terms of reference for the subsequent analysis of international criminal law. Thirdly, it surveys the relevant law and practice of international criminal tribunals, with a focus on the International Criminal Court, and it contemplates offences for which a defence of mistake of law may potentially succeed. Finally, the author tries to interpret what the rules on mistake of law applicable before international criminal tribunals imply about the purpose of punishing individuals and to the legitimacy of such punishment. Whilst the discourse on international criminal law is more and more concerned with global politics, The Defence of Mistake of Law in International Criminal Law brings back the focus on the appropriateness of imposing a guilty verdict on the individual defendant, a human being constituting the basic unit of each society.
International criminal law and justice is a flourishing field which has led, in recent years, to new international criminal tribunals and new mechanisms for investigation and holding criminals to account. These developments have, in turn, led to an increasing volume and greater consolidation of case law, and even more scholarly attention. The second edition of this volume of Kai Ambos' seminal treatise has been revised and rewritten in parts to provide coverage of recent developments in the 'Special Part' of international criminal law: namely, the specific crimes and sentencing. Amongst other updates, there are significant extensions of the discussion on sexual and gender-based crimes; the introduction of environmental crimes into international criminal law; further elaboration on the nexus requirement in war crimes and asymmetrical conflicts (e.g., ISIS); and reference to the newly introduced war crimes of the ICC Statute and of the peculiarities of cyber-attacks and other emerging activities. The volume complements Volume I of the treatise on issues relevant to the foundations, general part of international criminal law, and general principles of international criminal justice. Taken together with the other new editions of the three-volume series, this second edition provides an exhaustive guide to every aspect of international criminal law, from fundamental principles to procedures and implementation. Kai Ambos' Treatise remains an indispensable reference work for academics and practitioners of international criminal law.
Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations-from courts to NGOs to the UN-have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence. Yet many millennia of conflict preceded these developments, and we know little about the longer-term history of conflict-based sexual violence. Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones helps to fill in the historical gaps. It provides insight into subjects that are of deep concern to the human rights community, such as the aftermath of conflict-based sexual violence, legal strategies for prosecuting it, the economic functions of sexual violence, and the ways perceived religious or racial difference can create or aggravate settings of sexual danger. Essays in the volume span a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic scope, touching on the ancient world, medieval Europe, the American Revolutionary War, precolonial and colonial Africa, Muslim Central Asia, the two world wars, and the Bangladeshi War of Independence. By considering a wide variety of cases, the contributors analyze the factors making sexual violence in conflict zones more or less likely and the resulting trauma more or less devastating. Topics covered range from the experiences of victims and the motivations of perpetrators, to the relationship between wartime and peacetime sexual violence, to the historical background of the contemporary feminist-inflected human rights moment. In bringing together historical and contemporary perspectives, this wide-ranging collection provides historians and human rights activists with tools for understanding long-term consequences of sexual violence as war-ravaged societies struggle to achieve postconflict stability.
This powerful memoir weaves the stories of valiant women who survived the Rwandan genocide with the struggle of their champion, Karen Sherman, to recover from her own history of abuse. The strength of these women helped Karen find her own way--through conflict zones and confrontations with corrupt officials to a renewed commitment to her family.
In United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics, Zachary D. Kaufman explores the U.S. government's support for, or opposition to, certain transitional justice institutions. By first presenting an overview of possible responses to atrocities (such as war crimes tribunals) and then analyzing six historical case studies, Kaufman evaluates why and how the United States has pursued particular transitional justice options since World War II. This book challenges the "legalist" paradigm, which postulates that liberal states pursue war crimes tribunals because their decision-makers hold a principled commitment to the rule of law. Kaufman develops an alternative theory-"prudentialism"-which contends that any state (liberal or illiberal) may support bona fide war crimes tribunals. More generally, prudentialism proposes that states pursue transitional justice options, not out of strict adherence to certain principles, but as a result of a case-specific balancing of politics, pragmatics, and normative beliefs. Kaufman tests these two competing theories through the U.S. experience in six contexts: Germany and Japan after World War II, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, the 1990-1991 Iraqi offenses against Kuwaitis, the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kaufman demonstrates that political and pragmatic factors featured as or more prominently in U.S. transitional justice policy than did U.S. government officials' normative beliefs. Kaufman thus concludes that, at least for the United States, prudentialism is superior to legalism as an explanatory theory in transitional justice policymaking.
Based on extensive archival research, this book offers a historical examination of the arrest, trial and punishment of the leaders of the SS-Einsatzgruppen - the mobile security and killing units employed by the Nazis in their racial war on the Eastern front. Sent to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, four units of the Einsatzgruppen, along with reinforcements, murdered approximately 1 million Soviet civilians in open air shootings and in gas vans and, in 1947, twenty-four leaders of these units were indicted for crimes against humanity and war crimes for their part in the murders. In addition to describing the legal proceedings that held these men accountable, this book also examines historiographical trends and perpetrator paradigms and expounds on such contested issues as the timing and genesis of the Final Solution, the perpetrators' route to crime and their motivation for killing, as well as discussing the tensions between law and history.
Laszlo Bardossy was a wartime prime minister executed for his role in mass murder, but his role remains controversial. His trial was riddled with blunders and some, especially those on the extreme right, now call him a martyr and are demanding a retrial. Was B?rdossy a villain or was he himself a victim of Communist-inspired mass murder? He was at the helm in 1941--42 when Hungary declared war on Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and he was charged with sending more than 600,00 Jews to Nazi death camps. This book offers readers a balanced interpretation of Bardossy's life. The volume also includes two rare documents: the charges of the prosecution in his post-war trial, and Bardossy's statement in defense of his policies.
The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. When the Chinese emerged victorious with the Allies at the end of World War II, many seemed ready to exact retribution for these crimes. Rather than resort to violence, however, they chose to deal with their former enemy through legal and diplomatic means. Focusing on the trials of, and policies toward, Japanese war criminals in the postwar period, Men to Devils, Devils to Men "analyzes the complex political maneuvering between China and Japan that shaped East Asian realpolitik during the Cold War. Barak Kushner examines how factions of Nationalists and Communists within China structured the war crimes trials in ways meant to strengthen their competing claims to political rule. On the international stage, both China and Japan propagandized the tribunals, promoting or blocking them for their own advantage. Both nations vied to prove their justness to the world: competing groups in China by emphasizing their magnanimous policy toward the Japanese; Japan by openly cooperating with postwar democratization initiatives. At home, however, Japan allowed the legitimacy of the war crimes trials to be questioned in intense debates that became a formidable force in postwar Japanese politics. In uncovering the different ways the pursuit of justice for Japanese war crimes influenced Sino-Japanese relations in the postwar years, Men to Devils, Devils to Men "reveals a Cold War dynamic that still roils East Asian relations today.
Uganda's civil war with Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has raged since the 1980s, claiming over 100,000 lives and displacing around 1.5 million people. Kony's rebel force, who combine religious mysticism with extreme brutality, have abducted tens of thousands of children: their child soldiers. Their insurgency continues to this day, though most of us know little about it. Norman Okello was only twelve when he was abducted by the LRA. In captivity, he was subjected to a ruthless training regime aimed at turning him into a killing machine free from conscience and fear. Forced to commit unspeakable acts of violence, Norman struggled not just to stay alive but to hold on to the last shreds of his humanity. When he finally escaped the clutches of the LRA, he faced his next ordeal: trying to reintegrate into a society that feared and despised him. Harrowing, heart-rending and enlightening in equal measure, Boy Soldier is above all a story of survival and redemption against unbelievable odds. |
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