This book offers a unique and timely political analysis of war, international law and human rights, and the important interconnections among them. It questions why war features as a foundational problem in contemporary world affairs and explores how international law is used to manage this and other types of political violence. Challenging conventional thinking that understands war as a problem to be solved and law as an antidote to organized but unruly violence, this book situates the promotion and protection of human rights within the wider context of the modernist project, particularly during the epoch of the Anthropocene. Taking a critical perspective that draws on concepts found in the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, this book casts new light on the ways in which the politics of war, law and rights produces profound insecurities for the human species as well as for other life forms and life systems on this planet.

This book offers a unique and powerful critique of the quest for international criminal justice. It explores the efforts of three successive generations of international prosecutors, recognising the vital roles they play in the enforcement of international criminal law. By critically examining prosecutorial performance during the pre-trial and trial phases, the volume argues that these prosecutors are simultaneously political actors serving in the interests of economic liberalisation. It also posits that international prosecutors help wage a mostly silent and largely unacknowledged politico-cultural war fought for control over the institutions governing modernist international affairs. As the author contends, international prosecutors are thus best understood as agents not only of the law and politics, but also of a war fought by proponents of various utopian projects.

Even though impacts generated by the widespread availability and ongoing use of small arms and light weapons have not reached a magnitude sufficient to radically reorder contemporary world affairs, awareness of the nature and extent of these impacts has compelled some international actors to take decisive action. Damien Rogers examines how the international community has responded to the challenge of controlling small arms and light weapons since the early 1990s. Using a postinternationalist analytic framework, he specifically focuses on the maturing relationships between particular actors of world affairs and the nascent interconnectivity between their strategies for, and approaches toward, controlling these weapons. Furthermore, the book identifies ways in which the captains of small arms industry, arms brokers and chief users of these weapons are able to mitigate, resist or elude the intended effects of those responses.