No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Lengthening the Shadow of International Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2020
Abstract
What will be the consequences of the criminalization of aggression? In 2010, the International Criminal Court made aggression a crime for which individuals can be prosecuted. But questions around what constitutes aggression, who decides, and, most important, how effective this legal change will be in reducing the incidence of war remain. This essay considers these questions in light of two recent books on the criminalization of aggression: Noah Weisbord's The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats and Tom Dannenbaum's The Crime of Aggression, Humanity, and the Soldier. While the authors argue in favor of the efficacy of the criminalization of aggression as a means to reduce future war, it is also likely that the criminalization of aggression will reshape war in potentially profound ways.
Keywords
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
NOTES
1 Black, Jan Knippers, The Dominican Republic: Politics and Development in an Unsovereign State (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 21Google Scholar.
2 Maria Abi-Habib, “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port,” New York Times, June 25, 2018.
3 Hurd, Ian, How to Do Things with International Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Article 6, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17, 1998, p. 3, www.icc-cpi.int/resource-library/documents/rs-eng.pdf.
5 Article 8, in ibid., pp. 4–7.
6 Article 7, in ibid., p. 3.
7 Article 8 bis, in ibid., p. 8.
8 Article 2, Charter of the United Nations, June 26, 1945, legal.un.org/repertory/art2.shtml.
9 Dan Altman, “The Evolution of Territorial Conquest after 1945 and the Limits of the Norm of Territorial Integrity,” International Organization (forthcoming).
10 Hillebrecht, Courtney, “The Deterrent Effects of the International Criminal Court: Evidence from Libya,” International Interactions 42, no. 4 (May 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Broache, Michael, “Irrelevance, Instigation and Prevention: The Mixed Effects of International Criminal Court Prosecutions on Atrocities in the CNDP/M23 Case,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 10, no. 3 (November 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meernik, James, “The International Criminal Court and the Deterrence of Human Rights Atrocities,” Civil Wars 17, no. 3 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appel, Benjamin J., “In the Shadow of the International Criminal Court: Does the ICC Deter Human Rights Violations?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 1 (January 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stuart Ford, “Can the International Criminal Court Succeed? An Analysis of the Empirical Evidence of Violence Prevention,” Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review (forthcoming); Jo, Hyeran and Simmons, Beth A., “Can the International Criminal Court Deter Atrocity?,” International Organization 70, no. 3 (Summer 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jo, Hyeran and Simmons, Beth A., “Can the International Criminal Court Deter Atrocity?—CORRIGENDUM,” International Organization 7 (Spring 2017)Google Scholar.
11 Shay, Jonathan, “Casualties,” Daedalus 140, no. 3 (Summer 2011), p. 183CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
12 Homer, bk. 20, sec. 503 (p. 518) in The Iliad. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990).
13 Shephard, Ben, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Montgomery, Adam, The Invisible Injured: Psychological Trauma in the Canadian Military from the First World War to Afghanistan (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Dean, Eric T., Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
14 Scott, Wilbur J., “PTSD in DSM-III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease,” Social Problems 37, no. 3 (August 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilson, Mitchell, “DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150, no. 3 (April 1993), p. 404Google ScholarPubMed.
15 Litz, Brett T., Stein, Nathan, Delaney, Eileen, Lebowitz, Leslie, Nash, William P., Silva, Caroline, and Maguen, Shira, “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (December 2009)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Nash, William P., Carper, Teresa L. Marino, Mills, Mary Alice, Au, Teresa, Goldsmith, Abigail, and Litz, Brett T., “Psychometric Evaluation of the Moral Injury Events Scale,” Military Medicine 178, no. 6 (June 2013)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
16 However, publics may have a sense for just war theory, even if they are not familiar with the laws themselves. See John Halpin, Brian Katulis, Peter Juul, Karl Agne, Jim Gerstein, and Nisha Jain, “America Adrift: How the U.S. Foreign Policy Debate Misses What Voters Really Want,” Center for American Progress, May 5, 2019, www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2019/05/05/469218/america-adrift/; and Sagan, Scott D. and Valentino, Benjamin A., “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Ethics and International Affairs 33, no. 4 (Winter 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note, though, that both these sources draw only from U.S. public opinion data.
17 Beth Simmons, “ILAW Distinguished Scholar Panel: Celebrating the Work of Beth Simmons” (roundtable panel, International Studies Association 2019 Annual Convention, Toronto, March 30, 2019).
18 Fazal, Tanisha M., “State Death and Intervention after 1945,” ch. 7 in State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
19 Hathaway, Oona A. and Shapiro, Scott J., The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017)Google Scholar; and Fazal, Tanisha M. and Poast, Paul, “War Is Not Over: What the Optimists Get Wrong about Conflict,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 6 (November/December 2019)Google Scholar.
20 International Committee of the Red Cross, “Treaties, State Parties and Commentaries,” ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/vwTreatiesByDate.xsp.
21 This is even so for the one subentry in Article 8 bis that attempts to address civil war: “The sending by or on behalf of a state of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State of such gravity as to amount to the acts listed above, or its substantial involvement therein.” Article 8 bis (g), Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, p. 8.
22 Cunen, Céline, Hjort, Nils Lis, and Nygård, Håvard Mokleiv, “Statistical Sightings of Better Angels: Analysing the Distribution of Battle-Deaths in Interstate Conflict over Time,” Journal of Peace Research 57, no. 2 (March 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reiter, Dan, Stam, Allan C., and Horowitz, Michael C., “A Deeper Look at Interstate War Data: Interstate War Data Version 1.1,” Research & Politics 3, no. 4 (October–December 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Poznansky, Michael, In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stanton, Jessica A., Violence and Restraint in Civil War: Civilian Targeting in the Shadow of International Law (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.