Law, War and Crime : War Crimes, Trials and the Reinvention of International Law

From events at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, to the trials of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, war crimes trials are an increasingly pervasive feature of the aftermath of conflict. "Law, War and Crime" examines the meaning of such trials and their cultural political effects.

Gerry Simpson traces the development of the origins of the war crimes field from the outlawing of piracy to contemporary war crimes trials, and situates the phenomenon in the context of broad social and political forces.

Simpson argues that the field of war crimes is constituted by a number of complex relationships - between collective guilt and individual responsibility, between making history and performing justice, between the international sphere and the domestic zone, between legitimating dominant political forces and permitting the expression of dissident views, and between the idea of impartial and honourable justice and the spectre of the war crimes trial as a show trail.

Written in the wake of an extraordinary period in the life of the law, the book asks a number of critical questions: what does it mean to talk about war in the language of the criminal law?What are the consequences of seeking to criminalize the conduct of one's enemies?

How did this relatively new phenomenon of trying perpetrators of mass atrocity and defeated enemies come into existence?

This book seeks to answer these important questions whilst shedding new light on the complex relationship between law, war and crime.