Law, War and Crime (PDF)

From events at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, to the
recent trials of Slobodan MiloSevic and Saddam Hussein,
war crimes trials are an increasingly pervasive feature of the
aftermath of conflict. In his new book, Law, War and Crime, Gerry
Simpson explores the meaning and effect of such trials, and places
them in their broader political and cultural contexts. The book
traces the development of the war crimes field from its origins in
the outlawing of piracy to its contemporary manifestation in the
establishment of the International Criminal Court in The
Hague.

Simpson argues that the field of war crimes is constituted by a
number of tensions between, for example, politics and law, local
justice and cosmopolitan reckoning, collective guilt and individual
responsibility, and between the instinct that war, at worst, is an
error and the conviction that war is a crime.

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 criminalise the conduct of one's
enemies? How did this relatively new phenomenon of putting on trial
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.