Law, War and Crime

From events at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, to therecent trials of Slobodan MiloSevic and Saddam Hussein,war crimes trials are an increasingly pervasive feature of theaftermath of conflict. In his new book, Law, War and Crime, GerrySimpson explores the meaning and effect of such trials, and placesthem in their broader political and cultural contexts. The booktraces the development of the war crimes field from its origins inthe outlawing of piracy to its contemporary manifestation in theestablishment of the International Criminal Court in TheHague.
Simpson argues that the field of war crimes is constituted by anumber of tensions between, for example, politics and law, localjustice and cosmopolitan reckoning, collective guilt and individualresponsibility, and between the instinct that war, at worst, is anerror and the conviction that war is a crime.
Written in the wake of an extraordinary period in the life ofthe law, the book asks a number of critical questions. What does itmean to talk about war in the language of the criminal law? Whatare the consequences of seeking to criminalise the conduct of one'senemies? How did this relatively new phenomenon of putting on trialperpetrators of mass atrocity and defeated enemies come intoexistence? This book seeks to answer these important questionswhilst shedding new light on the complex relationship between law,war and crime.