In this sweeping, definitive work, historian David Crowe offers an unflinching account of the long and troubled history of genocide and war crimes. From ancient atrocities to more recent horrors, he traces their disturbing consistency but also the heroic efforts made to break seemingly intractable patterns of violence and retribution.

In the five decades after the Nuremberg trials, not one single international trial for war criminals took place until 1993. In that year a court was finally set up -- at the urging of Aryeh Neier and other high-profile activists -- to judge and sentence war criminals from the former Yugoslavia.In War Crimes, Neier argues for the creation of a permanent tribunal at the U.N. and shows how the continuing absence of such a tribunal is the result of paranoia on the part of governments worldwide. He addresses conflicts in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Cambodia, and the occupied territories of Israel. This is a powerful and sure-to-be-controversial book.

Entries address topics related to genocide, crimes against humanity and peace, and human rights violations; profile perpetrators including Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin; and discuss institutions set up to prosecute these crimes in countries around the world.

Combining history, politics, and critical analysis, he revisits the killing fields of Cambodia, documents the three-month Hutu "machete genocide" of about 800,000 Tutsi villagers in Rwanda, and casts recent headlines from Kosovo in the light of these other conflicts."--BOOK JACKET.

Women war criminals are far more common than we think. From the Holocaust to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to the Rwandan genocide, women have perpetrated heinous crimes. Few have been punished. These women go unnoticed because their very existence challenges our assumptions about war and about women. Biases about women as peaceful and innocent prevent us from "seeing" women as war criminals—and prevent postconflict justice systems from assigning women blame. Women as War Criminals argues that women are just as capable as men of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. In addition to unsettling assumptions about women as agents of peace and reconciliation, the book highlights the gendered dynamics of law, and demonstrates that women are adept at using gender instrumentally to fight for better conditions and reduced sentences when war ends. The book presents the legal cases of four women: the President (Biljana Plavšic), the Minister (Pauline Nyiramasuhuko), the Soldier (Lynndie England), and the Student (Hoda Muthana). Each woman's complex identity influenced her treatment by legal systems and her ability to mount a gendered defense before the court. Justice, as Steflja and Trisko Darden show, is not blind to gender.

As international criminal courts and tribunals have proliferated and international criminal law is increasingly seen as a key tool for bringing the world's worst perpetrators to account, the controversies surrounding the international trials of war criminals have grown. War crimes tribunals have to deal with accusations of victors' justice, bad prosecutorial policy and case management, and of jeopardizing fragile peace in post-conflict situations. In this exceptional book, one of the leading writers in the field of international criminal law explores these controversial issues in a manner that is accessible both to lawyers and to general readers. Professor William Schabas begins by considering the discipline of international criminal law, outlining the differing approaches to the description of international crimes and examining the frequent claims relating to the retroactive application of these crimes. The book then discusses the relationship between genocide and crimes against humanity, studying the fascination with what Schabas calls the 'genocide mystique'. International criminal tribunals have often been stigmatized as an exercise in victors' justice. This book traces how this critique developed and the difficulty it poses to the identification of situations for prosecution by the International Criminal Court. The claim that amnesty for international crimes is prohibited by international law is challenged, with a more nuanced approach to the relationship between justice and peace being proposed. Throughout the book there is a strong historical perspective, with constant reference to the early experiments in international justice at Nuremberg and Tokyo. The work also analyses the growing pains of the International Criminal Court as it enters its second decade.

This ground-breaking comparative perspective on the subject of World War II war crimes and war justice focuses on American and German atrocities. Almost every war involves loss of life of both military personnel and civilians, but World War II involved an unprecedented example of state-directed and ideologically motivated genocide--the Holocaust. Beyond this horrific, premeditated war crime perpetrated on a massive scale, there were also isolated and spontaneous war crimes committed by both German and U.S. forces. The book is focused upon on two World War II atrocities--one committed by Germans and the other by Americans. The author carefully examines how the U.S. Army treated each crime, and gives accounts of the atrocities from both German and American perspectives. The two events are contextualized within multiple frameworks: the international law of war, the phenomenon of war criminality in World War II, and the German and American collective memories of World War II. Americans, Germans and War Crimes Justice: Law, Memory, and "The Good War" provides a fresh and comprehensive perspective on the complex and sensitive subject of World War II war crimes and justice.