The Justice Dilemma

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-67
Author(s):  
Daniel Krcmaric
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Rome Statute ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
Golden Parachute ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
Augusto Pinochet ◽  
Atrocity Crimes ◽  
National Borders

This chapter analyses the theory about the justice dilemma and derives testable hypotheses on how international justice shapes patterns of exile, civil war duration, and mass killing onset. It offers both quantitative and qualitative evidence to assess the theory on the justice dilemma in multiple ways. It also points out how exile traditionally offered an attractive golden parachute for all embattled rulers and provided a mechanism for leaders to give up power in a manner that is relatively costless. The chapter reviews the recent trend toward holding leaders accountable for atrocity crimes that are irrespective of national borders, which complicates the exile option. It refers to the signing of the ICC's Rome Statute and the arrest of former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet that made the threat of arrest on foreign soil appear far more realistic.

The Justice Dilemma

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krcmaric
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
World Politics ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Golden Parachute ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Mass Atrocity ◽  
Atrocity Crimes ◽  
Exit Options

Abusive leaders are now held accountable for their crimes in a way that was unimaginable just a few decades ago. What are the consequences of this recent push for international justice? This book explains why the “golden parachute” of exile is no longer an attractive retirement option for oppressive rulers. The book argues that this is both a blessing and a curse: leaders culpable for atrocity crimes fight longer civil wars because they lack good exit options, but the threat of international prosecution deters some leaders from committing atrocities in the first place. The book diagnoses an inherent tension between conflict resolution and atrocity prevention, two of the signature goals of the international community. It also sheds light on several important puzzles in world politics. Why do some rulers choose to fight until they are killed or captured? Why not simply save oneself by going into exile? Why do some civil conflicts last so much longer than others? Why has state-sponsored violence against civilians fallen in recent years? While exploring these questions, the book marshals statistical evidence on patterns of exile, civil war duration, and mass atrocity onset. It also reconstructs the decision-making processes of embattled leaders to show how contemporary international justice both deters atrocities and prolongs conflicts.

Case Evidence: Conflict Trajectories in Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Syria

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Tir ◽  
Johannes Karreth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Intergovernmental Organizations ◽  
Crisis Resolution ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
The Government

Two low-level armed conflicts, Indonesia’s East Timor and Ivory Coast’s post-2010 election crises, provide detailed qualitative evidence of highly structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) engaging in effective civil warpreventing activities in member-states. Highly structured IGOs threatened and sanctioned each of these states and offered (long-term) benefits conditional on successful crisis resolution. The governments were aware of and responded to these IGOs’ concerns, as did the rebels in these respective cases. The early stages of the conflict in Syria in 2011 provide a counterpoint. With Syria’s limited engagement in only few highly structured IGOs, the Syrian government ignored international calls for peace. And, without highly structured IGOs’ counterweight to curtail the government, the rebels saw little reason to stop their armed resistance. The result was a brutal and deadly civil war that continues today.

scholarly journals Can patriotism justify killing in defense of one’s country?

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Pavkovic
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Political Institution ◽  
Political Preference ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
White Southerner

Cosmopolitan liberals would be ready to fight - and to kill and be killed for the sake of restoring international justice or for the abolition of profoundly unjust political institutions. Patriots are ready to do the same for their own country. Sometimes the cosmopolitan liberals and patriots would fight on the same side and sometimes on the opposite sides of the conflict. Thus the former would join the latter in the defense of Serbia against Austria-Hungary (in 1914) but would oppose the white Southerner patriots in the American Civil War (in 1861). In this paper I argue that fighting and killing for one?s country is, in both of those cases, different from the defense of one?s own life and the lives of those who cannot defend themselves. Killing for one?s country is killing in order to fulfill a particular political preference. The same is the case with fighting for the abolition of a profoundly unjust political institution. It is not amoral or immoral to refuse to kill for any one of these two political preferences because there is no reason to believe that either political preference trumps our moral constraints against killing.

Preamble: Préambule, Preamble/Préambule

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Schabas William A
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
Rome Statute ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Justice ◽  
General Philosophy ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Underlying Principle ◽  
The Subject

This chapter comments on the Preamble to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The Preamble consists of eleven paragraphs and some 305 words. It addresses several of the important principles that underpin the Statute, such as complementarity and gravity, the commitment to address impunity, and the obligations of States with respect to international justice in general. The Preamble also provides an appropriate place for the Statute to make reference to such instruments as the Charter of the United Nations. Although the final version of the Preamble provides indications as to the general philosophy animating the Statute, the earlier versions actually influenced the drafting process, most notably in the debate as to whether complementarity was merely an underlying principle or whether it required specific provisions and mechanisms for its implementation, and as regards the importance of gravity or seriousness in establishing the subject-matter jurisdiction of the Court.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
William A. Link
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American South ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Global Events ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Nation ◽  
National Borders

William Link introduces key contexts for the book, namely that the origins, onsets, and resolutions of the American Civil War are best understood as a global struggle. Not only was the creation of a new American nation a result of the war, but this creation also occurred in concert with a worldwide emergence of modern nationalism. By 1860, the American South contained the world’s largest and most valuable enslaved population, and the huge wealth in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco secured through slave labor is what drove exports, trade, and profit in American and global financial centers. This book suggests new ways to situate US Reconstruction as affecting and being affected by global events, and it argues that Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders.

Syria

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 467-502
Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Vulnerable Populations ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
Atrocity Crimes

Abstract The Syrian civil war stands as the most serious failure of the responsibility to prevent since the adoption of R2P in 2005. As the war has continued, there have been atrocities and abuse committed against vulnerable populations on a widespread and systematic scale. This article focuses on the atrocity prevention efforts undertaken in the first phase of the crisis from March 2011 to August 2012. It shows that while there were multiple tools utilized by a range of local, regional, and international actors, none of them had a lasting impact on the commission of atrocity crimes in Syria. This failure is due to five principal reasons. First, engagement to prevent atrocities came too late. Second, domestic and regional conditions were not conducive to prevention. Third, there was little reason for the warring parties to compromise. Fourth, there was a disconnect between what Western states wanted to achieve in Syria and what they were prepared to do about it. And fifth, the UN’s envoys had limited options for engagement.

Searching for Deterrence at the International Criminal Court

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-655 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Dancy
Keyword(s):  
Violence Prevention ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
Rome Statute ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
General Deterrence ◽  
Specific Deterrence ◽  
The World ◽  
Atrocity Crimes

Does the International Criminal Court (icc) deter acts of violence in the world? To answer this question, this article first distinguishes between three phenomena that are often confusingly grouped together under the heading of ‘deterrence’. These include the termination of ongoing civil wars (compellence), the prevention of atrocity crime recidivism (specific deterrence), and the overall prevention of war and atrocity crimes (general deterrence). The article then assesses whether state commitments to the Rome Statute and icc intervention in specific contexts can promote these three aims. It presents evidence that the icc can indeed contribute to violence prevention, though not because of its ability to sanction abusive actors. Instead, the Court’s role as a ‘stigmatizer’ in the international community has likely contributed to declines in certain types of violence over time. As such, the article concludes that the icc is more important for what it is than what it does.

Varieties of civil war and mass killing

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krcmaric
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Why do some civil wars feature the mass killing of civilians while others do not? Recent research answers this question by adopting a ‘varieties of civil war’ approach that distinguishes between guerrilla and conventional civil wars. One particularly influential claim is that guerrilla wars feature more civilian victimization because mass killing is an attractive strategy for states attempting to eliminate the civilian support base of an insurgency. In this article, I suggest that there are two reasons to question this ‘draining the sea’ argument. First, the logic of ‘hearts and minds’ during guerrilla wars implies that protecting civilians – not killing them – is the key to success during counterinsurgency. Second, unpacking the nature of fighting in conventional wars gives compelling reasons to think that they could be particularly deadly for civilians caught in the war’s path. After deriving competing predictions on the relationship between civil war type and mass killing, I offer an empirical test by pairing a recently released dataset on the ‘technology of rebellion’ featured in civil wars with a more nuanced dataset of mass killing than those used in several previous studies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that mass killing onset is more likely to occur during conventional wars than during guerrilla wars.

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