ABSTRACT
A focus throughout this book has been the unique collective nature of atrocity contexts and how this collective nature affects the manner in which individual responsibility might attach to persons. Although the atrocities committed would not have been realized except that many individuals participated, acting together in collaboration, the principal backward-looking international response has been to concentrate on holding individuals accountable for their exclusive participation in the greater crimes. This chapter will turn again to the condition of collective responsibility. It will briefly reiterate the position that under certain conditions there is a sense in which the total wrong is far worse than the sum of the individual wrongs and therefore requires a particular understanding of the context in its entirety.1 It will then posit that individual punishment, while significant in its expressive power of condemnation of particular actions, disregards to a certain extent much of the collective nature of the atrocity context. This chapter will argue that if the goal is to identify those agents responsible and communicate disapproval and censure, there ought to be some form of shared penalty that reflects and denounces collective engagement in the atrocity scheme.
