ABSTRACT

Drawing on the critical legal tradition, the collection of international scholars gathered in this volume analyse the complicities and limitations of International Criminal Law. This area of law has recently experienced a significant surge in scholarship and public debate; individual criminal accountability is now firmly entrenched in both international law and the international consciousness as a necessary mechanism of responsibility. Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law: An Introduction shifts the debate towards that which has so far been missing from the mainstream discussion: the possible injustices, exclusions, and biases of International Criminal Law.

This collection of essays is the first dedicated to the topic of critical approaches to international criminal law. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of international criminal law, international law, international legal theory, criminal law, and criminology.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

part I|100 pages

Critique as an agenda

chapter Chapter 1|37 pages

International criminal justice

A critical research agenda

chapter Chapter 2|17 pages

Critical orientations

A critique of international criminal court practice

chapter Chapter 4|19 pages

Critique, complicity and I

part II|42 pages

The politics of international criminal law

chapter Chapter 6|19 pages

Reading the political

Jurisdiction and legality at the Lebanon tribunal

part III|62 pages

International criminal legal histories revisited

chapter Chapter 7|21 pages

Linear law

The history of international criminal law

chapter Chapter 8|16 pages

Silences in international criminal legal histories and the construction of the victim subject of international criminal law

The nineteenth-century slave trading trial of Joseph Peters

chapter Chapter 9|23 pages

Making ICL history

On the need to move beyond pre-fab critiques of ICL

part IV|62 pages

The visible and the invisible in international criminal law

chapter Chapter 10|25 pages

International criminal law and individualism

An African perspective

chapter Chapter 11|18 pages

An arresting event

Assassination within the purview of international criminal law