ABSTRACT
The modern crime of aggression is, in essence, the planning or executing by an individual in one state of a use of force against another state in manifest violation of the United Nations Charter. Moreover, to ensure agreement at the Rome Conference of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, aggression was listed but not included in the Court's jurisdiction. This chapter aims to help interested scholars and graduate students think about why such interdisciplinary questions are relevant to important theoretical debates within and outside existing international criminal law (ICL) research. During the initial negotiating phase, a key point on which PrepCom participants developed agreement was that a state must commit an act of aggression before an individual can commit a crime of aggression. From a policy viewpoint, the Council's historical reluctance to formally describe prior uses of force as aggression suggests it may be unlikely to make such determinations in future conflicts.
