ABSTRACT
Dominant understandings of atrocity violence (i.e., the means through which genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes may be committed) currently frame atrocities simplistically as fast-paced eruptions of spectacular violence. To date, international criminal law prosecutions have, for the most part, served to confirm this association between atrocity and highly visible forms of violence. In the process, a subset of international crimes committed through methods of domination, abuse, and killing that are slow and attritive have continued to be relegated, conceptually and practically, to the fringes of international criminal justice or ignored altogether. This chapter considers the possibility of recasting atrocities to include public health catastrophes as a means of facilitating a conceptual shift away from a myopic focus on spectacular acts of violence within international criminal justice and toward the recognition of a broader array of manifestations of power over the health and lives of human populations.
