Justice and the faithless
The demand for disobedience in international criminal law
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6060474 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bronwyn Leebaw (University of California, Riverside, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 344-366 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of International Relations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1354-0661 • E-ISSN: 1460-3713 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066117715899 |
| OpenAlex | W2736510493 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 40 |
How is disobedience required under international criminal law? How do war crimes trials demand and seek to cultivate disobedience as a response to atrocity? It is widely recognized that international law may require disobedience as a response to domestic authorities that order or legalize war crimes, yet this obligation to disobey is commonly conceptualized as a kind of byproduct of efforts to establish compliance with international norms. Drawing on empirical and theoretical scholarship analyzing “crimes of obedience,” this article investigates the demand for disobedience as articulated in international legal conventions and in war crimes trials dealing with lower-level soldiers and civilian authorities. It argues that disobedience is an important response to war crimes and that the capacity to disobey abusive authorities does not follow logically or inevitably from a commitment to obey laws that criminalize their abuses. In international criminal law, the obligation to disobey abusive authorities has been articulated in ways that require the exercise of critical judgment, as well as moral and political agency, in order to overcome various pressures to obey domestic authority. Prominent theoretical explanations of compliance with international law not only neglect the importance of such skills, but call for strategies that are in tension with their development. Closer attention to the role of exemplary disobedience in the legal reasoning animating war crimes prosecutions, I suggest, could strengthen the pedagogical role of legal institutions as a response to criminal obedience and as interventions in the politics of memory
Civil disobedience · Criminal justice · Criminal law · International law · Moral obligation · Obedience · Obligation · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · War crime · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law · Torture, Ethics, and Law
Crimes of Obedience
Home from the War
The Force of the Example
Writing History in International Criminal Trials
Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
Accountability for Killing
The Image before the Weapon
Stay the Hand of Vengeance
On the FrontlinesGender, War, and the Post-Conflict Process
Fictions of Justice
International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans
The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices
Eichmann in Jerusalem
The justice cascade
Obedience to authority
Socializing States
Speaking Rights to Power
Torture, Power, and Law
American Memories
Intimate Enemies
Remaking Rwanda
Gender, Responsibility, and the Grey Zone
The defence of superior orders
Judging and Understanding
International Law
Beyond Impunity
Transitional Justice as Global Project
On killing
The Order of Genocide
Innocent Women and Children
Explaining the Deterrence Effect of Human Rights Prosecutions for Transitional Countries1
International Norm Dynamics and Political Change
Multidirectional Memory
Beyond Legalism
Complex political perpetrators
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |