The Americas in and before a Century of International Criminal Law

Abstract

Note: This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book ‘The Oxford Handbook of International Law and the Americas’ edited by Liliana Obregón, Laura Betancur-Restrepo, and Juan M. Amaya-Castro (editors), and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarin (assistant editor).

Dominant accounts have largely excluded actors from the Americas, other than the United States, from the history of international criminal law. This chapter does not attempt to introduce these exclusions into the established celebratory narrative. Instead, it explores how and why American actors have promoted, resisted, ignored, been affected, or been ignored by different efforts to implement or expand criminal justice in and through international law since the end of World War I until the present. In this way, this chapter presents a counter-history of international criminal law in and from the Americas, unveiling overlooked discontinuities and illuminating the changing political stakes involved in these projects.

Keywords: international criminal law, critical histories, Cold War, International Criminal Court, impunity, domestic courts and international law

JEL Classification: K33, K3