International Criminal Law as a Cold War-Inflected Project

Abstract

This chapter surveys international criminal justice during the Cold War era, with two main objectives. First, it argues that the Cold War both shaped and reconfigured the field’s constitutive tensions. As a consequence, this chapter suggests that the end of the Cold War has ironically been invoked to justify a Cold War-inflected project. Second, throughout this exploration, this chapter studies the politics underpinning those Cold War precedents that remain foundational to the accepted history of international criminal law. Overall, the chapter reclaims the centrality of the Cold War to understand the ideological justifications, institutional forms, and conditions of possibility of international criminal law.

Keywords: History of international law, international criminal law, Cold War, historiography, war crimes