TARGETS OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE: Yugoslavia and Rwanda

Abstract

This book of essays and articles spans two decades and three continents. The essays are an attempt to understand and critique the puzzling development of international criminal tribunals that emerged suddenly after the end of the Cold War, though many decades of formal and informal efforts to create an international body with jurisdiction over criminal offenses of an international nature—and notably aggression, forgotten by the new Security Council bodies—had failed.

The chapters assembled in this book besides analyzing the positions, claims and what even passes for theories in various disciplines deployed within a novel post-Cold War field of “International Justice” also paints these endeavors as tools for justifying the foreign policies of the hegemonic United States and its subservient allies. Without explicitly reducing the international justice discourse, both public and academic, to outright propaganda, we deliberately present Yugoslavia and Rwanda as targets of international justice, countries that are literally no more or so dramatically transfigured that the flags from the cover of this book no longer stand for anything. No doubt many among those who had found their academic niche as contributors to some aspect of international justice discourse will find our position surprising, exaggerated, and even shocking. In the end, whatever the shock value of this book, our hope is that its readers, particularly the uninitiated, will find our arguments compelling and useful.