Since World War II, international law has identified crimes of hate (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggression) as the greatest threats to global stability, security, human rights, and sovereignty. Accordingly an entire legal superstructure has been created to prosecute such crimes. This has meant: the development of individual criminal responsibility in which a few malevolent perpetrators are blamed for the collective violence of many; the proliferation of identity politics; and the spread of retributive legalism (courts, prosecutions, jails). This presentation looks ahead and argues that critical future stability, security, human rights, and sovereignty threats, however, are not motivated by individual hate, malevolence, or intent. Rather, they are motored by carelessness, poverty, desires to economically develop, have a quality of life for one’s children, self-improvement, and hasty decisions. These notably are the harms of climate change, environmental peril, public health pandemics, capitalism, and rampant speciesism. Addressing these harms cannot occur though criminal law frameworks without imprisoning everyone. How, then, should the architecture of international law and transitional justice change? What will ‘justice’ mean in fifty years? How do we define ‘violence’ and ‘harm’?
About the Speaker
Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. He has held visiting appointments and has taught at law schools world-wide, including Queen’s University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Université de Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, Masaryk University (Czechia), and John Cabot University in Rome. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as defense lawyer in genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court; and has been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech. His books include Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge 2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford 2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford 2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-edited volumes Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (Elgar 2019, with Jastine Barrett), Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill 2024, with Caroline Fournet), and Children and Violence (Routledge 2024, with Christelle Molima and Mohamed Kamara et al). He is currently working on a fictional stage-play imagining a trial for the US drop of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki; a project on fascist cultural property in Italy; on child soldiers during the Korean War; a Festschrift for a dear departed friend; and on the relationship between international law and climate change.
