Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development

Abstract: This article offers a critique of the Nuremberg-inspired paradigm of international criminal justice, which focuses on high-profile, top-down approaches to post-conflict accountability. To this end, it appraises the work of the United Nations War Crimes Commission as a "path not taken." We discuss the very different approach to supporting post-conflict justice adopted by the UNWCC—from its original support base beyond the major geopolitical powers, to the impact of its more deliberative system, to the role of the UNWCC as a hub in which new practices of international law were developed. Such an approach had its achievements: the UNWCC assisted in prosecuting significantly more cases than the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, as well as the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals, and its structure lent itself to effective use of national expertise and resources. It also had weaknesses and limitations. The Commission was unable to resist great power politics, which eventually led to its demise. We then discuss the implications of such a model for modern-day international criminal justice. While many of the advances made by the UNWCC have echoes in modern-day processes of "convergent evolution," there is much still to learn from examining this period of institutional innovation. Recent efforts to institute "positive complementarity" and more cooperative, facilitatory, and horizontal criminal justice institutions could benefit from exploring the UNWCC model. While it remains strictly within liberal approaches to international criminal justice, we argue that the UNWCC represents a clear alternative to the "Nuremberg model" and contemporary approaches to international criminal law, including the work of the International Criminal Court. Shorter Abstract: This article offers a critique of the 'Nuremberg model', which focuses on high-profile, top-down approaches to post-conflict accountability, in favour of the model offered by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. We discuss its achievements – especially around peer review, sharing best practice, and participation of states outside Western Europe and the US – as well as its weaknesses and limitations in the face of great power resistance. We then discuss its lessons for "positive complementarity" today, with more cooperative, facilitatory, and horizontal (in terms of state influence) forms of post-conflict justice. It offers several possible paths for future development.

Dan Plesch

Leah Owen

Humanity

The United Nations War Crimes Commission 1943–1948: A Forgotten Highway to Postconflict Justice?

联合国战争罪行委员会1943-1948年：通往战后正义的被遗忘之路？

Abstract: The Red Cross of Yugoslavia invited the International Red Cross Movement in the 1970s to reconsider its humanitarian principles and include perspectives from the countries belonging to the Non-Aligned Movement. The organization created an alternative humanitarian imaginary that partly challenged and partly reproduced the premises of the humanitarian sector in the West. This largely forgotten episode in the history of humanitarianism presented an attempt at worldmaking, not of a world free from the coloniality/modernity nexus, but of a socialist modernist world that was in many aspects different from the one that had been built since the 1970s.

Čarna Brković

Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s

社会主义现代主义的世界构建：20世纪70年代南斯拉夫在国际人道主义辩论中的介入

Abstract: Before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation , there was the Spanish consenso . The idea of negotiated and peaceful consensus it embodied, as a way to overcome violent pasts after the end of dictatorship, was forged in the work of Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and human rights organisations both internationally and in Spain from the late 1950s onwards. Following the death of Franco and Spain's successful democratization from the late 1970s, it would then become an influential approach that travelled internationally for two decades. This article highlights the role of left politicians and organisations such as the Socialist International in the deradicalization of visions of post-dictatorial justice and in the circulation of this paradigm across Latin America and Eastern Europe. It concludes by tracing the way in which, in the twenty-first century, consenso-type settlements have been attacked for, variously, their acceptance of impunity; avoidance of questions of economic and structural justice; and incapacity to effect a revolutionary break sufficient to protect societies from corruption, inequality and a return to authoritarianism. Shorter Abstract: Before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation , there was the Spanish consenso , understood not only as a commitment to a peaceful democratic exit from dictatorship, but also a way of forging an end to, and not falling back into, civil war. This article explores in particular the contribution of an international and domestic left in not only building the consenso in Spain, but also exporting its deradicalized vision of post-dictatorial justice across Latin America and Eastern Europe. It concludes by analysing why consenso-type settlements fell out of fashion after the Cold War and have been attacked in the twenty-first century.

Sophie Baby

Daniel Kressel

James Mark

Collective Impunity for Transition? Consenso and the International Travels of a Spanish Paradigm

过渡时期的集体豁免？共识与西班牙范式的国际传播

Abstract: The Western myth of Nuremberg has dominated understandings of the evolution of international criminal law. Enshrining the International Military Tribunal as a critical point of origin, this paradigm has developed a narrative of post-war liberal progress, in which a universal model of externally-delivered, individualised criminal justice was interrupted by the exigencies of the Cold War then rediscovered through various international and hybrid tribunals in the 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Often instrumentalised to protect Western interests, the Nuremberg myth marginalises the histories of a wide range of criminalisation and accountability practices that existed, both at the time and since. In this essay, we introduce alternative practices and alliances that challenged both the Nuremberg myth and the specific accountability model it propagates: from the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which contested the colonial erasures of Nuremberg at the time, to the move towards localised forms of post-atrocity justice such as the gacaca courts in Rwanda in the 2000s. The essays in this dossier question the idea that international criminal law hibernated for four decades after Nuremberg and demonstrate how ideas of criminalisation have been shaped by numerous shifting mid- to -late twentieth and early twenty-first century ideologies, such as anti-colonialism, Communism, various iterations of human rights, racial justice, neoliberalism, or, more recently, populist re-imaginings of the global. Shorter Abstract: The Western myth of Nuremberg has dominated understandings of the evolution of international criminal law. This paradigm has developed a narrative of post-war liberal progress, in which a universal model of externally-delivered, individualised criminal justice was interrupted by the Cold War then rediscovered through various international tribunals in the 1990s, culminating in the International Criminal Court in 2002. The essay introduces alternative practices challenging the Nuremberg myth and the accountability model it propagates. The dossier's essays question the supposed 40-year hibernation of international criminal law after Nuremberg and demonstrate how ideas of criminalisation draw on numerous shifting post-war ideologies.

Phil Clark

Not Nuremberg—Histories of Alternative Criminalization Paradigms, 1945–2021: An Introduction

非纽伦堡——1945-2021年替代性刑事化范式历史：引言

Abstract: This article extends recent academic debates about the sociohistorical entanglements between neoliberalism and human rights by exploring transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone, which followed the country's decade-long civil war (1991-2002). It analyses the ways both the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) drew on 'economic' discourses, variously using the concepts of 'greed', 'corruption' and 'governance' to explain the broader context of the human rights violations with which they were concerned. By critically tracing how these discourses were mobilised, this article shows that neither the SLTRC nor the SCSL challenged the neoliberal vision of human rights. Rather, each process produced a narrative about Sierra Leone's civil war that not only effaced the deleterious role of neoliberal policies in the history of the conflict but also reproduced neoliberal ideas both about conflict and the economy. In this respect, my exploration of the Sierra Leone case demonstrates the importance of paying closer attention to how 'the socioeconomic' is conceptualised and accounted for within transitional justice and broader human rights processes, especially if they are to pose a more adequate challenge to the neoliberal order. Shorter abstract: This article extends recent academic debates about the sociohistorical entanglements between neoliberalism and human rights by exploring transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone after the country's decade-long civil war. The article focuses on the ways both the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission drew on discourses of 'greed', 'corruption' and 'governance' to explain the broader socioeconomic context of the human rights violations they were concerned with. The article demonstrates these discourses did not challenge but instead reinforced neoliberal visions of human rights.

Josh Bowsher

Rebel Greed and Postcolonial Governance: Neoliberal Accountings of the Past within Transitional Justice Processes in Sierra Leone

叛乱贪婪与后殖民治理：塞拉利昂过渡时期正义进程中的新自由主义历史核算

短名	Humanity
Journal Impact	0.93
国际分区	SOCIAL ISSUES(Q3)

涉及主题	政治学法学社会学哲学政治历史经济地理考古计算机科学心理学人权艺术语言学
出版信息	出版商: University of Pennsylvania Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 否
基本数据	创刊年份: 2019，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 0.00%

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development

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投稿经验分享

The United Nations War Crimes Commission 1943–1948: A Forgotten Highway to Postconflict Justice?

Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s

Collective Impunity for Transition? Consenso and the International Travels of a Spanish Paradigm

Not Nuremberg—Histories of Alternative Criminalization Paradigms, 1945–2021: An Introduction

Rebel Greed and Postcolonial Governance: Neoliberal Accountings of the Past within Transitional Justice Processes in Sierra Leone

The United Nations War Crimes Commission 1943–1948: A Forgotten Highway to Postconflict Justice?

Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s

Collective Impunity for Transition? Consenso and the International Travels of a Spanish Paradigm

Not Nuremberg—Histories of Alternative Criminalization Paradigms, 1945–2021: An Introduction

Rebel Greed and Postcolonial Governance: Neoliberal Accountings of the Past within Transitional Justice Processes in Sierra Leone

ISSN	2151-4364, 2151-4372
h-index	7