INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE,
WAR CRIMES AND TERRORISM:
THE U.S. RECORD  
Volume 69 No. 4 (Winter 2002)
Arien Mack, Editor

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Editor's Note

The origins of the Social Research conference at which the papers in this issue were first presented are complicated. Its subject was adapted twice in the course of its development. In the winter of 2000, when we began our planning for the tenth conference in the Social Research series, we intended to organize a conference on “Punishment.” We were motivated by a great many issues, including the vastly disproportionate number of African-American males incarcerated in United States prisons, the use of the death penalty in the United States—a form of punishment that has disappeared from almost all other countries in the West—and the wish to examine the history of punishment both in the United States and elsewhere as a way of understanding and perhaps even affecting our decision-making processes. Events for which we were unprepared, however, led us to postpone this subject for a future date and replace it with one closer to home. In the spring of 2002 we, and the rest of the country, became aware of the raid in Thanh Phong, Vietnam, led by Bob Kerrey, then a Navy Seal, now president of the New School, that caused the deaths of more than a dozen unarmed civilians, mostly women and children. Our distress at learning of this event caused us to refocus our attention from the broad subject of “Punishment” to the more specifically timely topic of “International Justice: War Crimes and Atrocities.” We believed that an extended reflection on the United States record in these matters would contribute to the “educational moment” that both Bob Kerrey and we hoped would emerge from what was a very traumatic moment for us all.

But events again interfered, this time on September 11, 2001. There was now no way to organize a conference on international justice and war crimes without including acts of terrorism, so the conference focus was once again modified. The program we held at the New School on April 25-27, 2002, was entitled International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record. Of course we hope, like Bob Kerrey, that the conference and this issue of Social Research will become part of a larger educational moment as we continue to try to come to terms with the United States record in relation to the commission and prosecution of war crimes, especially as our government threatens to wage war on Iraq and we continue to contend with recurring global threats of terrorism.

Our intention in convening this conference was to reflect upon and examine how war crimes and acts of terrorism are and ought to be dealt with. The events of September 11 made painfully clear the urgent need not only for a globally accepted code of international
human rights and civilized relations among and within nations, but for a globally accepted system of justice in which war crimes would be prosecuted by a variety of international and national jurisdictions. The United States has already made important contributions to this effort, beginning with the Nuremberg Trials and the drafting of the Geneva Conventions. However, prior to September 11, American foreign policy had taken an unsettling anti-internationalist turn that put a variety of actual or potential international agreements and forms of collective self-regulation in danger. Unfortunately, the events of September 11 and those that have followed have not done anything to alter this stance.

A crucial consequence of our anti-internationalist posture is the unwillingness of American political actors to support the ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which, for the first time, provides a universal enforcement mechanism for agreements and conventions concerning war crimes, acts of genocide, and human rights violations. This court, whose conventions for its establishment have now been ratified without United States participation, may enable us to leave behind earlier forms of enforcement that were applied exclusively against weak states or those that lost wars or military confrontations. Unfortunately, however unjustly, America’s opposition to the new universal jurisdictions reinforces the views of critics who claim that the United States is willing to apply sanctions of international criminal law only to its enemies. If we demand that the new court must have no jurisdiction over American soldiers or government officials, it will fuel the view that the United States hopes to assert a new kind of American “exceptionalism” and reveal the bad faith of our efforts to prosecute war criminals and insist on adherence to human rights.

International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record seeks to examine the American role in the evolution of new forms of international criminal jurisdictions from a variety of perspectives. It explores how successful the United States has been in enforcing among its own personnel the international standards and conventions that have been incorporated into our national laws and military regulations, and compares our success in this regard with that of other countries that have also internalized these standards and conventions. In so doing, it takes seriously the arguments of those who fear that international jurisdictions constitute a threat to our national sovereignty and may compromise the supposedly model character of our institutions —especially our independent judiciary—and the special position, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities of the last remaining superpower.

This conference, like the nine that preceded it, could not have occurred without the support or advice of colleagues, friends, and foundations. I gratefully acknowledge the advice and guidance of Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, who is without doubt the world’s expert on human rights. I am grateful too for the advice of my colleagues at the Graduate Faculty, particularly Andrew Arato and David Plotke, and of course to the conference participants, all of whom have spent a large part of their lives concerned with these issues. Finally, I am grateful to the Open Society Institute, the Russell Sage Foundation, and an anonymous donor for making this conference and these papers possible.

Arien Mack
Editor

Recommended Reading

 Martyrdom, Self-sacrifice and Self-denial
Vol. 75 No. 2 (Summer 2008)

Punishment: The U.S. Record
Vol. 74 No. 2 (Summer 2007)

Their America: States in the Eyes of the Rest of the World
Vol. 72 No. 4 (Winter 2005)

Islam: The Public and Private Spheres
Vol. 70 No. 3 (Fall 2003)

You may also be interested in the other issues in our conference series.

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