SOAS Research Online

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.