The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law by Kevin Jon Heller; Beyond Victor's Justice - The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited Edited by Yuki Tanaka, Tim McCormack and Gerry Simpson
![handle is hein.journals/meljil13 and id is 350 raw text is: THE NUREMBERG MILITARY TRIBUNALS AND THE ORIGINS OF
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW BY KEVIN JON HELLER (OXFORD, UK:
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011) 509 PAGES. PRICE US$135.00
(HARDBACK) ISBN 9780199554317.
BEYOND VICTOR'S JUSTICE? THE TOKYO WAR CRIMES TRIAL REVISITED
EDITED BY YUKI TANAKA, TIM MCCORMACK AND GERRY SIMPSON
(LEIDEN, NETHERLANDS: MARTINUS NIJHOFF, 2011) 402 PAGES. PRICE
US$192.00 (HARDBACK) ISBN 9789004203037.
'We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound
intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our
existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of
reference.'
Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, Historyl
At a time when the field of international criminal law is moving beyond its
adolescence into a greater sense of existential comfort, focusing on closure
mechanisms for the ad hoc tribunals and on the 10 year anniversary of the
International Criminal Court, two recent publications revisit what they take to be
neglected institutional sites at the origins of the field. Kevin Jon Heller's The
Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law
makes this bold claim within his title: a claim that anchors the text as a kind of
origin narrative rather than merely a descriptive history of this corner of what
might be called 'tribunal studies'. Yuki Tanaka, Tim McCormack and Gerry
Simpson's edited volume entitled Beyond Victor's Justice? The Tokyo War
Crimes Trial Revisited is more restrained, 'revisiting' the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East ('Tokyo Trial') to consider alternatives to the familiar
victor's justice critique without assigning the tribunal such constitutive power
over the field. Taken together, these books attempt to re-inscribe neglected
institutional pasts into the present of international criminal law, offering alternate
lineages and ways of understanding the field's development and animating
moments.
Before considering the contributions of these two books in more detail, it is
worth pausing to note different historiographical approaches in international
criminal law scholarship. How is the history of this field written? The more or
less standard textbook account tends to offer a progress narrative that began with
the post-World War II tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, was interrupted for
several decades by the Cold War, resumed during the 1990s with the ad hoc
tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, adapted with the rise of
'hybrid' and 'internationalised' tribunals, and which culminated with the
establishment of the permanent International Criminal Court. Social theorist
Michel Foucault would have taken issue with such a telling by reminding us of
Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' in Paul Rabinow (ed), The Foucault
Reader (Pantheon, 1984) 76, 89.
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