Social Science Research Council

I read After Genocide while en route to Kenya. And especially, while en route back. I tried to square what I was reading with what I was hearing in Kenya, wondering if Kenyan’s hopes for justice were unreasonably high, or if in fact what we were seeing there was a fundamental challenge to [...]

Daniel Agundo’s commentary about After Genocide is thought provoking. He is correct in emphasizing that processes towards international development, especially those developments that seek to provide global public goods, can be iterative and plodding, often involving “two steps forward and one step back.” He claims that international justice is no different, and thus [...]

In his provocative book, After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice, Adam Smith makes a slightly barbed remark to the effect that international justice is a form of globalization, and the ICC is an international institution similar in some respects to the World Bank, but that most advocates of international justice find themselves on the [...]

Neither truth commissions nor domestic trials are as black and white as Professor Heller’s critique of my comments seems to argue.

First, Professor Heller is concerned that a post-war German truth commission would have meant that the architects of the Nazi period would have been absolved after “the Allies…simply asked them to admit their sins.” [...]

Professor Roht-Arriaza makes several characteristically insightful comments about After Genocide. They have spurred me to continue the conversation.

The professor notes that international judicial institutions have learned from some of the failings of early tribunals and, for example, have worked hard to improve outreach in their later iterations. This is undoubtedly true and in [...]

Adam Smith’s book posits that international criminal tribunals, especially those of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), don’t actually do justice for the people of the places where atrocities occurred. The Tribunals are remote, have a tin ear for local politics, and don’t lead to lasting improvements in local justice systems. Instead, [...]

It is a rare treat for an author to be given the opportunity to continue the discussion about his or her book in the wake of reviews. I am grateful to be able to do so, especially when the reviewers have made penetrating observations about my book. It is in that spirit, and [...]

Reading Adam Smith’s book now, after the intense debates around the ICC’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir, provokes a deep sadness at how impoverished the discussion of international judicial proceedings is when it comes time for policy prescriptions. This does not need to be the case. There have been volumes written about how [...]

Ask an international human rights lawyer and the director of a human rights organization, and they will tell you that justice has no price.
That’s not the case in Muslim tribal societies, at least when homicide is committed in inter- or intra-tribal disputes. The customary way of settling securing justice is through the payment of bloodmoney [...]

Where the converted are the most fervent preachers of a belief, the disillusioned are its fiercest prosecutors. For Adam Smith, faith in international justice was part of his family’s traditions. No longer. His book After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice (New York, Prometheus Books, 2009) is one of the strongest indictments of international criminal [...]