Restraining the Barbarians: Can International Criminal Law Help?

Abstract

Civil armed conflicts are nasty, brutish, peculiarly intractable, and, these days, often long, even where one side is vastly stronger than the other. In earlier times, power asymmetries translated more readily into slavish submission, expulsion, or extermination of the weaker party. Today, the universalization of human rights as a kind of secular faith and a spreading (albeit by no means universal) conviction that gross violence within a country threatens the interests of other countries combine to inhibit that translation. Yet, it may nevertheless occur. Ask the Tutsis of Rwanda; that is to say, ask the remnant who survived.