The Criminal State offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights.
Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice.
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. His many books include The Right Wrong Man (91ÌÒÉ«) and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.
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“At a time of widespread impunity for lawless governments, Lawrence Douglas has written a rich, provocative study of how international law has charged the state itself as a criminal organization. Rather than treating the state as a protector against violence and abuse, this compelling book understands the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials as crucial moments when international law pitted itself against state-sponsored crimes of aggression. It makes a powerful argument that aggressive war should be prosecuted because it leads to war crimes and mass atrocity, posing hard questions about what can be really expected from international criminal law.”—Gary J. Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo
“The Criminal State represents one of the most significant scholarly contributions I have read in years. This is a superb book, destined to become a classic in the literature on international criminal justice and its history. It is strongly argued, the research is vast in scope, and the writing is terrific.”—David Luban, Georgetown Law School
“This is an epic study of an epoch-making transformation in politics and law: after centuries, the halo of sovereignty protecting states was cast down. After a first plan to hold states accountable for their aggression, the prosecution of leaders for atrocity became the preferred model. Lawrence Douglas’s dramatic and learned story allows magnificent perspective on today’s headlines—perspective the world needs, since it is by no means clear that international affairs have been transformed by law in the right ways.”—Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
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