However, that is not why such wars are criminal. Aggressive war is a crime because it entails killing without justification. First, banning aggression restricted states from using force to protect their core sovereign rights, including even their rights of political independence and territorial integrity. Those core states’ rights cannot make sense of the move to ban aggression. Second, what distinguishes aggression from any other sovereignty violation-what makes it criminal, when no other sovereignty violation is-is not that it involves an especially egregious violation of territorial integrity or political independence, but that it involves killing without justification. Third, the unjustified killing account makes sense of aggression’s standing alongside genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The traditional notion that aggression is a crime against sovereignty instead isolates aggression as the inexplicably odd crime out. Fourth, the public reasons for restricting jus ad bellum rights in the early twentieth century focused not on infringements of states’ rights but on the infliction of death without justification. Finally, the importance of wrongful killing to the criminalization of aggression was apparent at the post-World War II tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Understanding the crime in this way matters doctrinally. This understanding clarifies the boundaries of the crime, resolving hard cases like unilateral humanitarian intervention and bloodless invasion. It also has implications for the legal rights of soldiers involved on either side of such wars.Īuthor.

Rubenfeld, Kim Lane Scheppele, Scott Shapiro, John Witt, and participants in the Prior to the first draft to granular criticism of the fully drafted text, I amĭeeply indebted to Dapo Akande, Gary Bass, Charles Beitz, Kiel Brennan-Marquez,Īmy Chua, David Crane, Oona Hathaway, Paul Kahn, Katerina Linos, Itamar Mann,ĭaniel Markovits, Frédéric Mégret, Marko Milanovic, Michael Reisman, Jed For potent contributions ranging from conceptual discussions Lecturer in Human Rights, UniversityĬollege London. Oxford Public International Law seminar and the American Society of

Warfare 1917 hacked unlimited morale