War crimes constitute breaches of LOIAC giving rise to penal accountability of the individuals who perpetrated the proscribed acts. In the past, it was frequently asserted that every breach of LOIAC was a war crime, but – as pointed out already by H. Lauterpacht – ‘textbook writers and, occasionally, military manuals and official pronouncements have erred on the side of comprehensiveness’ in making ‘no attempt to distinguish between violations of the rules of warfare and war crimes’.2179 It is currently clear that only select violations of LOIAC are stigmatized as war crimes.2180 Some of these violations are regarded as ‘grave’ breaches (see infra 1066). But ‘[o]ther serious violations’ of LOIAC are listed as war crimes in Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute (see infra 1067). Of course, by itself, the adjective ‘serious’ (or, for that matter, ‘grave’) does not provide a useful compass indicating the contours of war crimes.2181 War crimes must be defined in specie.

This chapter is the final component of this book’s complexity theory of economic evolution, but not the least: it brings together all the elements developed in previous chapters to build a general macro theory of innovation and economic growth. As debated in Chapter 3, in economic theory, there is no real consensus across schools on the nature of growth. There is, however, consensus on the idea that growth originates from the cumulative effect of innovation. In Chapter 8, a theory of creative destruction was developed that explains, at the very least, productivity growth from cumulative process innovation. To a lesser degree, it explains product innovation and product diversity growth. In this chapter, it is shown that process and product innovation have a co-evolutionary role in generating economic growth in a demand-led model of economic evolution. From there, a closed set of relationships is derived to represent the macroeconomic connection and causation between innovation, productivity, employment, production, investment and demand, offering a complete model of endogenous economic growth based on innovation.

The closing act of the story concerns the drafting of the final judgment. The final task of judicial bureaucrats is to stitch together the fragmentary instructions received from the judges to create coherent and persuasive texts. Like weaving, the drafting process is all but smooth. Every time the warp meets the weft, loose threads come out which must be ironed out. Likewise, every new paragraph added to the text of a judgment reveals logical leaps, internal inconsistencies, and gaps in the reasoning that must be papered over for the decision to wield its prescriptive and symbolic authority. Despite these difficulties, the final decision – the magical artefact that makes the pride of our lot – is somehow churned out on time. Its seamless fabric, now up for scrutiny by journalists, practitioners, and scholars, carefully conceals the infinite series of choices, confrontations, and hesitations that marked every turn of the proceedings.

The requirement of distinction between combatants and civilians – as well as between military objectives and civilian objects – is underscored in Article 48 of AP/I, entitled ‘[b]asic rule’:

This chapter flashes back to the first days of Sophie’s employment at the ICJ registry, and sees her and her girlfriend Norma mull over the socio-professional features of the international judicial community. The chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the book and provides the reader with pointers to interpret the unfolding of judicial proceedings. The international judicial community has a twofold structure, at once cooperative and competitive. On the one hand, its members work together to secure control on courts and tribunals and insulate their internal activities from outside interference. On the other hand, community members ceaselessly strive to maximize their relative capital in a ruthless struggle for authority and prestige. The practices of the community are patterned, as they present regularities over time; they are competent, as they rest on collective background knowledge; and they weave together the discursive and the material world. Thus, community practices are the vehicle of both continuity and change, constraint and freedom in international adjudication.

Energy and climate policies may have significant economy-wide impacts that are regularly assessed based on quantitative energy-environment-economy models. These tend to vary in their conclusions on the scale and direction of the likely macroeconomic impacts of a low-carbon transition. This chapter traces the characteristic discrepancies in models’ outcomes to their origins in different macroeconomic theories, most importantly their treatment of technological innovation and finance. The relevant branches of macro-innovation theory are analysed and grouped into two classes: ‘equilibrium’ and ‘non-equilibrium’, which yield opposite conclusions for the economic impacts of low-carbon policies. It is shown that model outcomes are mainly determined by their representations of monetary and finance dimensions, and their interactions with investment, innovation and technological change.

This chapter explores the scientific consistency problems with current economic analysis of policy, offering a way forward to rebuild a consistent framework under the umbrella of complexity economics. A standard simple representation of the policy cycle is used, in order to place the role of scientists and economists into the policy-making process, and thus identify what kind of evidence is used in which stage of the policy-making process. Normative and positive traditions of policy analysis are described, with their respective roles in the policy cycle, and current inconsistencies identified. Inconsistencies in the philosophy of science currently used in economics are discussed. The Lucas critique is reviewed, arguably the main problem in economics. A list is drawn for desired empirical evidence to develop a complexity theory of economics.

This chapter concludes the discussion of interpretation by focusing on the emotions and mental processes of the interpreter. Each case presents at least one dilemma that cannot be solved through pure legal deduction. What options, then, does the interpreter have? First, they will seek the illusory comfort of legal objectivity, and convince themselves that the answer is out there, buried somewhere in the record. But it is not. Second, the interpreter will try to exercise responsible agency and provide an answer that best resonates with their ethical or political commitments. But the interpreter does not really know which interpretive outcome is preferable. Third, the interpreter will turn to the standard practices of the community and write pages upon pages of corollary analysis, hoping that the intractable issue will magically vanish. Finally, the interpreter will stick to their decision and defend it as the sole logical solution.