Chapter 7 sets out the key components of State responsibility under international law and then uses a series of case studies to demonstrate that responsibility in practice. Responsibility for a State’s negligent failure to prevent a terrorist attack looks at the acts and omissions of the Russian authorities with respect to the school siege at Beslan in 2003. Three cases have been chosen to exemplify the direct perpetration of terrorism by a State. The first case is the bombing by French agents of the Greenpeace boat, Rainbow Warrior, by French agents in New Zealand in 1985. The second involves certain acts of Syrian authorities following the protests related to the Arab Spring, in particular the widespread and systematic torture and summary execution of opponents of the regime. The third case is the conduct of Russian forces in Ukraine following its invasion on 24 February 2022. Examples of State responsibility as accomplices to acts of terrorism are the responsibility of Liberia for the actions of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighbouring Sierra Leone during the civil war and the potential responsibility of Syria for the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in Beirut on 14 February 2005.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

Chapter 4 proceeds to the first published, but chronologically last, installment of the trilogy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and begins with an analysis of the multiple temporalities of that novel, which are discussed in dialogue with the historiographical theories of Reinhart Kosseleck. It then examines Pynchon’s both bleak and desperately funny depiction of how modernity reached its dark apogee in World War II, where humanity’s romantic affair with technology was finally fully consummated. In particular, this theme is traced through a meticulous analysis of the theme of immachination, which runs through all three novels but reaches its natural (or unnatural) culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow. In dialogue with important critical work by Ali Chetwynd as well as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, the chapter concludes by revisiting the pervasive metaphor of the crossroads and the related theme of complicity in order to discuss whether the novel – and the global trilogy in general – is as relentlessly negative as they argue or whether it poses possible alternatives to the status quo.

The past decade has seen outside states, coalitions or regional organisations lead military operations at the (real or alleged) ‘invitation’ of one of the parties embroiled in military strife – notably, in Mali, Syria, Yemen, and The Gambia. This chapter addresses key legal questions, starting with the validity of a government’s ‘consent’. Others include the legal nature and the effects of such consent, and how a government might lose its capacity to consent to military action in its own territory. The chapter includes analysis of the legal doctrines that might limit the lawfulness of the intervention despite such consent, including the invalidity of consent, the ‘negative equality’ doctrine or complete abstention, unlawful purposes, and other grounds of illegality, such as the inviting state’s complicity in international crimes. In the cases examined in the volume, the intervening states typically invoked multiple legal grounds, of which invitation is only one, and the UN Security Council has been intensely involved: the chapter appraises the legal significance of these novel features. It concludes with a summary of the trialogue method and an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter focuses on Bolaño’s writings that confront the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973–1990) and the complicity of intellectuals with Pinochet’s dictatorial state. Prior to Bolaño, few if any Chilean writers had reflected on complicity at such length or with such scathing intentionality. His works illuminate the moral gray zones to which the dictatorship gave rise and the myriad ways civilians and intellectuals became implicated in the regime’s reign of terror. Focusing especially on Bolaño’s 1996 novel Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2004) and his 2000 novel Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile, 2003), the chapter evokes several scenes from Bolaño’s two “dictatorship” novels to illustrate a wide spectrum of characters that range from fully complicit subjects to “implicated subjects” (Michael Rothberg). If the poet-killer Carlos Wieder, also known as Alberto Ruíz-Tagle, is clearly an accomplice to the Pinochet regime in Distant Star, figures such as the Opus Dei priest Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix or the belle of the literary salons María Canales in By Night in Chile, might be more aptly characterized as implicated subjects whose example brings into relief the ways a “civilized” culture inhabited by barbarism becomes part and parcel of dictatorial rule.

This chapter sets out to establish what Molière’s prefaces and meta-theatrical plays tell us about audience laughter. In these texts, Molière sets up the notion of an ideal public, primarily by means of spectator characters who act as models or counter-models in terms of reception. His laughing characters allow us to understand the link between Molière and the laughter of a public that saw itself in them. In this way, Molière echoes wider contemporary discourse on comedy at the same time as contributing to its development. He offers reflections on parody, on the connection between audience laughter and poetics, on the relationship of the social aspects of audience laughter to moral decency and on laughter as an indication of a comic author’s merit. His spectator characters reflect a contemporary discourse that saw laughter as an entirely legitimate reaction to the performance of comedies, and Molière is thereby situated at the heart of the critical re-evaluation of laughter that occurred between 1660 and 1670, of which he was at once a beneficiary and one of the driving forces.

This chapter analyses how an international wrongful act accrues from the violation of a due diligence obligation and its consequences. The first part discusses due diligence obligations against secondary rules of ARSIWA concerning the existence of a wrongful act. It is argued that violations of due diligence obligations stem from omissions and that the difficulty of establishing responsibility for failure of due diligence typically concerns the application of rules governing the breach, rather than rules of attribution of conduct. Accordingly, a critical reappraisal of the genealogy of Article 14(3) of ARSIWA and breaches of preventive obligations is undertaken; the chapter argues that the ILC wrongly conceptualised the ‘event’ to be prevented as a secondary rule, this way confusing the relationship between prevention and due diligence. The rest of the chapter examines due diligence obligations against other relevant secondary rules, such as circumstances precluding wrongfulness (specifically, force majeure and distress), the relationship between due diligence and complicity, and how reparation is to be accorded following a breach of due diligence obligations.

This chapter explores the foundations of due diligence under international law. Due diligence emerged in the international practice of the nineteenth century concerning diplomatic protection and the security of states, and developed as a notion linked to the responsibility of states in connection with acts of private individuals. For a long time, due diligence was conceived as a concept pertaining to the realm of international responsibility and it was primarily associated with the measure of a state organ’s fault. The chapter illustrates how, during the twentieth century, due diligence migrated from the realm of secondary rules to primary rules. The chapter clarifies the relationship between due diligence and overlapping concepts, like international liability and the notion of general principles of international law. It is argued that due diligence should be construed as an identifier for a typology of international obligations, something that provides meaning and rationale to them. The chapter concludes by clarifying the difference between due diligence as a ‘qualifier’ for primary rules of states, and due diligence as a ‘process’ linked to the activities of non-state actors.

While many critics have noted ways in which Bishop writes indirectly and obliquely about war, it should also be noted that when her first volume, North & South, appeared in 1946, Louise Bogan, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, had no difficulty registering the presence of war in Bishop’s poetry, declaring that it “contains all manner of references to war and warriors.” Life-long readers of Bishop understand how the profound, insinuative workings of her layered language allows them at times to focus on how she was able to keep war at a distance, while also opening her poetic consciousness to its inexorable

presence. She lived and wrote both inside and outside the camp. With the end of WW II and the coming of the Atomic Age, a new note of apocalyptic threat emerges in Bishop’s poetry. Her Cold War poetry reflects the sense that no one is any longer a “civilian.”

Chapter 9 examines the increasing number of cases involving allegations of crimes by commercial actors in situations of armed conflict, in particular under domestic criminal statutes. The chapter examines various forms of liability to understand the nature of this turn to corporate criminal liability for certain activities associated with war economies.

This chapter revisits the important role of affect in pedagogical efforts to engage students with complicity in democratic education. Recent theoretical shifts on affect and complicity enable education scholars and practitioners to move the focus away from what we do not want (i.e. more complicity) toward anti-complicity. The new openings emerging from these theoretical shifts create pedagogical spaces to inspire anti-complicity praxes— that is, actions that actively resist social harm in everyday life. It is argued that for this to happen, it is necessary that educators navigate students through the affective and political dynamics of complicity in both critical and strategic ways. The chapter concludes by discussing how an anti-complicity pedagogy may be ‘translated’ into strategic moves in democratic education.

In order to narrow down the concrete content of an international due diligence standard, the third chapter starts with a brief historical summary of how due diligence obligations have entered the international stage. It retraces how the standard of due diligence has been developed in early scholarly writings before it was widely applied in the jurisprudence of so-called Claims Commissions in the context of alien protection laws. In spite of this early recognition, several codification attempts yet have failed which is why the standard of due diligence is not entailed in the ILC’s draft articles on state responsibility that mirror the modern status quo of the customary law on state responsibility. In a second step, chapter 3 therefore undertakes an attempt to locate the position of due diligence obligations in the existing law on state responsibility by comparing and contrasting the standard with other concepts of responsibility.

Professor Aron Trainin (1883–1957), an outstanding Russian and Soviet criminal law scholar, has played a leading role in academic support of the Soviet Union’s team in Nuremberg and contributed to the drafting of the IMT Charter and Judgment. His writings to a large extent shaped the Soviet approach to international criminal law. The chapter addresses Trainin’s biography and follows the major steps in his academic career from its beginning in tsarist Russia to its the peak, when Trainin held the positions of associate member of Soviet Academy of Sciences and professor at Moscow University. The chapter traces the sources of Trainin’s interest in international criminal law and addresses the scholar’s contribution to the ICL. The author focuses specifically on two areas, where the impact of Trainin’s was significant – a legal justification for crimes against peace, and the concept of complicity.

The primary source of law before the Court is the Statute itself and the principal subsidiary instruments, the Elements of Crimes and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The Court may also refer to relevant rules of international law, notably those of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Article 25 of the Statute sets out the various forms of participation in crimes starting with direct perpetration but also including ordering and forms of complicity and attempt. Article 28 defines so-called command or superior responsibility, by which an individual may be held responsible for crimes perpetrated by subordinates. The Court cannot prosecute an individual who was under 18 at the time of the crime. Statutory limitation of crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction is prohibited. There is a presumption that all crimes subject to the Court’s jurisdiction require proof of intent and knowledge. Several defences are codified: diminished mental capacity, voluntary intoxication, self-defence, duress and necessity, mistake of law and mistake of fact and, under limited circumstances, superior orders.