Chapter 6 describes how terrorism is punishable under international criminal law. This body of international law holds natural persons – individuals – criminally responsible for the perpetration of international crimes. Although views differ among scholars, as the chapter describes, the better view is that individual acts of terrorism that do not fall within the definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide are not directly criminalized by international law. Particular attention is paid to the relevant caselaw of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Starting with a discussion of genocide studies and the Genocide Convention, this chapter analyzes the definition and the theories of the causes of genocide. It presents the proposed and used strategies of how to intervene when there is a genocide and how to prevent genocide. It also examines several catastrophic examples, including those in Bosnia and Rwanda and the Darfur crisis.

This form of international cooperation offered completely new possibilities for the suppression of a system of human trafficking that operated across oceans and continents, but at the same time it conflicted with the interests of particular states and their own mutual rivalries and on several occasions threatened to founder on the limitations imposed by national sovereign rights. Alongside the viability of the agreed measure, then, Chapter 6 looks at the diplomatic wrangling by which the British government tried to secure treaty obligations from as many states as possible and to overcome massive political resistance, notably from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, France and the United States. Yet this decades-long process of negotiation produced a mounting international consensus, particularly from the mid-1840s onwards, condemning slavery as a ‘crime against humanity’. One telling sign of this new moral climate was the emergence of one of the first international treaty regimes, which extended from Europe across North and South America and the Arab World to East and West Africa. Its foundational idea was to enforce an agreed humanitarian norms by military means if necessary. The fight against the slave trade, it is argued, gave rise to a new conception of intervention, and abolitionism became established as a key international guiding norm for ‘civilisational’ action in the long nineteenth century.

This chapter describes the three purposes the book serves.The first is to introduce readers to certain core questions in the philosophy of law, by way of engagement with international legal skepticism.The book’s second aim is to acquaint readers with recent work by legal and political philosophers on conceptual and moral questions specific to particular domains of international law.These include the nature of human rights, and of a crime against humanity, as well as the moral justifiability of certain core features of the law of war, international trade law, and international law’s stance on unilateral secession.Finally, the book aims to advance the debate on many of the topics it discusses.Examples include novel readings of both H.L.A. Hart’s and Ronald Dworkin’s reflections on international law, as well as new arguments regarding the existence of an international rule of law, the possible bases of a moral duty to obey international law, and the moral grounds of universal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity.A brief chapter-by-chapter outline is also included.