A classic tenet of the just war tradition is that the purpose of a just war is to secure a just peace. In the past generation, securing a just peace in the wake of military victory has been perhaps the thorniest problem in United States foreign policy, encountered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Kosovo. This chapter offers a moral framework for judging and pursuing a just peace in the wake of military intervention – an ethic of political reconciliation. It roots the ethic in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, seeks also to express it in secular language, and contrasts it with the globally dominant liberal peace. The chapter then applies the ethic to Iraq and shows how the it may help to build a deeper and more lasting peace and thus secure a critical foreign policy interest of the United States.

Chapter 2 maps out major theories in peace and conflict studies dealing with the interaction between nature, war, and peace. While acknowledging that the field is characterised by a broad diversity of research traditions and methodological approaches, the aim of the chapter is to offer a review of the research that has had most influence on international policies and legal development. Although legal scholars often think of this literature as monolithic, what will emerge from this chapter is that there is a vivid debate on the linkages between environment and conflict, which is explained by the different underlying paradigms and concepts. It is important to pay attention to the contested nature of these analytical frameworks to better understand (and challenge) the approaches that emerged at the international level. The second part of the chapter introduces environmental justice as an alternative framework to move beyond certain problematic assumptions about environmental scarcity/abundance that have fed into international law. Environmental justice perspectives will be used in subsequent chapters to think about justice accordingly and beyond international law.

Chapter 6, ‘Imagining a Community’, brings together, and builds on, the findings made throughout the book about the nature of the international community imagined within the archive. This shows that whilst the tribunal functioned as a site of liberal international governance, that underneath this liberal vision sat a distinctly illiberal understanding of community. In particular this shows that the archive divided the international community into the international, as a site of peace and order, and the local, as a site of barbarity; protected a space wherein violence was a legitimate aspect of international relations; and projected a patriarchal and colonial vision of community as the voice of the subaltern was denied.

This brings these findings together and considers what this tells us about the role of archives in international criminal justice and international politics. This reveals a complex picture where the principles and strategies that underpinned knowledge production within the ICTR’s archive shifted over time, from a form of restorative justice to a more strictly retributive model. This also meant a shift from more far-reaching records of violence produced under the witnesses’ influence to a more legalistic record of violence. Over time, the archive, then, less closely reflected the needs and priorities of those affected by the genocide and arguably also produced a more conservative vision of the international community. The chapter also examines the extent to which these dynamics are an inevitable part of international criminal justice,. as a liberal tool of international governance, in part by examining the ICC. This argues that whilst there is little to suggest international criminal justice must necessarily act with such a reductionist view of its function, that these issues continue to underpin current practices of international courts.

nternational lawyers and political economists look at exits from armed conflict from different perspectives. From a legal perspective, the role of law has been to provide a framework to regulate the use of force and to articulate a common vision of the pathways towards constitutional democracies. In the post-Cold War period, the UN and other international actors hoped to end armed conflict through peace agreements, peacekeeping, statebuilding and peacebuilding – summarised as creating a ‘liberal peace’. But armed conflicts have become internal and complex – and there has been widespread recognition that the ‘liberal peace’ has not, and cannot, deliver. From a political economy perspective, the process of forming political settlements gives some explanation: law is less relevant than the reordering of partisan interests of power holders. This questions the viability of attempts to build a ‘liberal peace’. The insights of political economy are thus a reality check to inform the search for viable alternatives to prevent or exit violent conflict.