Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

The origins of the Social Research conference at which the papers in this issue were first presented are complicated. Its subject was adapted twice in the course of its development. In the winter of 2000, when we began our planning for the tenth conference in the Social Research series, we intended to organize a conference on “Punishment.” We were motivated by a great many issues, including the vastly disproportionate number of AfricanAmerican males incarcerated in United States prisons, the use of the death penalty in the United States—a form of punishment that has disappeared from almost all other countries in the West—and the wish to examine the history of punishment both in the United States and elsewhere as a way of understanding and perhaps even affecting our decision-making processes. Events for which we were unprepared, however, led us to postpone this subject for a future date and replace it with one closer to home. In the spring of 2002 we, and the rest of the country, became aware of the raid in Thanh Phong, Vietnam, led by Bob Kerrey, then a Navy Seal, now president of the New School, that caused the deaths of more than a dozen unarmed civilians, mostly women and children. Our distress at learning of this event caused us to refocus our attention from the broad subject of “Punishment ” to the more specifically timely topic of “International Justice : War Crimes and Atrocities.” We believed that an extended reflection on the United States record in these matters would contribute to the “educational moment” that both Bob Kerrey and we hoped would emerge from what was a very traumatic moment for us all. But events again interfered, this time on September 11, 2001. There was now no way to organize a conference on international justice and war crimes without including acts of terrorism, so the conference focus was once again modified. The program we held at the New School on April 25-27, 2002, was entitled InterEditor ’s Introduction national Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record. Of course we hope, like Bob Kerrey, that the conference and this issue of Social Research will become part of a larger educational moment as we continue to try to come to terms with the United States record in relation to the commission and prosecution of war crimes, especially as our government threatens to wage war on Iraq and we continue to contend with recurring global threats of terrorism. Our intention in convening this conference was to reflect upon and examine how war crimes and acts of terrorism are and ought to be dealt with. The events of September 11 made painfully clear the urgent need not only for a globally accepted code of international human rights and civilized relations among and within nations, but for a globally accepted system of justice in which war crimes would be prosecuted by a variety of international and national jurisdictions. The United States has already made important contributions to this effort, beginning with the Nuremberg Trials and the drafting of the Geneva Conventions. However, prior to September 11, American foreign policy had taken an unsettling anti-internationalist turn that put a variety of actual or potential international agreements and forms of collective self-regulation in danger. Unfortunately, the events of September 11 and those that have followed have not done anything to alter this stance. A crucial consequence of our anti-internationalist posture is the unwillingness of American political actors to support the ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which, for the first time, provides a universal enforcement mechanism for agreements and conventions concerning war crimes, acts of genocide, and human rights violations. This court, whose conventions for its establishment have now been ratified without United States participation, may enable us to leave behind earlier forms of enforcement that were applied exclusively against weak states or those that lost wars or military confrontations. Unfortunately , however unjustly, America’s opposition to the new universal jurisdictions reinforces the views of critics who claim that the VI SOCIAL RESEARCH United States is willing to apply sanctions of international criminal law only to its enemies. If we demand that...