Justice and the faithless: The demand for disobedience in international criminal law

Abstract

How is disobedience required under international criminal law? How do war crimes trials demand and seek to cultivate disobedience as a response to atrocity? It is widely recognized that international law may require disobedience as a response to domestic authorities that order or legalize war crimes, yet this obligation to disobey is commonly conceptualized as a kind of byproduct of efforts to establish compliance with international norms. Drawing on empirical and theoretical scholarship analyzing “crimes of obedience,” this article investigates the demand for disobedience as articulated in international legal conventions and in war crimes trials dealing with lower-level soldiers and civilian authorities. It argues that disobedience is an important response to war crimes and that the capacity to disobey abusive authorities does not follow logically or inevitably from a commitment to obey laws that criminalize their abuses. In international criminal law, the obligation to disobey abusive authorities has been articulated in ways that require the exercise of critical judgment, as well as moral and political agency, in order to overcome various pressures to obey domestic authority. Prominent theoretical explanations of compliance with international law not only neglect the importance of such skills, but call for strategies that are in tension with their development. Closer attention to the role of exemplary disobedience in the legal reasoning animating war crimes prosecutions, I suggest, could strengthen the pedagogical role of legal institutions as a response to criminal obedience and as interventions in the politics of memory.