Trading order for justice? Prosecuting war criminals in the aftermath of conflict

During the 1990s, the major liberal powers sponsored international war crimes tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and engaged in lengthy negotiations to pursue similar policies in Cambodia and Sierra Leone. Despite the appearance that war crimes tribunals were a normal part of international politics however, in Burundi, Chechnya, East Timor, and elsewhere, the international community made little or no attempt to bear the responsibility of prosecuting war criminals. This dissertation examines the politics behind the choices made by the major liberal powers about how to deal with the perpetrators of mass atrocities in the aftermath of violent conflict. It focuses primarily on decisions to create and support international war crimes tribunals.; In the past decade, battles over how to deal with war criminals responsible for mass atrocities have gone undercover. Rather than openly rejecting the demands made by transnational networks of human rights advocates for war crime trials, the major liberal powers have increasingly paid lip service to the norm of legal accountability. Their actions however reveal deep ambivalence; the institutions they set up have been designed to be ineffective purveyors of justice. Despite states' efforts to maximize their control over war crimes tribunals however, this strategy has had the unintended consequence of generating further expectations that war criminals will be held legally accountable and given advocates a legitimate institutional base from which to promote policies for prosecuting war criminals.; Theoretically, the dissertation examines the evolution of the norm that war criminals should be held legally accountable before a war crimes tribunal beginning wit the Second World War. It then examines the evolution of this norm through the rise of the modern international human rights movement and its selective application since the end of the Cold War. Special attention is given to the politics surrounding the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as well as the politics of transitional justice in El Salvador, the Gulf War, and Sierra Leone.