Prior to the 1990s and the re-emergence of the crime of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, the arcane world of international law was a subject few non-experts knew or cared about. The Iron Curtain of the Cold War and the threat of mutual nuclear devastation held the world’s superpowers and their respective satellites in check. It became fashionable among certain Cold Warriors to claim that the field did not actually exist—that it was, in other words, irrelevant. There was some truth to the latter declaration, if not to the former: the global laws that had been agreed to over a century of international negotiations remained on the books, even if they were ignored.
If the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia stirred up public interest in the meaning of words such as genocide, war law and crimes against humanity, the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, effectively catapulted the global community into a frenzy of debate over the language and meaning of international...
Erna Paris was the author of many acclaimed works of literary non-fiction, including The Sun Climbs Slow: The International Criminal Court and the Search for Justice.
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