Schwöbel-Patel: The Core Crimes of International Criminal Law

Christine Schwöbel-Patel (Univ, of Liverpool - Law) has posted The Core Crimes of International Criminal Law (in The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller, Frédéric Mégret, Sarah Nouwen, Jens David Ohlin & Darryl Robinson eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

The ‘core’ crimes enumerated in the Rome Statute - the crime of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression - are overwhelmingly assumed to be the most important international crimes. In this chapter, I aim to unsettle this assumption by revealing and problematising the civilisational, political-economic, and aesthetical biases behind designating these crimes as ‘core’. This is done by shedding light on discontinuities in the history of the core crimes, and unsettling the progress narrative from Nuremberg to Rome. More specifically, crimes associated with drug control are placed in conversation with the accepted history of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to exemplify a systematic editing of the dominant narrative of international criminal law.