War crimes and the new global reckoning

The world is on the brink of war again. War crimes, massacres and genocides are coming to characterise our modern world. Humanity is in the deepest crisis it has ever seen.

- Ahmet Sait Akcay

German critic Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940, said: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” These words predicted the scale of atrocity during the Nazi invasion of Europe.

Benjamin believed that barbarism was being transmitted from one hand to another. Almost a century before him, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson raised a very similar concern about the trajectory of civilisation, remarking, “The course of civilisation is an endless train of felonies” and it seems this train is still on the move.

The 20th century was full of genocides and crimes against humanity. Colonial atrocities, genocides and mass massacres, along with two world wars, seemed to establish a legacy of crime for the 21 century.

Steve Crawshaw’s recent book, Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice, is an urgent call for justice. As an award-winning journalist and historian, his book is a document of crises in the struggle against war crimes.

Reports, court documents and registers are seamlessly woven into his acute sense of justice and hope. This results from his experiences and what he witnessed over two decades on the front lines of justice through his work at Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Freedom from Torture.

His commitment to justice is clearly seen in his covering “stories of human rights abuses in the hope of making change”. These observations from the field add to his judgments throughout the book.

The book provides us with a broad perspective on the battle against injustice, registering the failures and successes over a century.