Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law: From Speakers' Corner to War Crimes

Description

Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law addresses the emerging jurisprudence and international law concerning propaganda in war crimes investigations and trials. The role of propaganda in the perpetration of atrocities has emerged as a central theme in the war crimes trials in the past century. The Nuremburg trials initially, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda currently, have all substantially contributed to the development of international law in this respect. Investigating and exploring the areas between lawful and unlawful propaganda, they have dealt with specific mechanisms and consequences of the phenomenon within the perspective and framework of their international legal mandates. But the cultural codes and argots through which propaganda operates have vexed international courts struggling to assign responsibility to the instigators of mass crimes, as subtle, but potentially fatal, communications often remain undetected, misinterpreted or even dismissed as entirely irrelevant. With contributions from leading international scholars and legal practioners, Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law pursues a comparative approach to this problem: providing an overview of the current state of the theory of propaganda in the social sciences; exploring this theory in the legal analysis of war crimes and related proceedings; and, finally, offering a study of the prosecution of propaganda-related crimes in international law, and the newly emerging jurisprudence of war crimes propaganda cases. Dedication Contents List of figures Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction • Predrag Dojčinović Part 1: Analysis, investigations, prosecutions 1 The indictable propaganda: a bottom-up perspective • Nenad Fišer 2 Word scene investigations: toward a cognitive linguistic approach to the criminal analysis of open source evidence in war crimes cases • Predrag Dojčinović 3 Propaganda as a crime under international humanitarian law: theories and strategies for prosecutors • Dan Saxon Part 2: Expert evidence 4 The challenges of understanding Kinyarwanda key terms used to instigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda • Mathias Ruzindana 5 Propaganda, hate speech and mass killings • Anthony Oberschall Part 3: Trials and jurisprudence: a scrutiny 6 Hitler’s notorious Jew-baiter: the prosecution of Julius Streicher • Margaret Eastwood 7 Propaganda in the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia • Michael G. Kearney 8 The ghost of causation in international speech crime cases • Susan Benesch 9 Crimes of atrocity, the problem of punishment and the situ of law • Lawrence Douglas Index