Description
According to a now standardized account, what distinguishes the crime of genocide from other atrocity crimes is the perpetrators’ dolus specialis, or ‘specific intent to destroy a group as such.’ Because typical histories have considered case law only from U.N. courts, the literature on responsibility offers only a partial view of how global political institutions have used the 'dolus specialis test’ to hold people responsible. This paper compares prosecutions of genocide and the crime against humanity of extermination between U.N. courts and international people's courts in order to understand the politics of responsbility as it manifests in atrocity trials and how the ongoing practice(s) of legal doctrine impacts the global political projects they sustain or within which they are embedded. It compares how courts across time and space have interpreted the idea of specific intent differently and with what impacts, whether social, legal, or political, such a scheme has on the possibilities of responsibility as politics at the level of international order. It identifies entanglements between the idea of responsibility and imperial logics of liability in the distributional consequences these differing formulations of the idea of dolus specialis, some which far exceed the epistemic boundaries of legal analysis carried out during an atrocity trial.
