War crimes, genocide and the value of a social harm approach in a post accountability world

Diminishing support for international regulatory mechanisms, principally the International Criminal Court, demonstrates a lack of political will to engage with the global harms of state crime. Governments have been able to distance themselves from the human cost of conflict by various means: private military contractors, extraordinary rendition, remote assassination via unmanned drone technology, and covert Special Forces incursions. The conceptual and evidential issues confronting a contemporary analysis of war crime, genocide and state crime, are not new to criminological research. Exploring the purpose of a research agenda focused on state crime, the chapter demonstrates the value of global crime research, in the context of war crimes and genocide, with a focus on harm reduction. In a post-accountability political world, addressing harm is a more productive approach than attempting to hold governments to international standards that can only ever succeed, but more likely fail, through bureaucratic self-regulation and political self-interest.