Book Review, Terje Einarsen & Joseph Rikhof, A Theory of Punishable Participation in Universal Crimes (2018)

In A Theory of Punishable Participation in Universal Crimes, Terje Einarsen and Joseph Rikhof unpack concepts of liability for individual contributions to universal crimes. Universal crimes – namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and acts of aggression – tend to occur when a state or another powerful organization (a non-state actor, for example) collectivizes and channels the involvement of many people to commit the crime. The people who execute the acts are rarely ever the people who coordinate them. This disjuncture renders participation difficult to define and punish – individual acts may elide conventional legal intelligibility. Consequently, only a few individuals typically ever face prosecution for mass atrocities notwithstanding the involvement of what may be many thousands of individuals in the violence. An overview of the current legal theories of liability reveals that current approaches are inconsistent and imprecise. Therefore, Einarsen and Rikhof sought to develop a more comprehensive theory of personal criminal liability that would strengthen the ability of practitioners and policy makers to understand, explain, and predict the outcomes of the legal issues involved. This approach, moreover, would also better reflect the dynamics of the perpetration of atrocity.