Stay the Hand of Vengeance is a useful overview of a difficult political issue, the prosecution of war crimes from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the Kosovo war. Bass rarely strays into describing the proceedings themselves nor the events that caused them, with the exception of the chapter on Bosnia. At the core of his book is "legalism", the notion that war criminals should be tried, rather than, for example, simply executed on sight or exiled.

Bass examines legalism through a series of case studies, from the British discussion of how Napoleon and his protégés should have been brought to justice, to the tortured response to war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and the Hague tribunal. Legalism sounds desirable, but as Bass argues, it is subject inevitably to a State's self interests, such as the concern by the U.S. government not to put American soldiers' lives at risk in Bosnia to capture war criminals who had harmed Bosnians, not Americans.

Bass mounts an important and effective defence of war crimes tribunals, in particular of Nuremberg. He argues against the lazy relativism that calls Nuremberg "victor's justice", showing how much effort was made to give the German defendants a fair trial. Unfortunately, the chapter on Nuremberg drags, in part because the material is so familiar. The chapter on the Hague suffers from a similar problem and at one point is more a discussion of Dayton than of war crimes. By contrast, the chapters on Napoleon and the Constantinople tribunal, set up to try Ottoman war criminals after the First World War, are powerful and important contributions to understanding earlier, failed attempts to deal with war crimes.

Although Bass acknowledges his debt to James P. Willis' work, his coverage of the Leipzig tribunal, at which Germans accused of atrocities during the First World War were half-heartedly tried, is excellent. Bass argues that one of the lessons of the Leipzig tribunal is that failed war crimes trials can provoke a nationalist backlash. This argument can be overdone. Leipzig was just one of many resentments manipulated by German nationalists in their successful attempt to portray Germans as the victims rather than the victimisers of the First World War. By contrast, the Constantinople tribunal helped stimulate an inward looking Turkish nationalism which avoided foreign entanglements and foreign influence. In the long run, however, the failure to prosecute war criminals for the Armenian genocide may have created a sense of impunity for human rights violations in Turkey, something which has undermined domestic rather than international stability.

Bass consistently asks why liberal states try, and sometimes fail, to live up to their liberal principles. The problem is that this question only really concerns two countries: the U.S. and Britain. Yet war crimes tribunals cannot work without broader international support, which poses the question as to how the liberal states such as Britain and the U.S. secure broader international backing for tribunals. Theoretical issues, such as what constitutes a war crime, are avoided. All of the cases which Bass examines are those of criminal wars pursued in a criminal manner. A war crime, in the sense in which Bass examines it, is therefore the opposite of the just war, a corollary which might have been fruitfully explored.

A major gap in the book is the scant coverage of the Arusha tribunal in Tanzania, set up by the UN to try those responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Here Bass misses an important opportunity to analyse liberal states acting in a less than liberal manner by ignoring the butchery that took place in Rwanda. France helped to train those responsible for the genocide and then launched a so-called "humanitarian intervention" to help them escape. The U.S. refused to call the killings a "genocide" until they had ended, for fear that it might be forced to intervene.

Bass' careful work in American, British and French archives sets a high standard for others in the field. Retribution for war crimes is, like the construction of memory, becoming a "hot" academic issue. In the same way that researching post-war memorialization is easier than studying the war itself, so post-war tribunals are a more straightforward issue to examine than the crimes themselves. Bass shows that this drift towards studying how we deal with the past as opposed to the past itself need not be shallow, but can, instead, be based on a solid foundation of primary research. Ultimately, as Bass rightly acknowledges, what prevents war crimes is not the threat of prosecution but the willingness of liberal states to fight and win wars against criminal regimes. So while how and why crimes are punished is important, why and in what circumstances we are willing to prevent them will remain a greater concern.

Andrew Apostolou is a historian at St. Antony's College, Oxford.

"Stay the Hand of Vengence: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals ". Click here to order.

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