Accountability for collective wrongdoing /

This collection of essays, which originated from a 2009 conference on collective responsibility at the University of Western Ontario, explores the challenges of pursuing accountability for regime and group offenses. The 11 chapters--written by scholars of international law, international politics, political ethics, and legal philosophy--examine the feasibility and limitations of holding groups accountable for collective wrongdoing. Because the prevailing criminal justice paradigm in Western societies assumes that legal accountability must be judged individually, this book makes an important contribution to the expanding scholarship on transitional justice. Three themes are salient in the book: the limits of the criminal justice model in confronting regime atrocities, the challenges in identifying group membership and defining collective responsibility, and the challenge of assigning appropriate punishment for group offenses. The first six essays focus on collective accountability; the remaining five assess the challenges of distributing criminal responsibility. Because of the theoretical and philosophical nature of the essays, the book will be of primary interest to political and legal philosophers concerned with international justice and the politics of transitional justice. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections. M. Amstutz Wheaton College