Crimes of Complicity: Confronting Crises Through Collective Responsibility

• In Event: Responses to Crime and Justice

Abstract

The Nuremberg Principles established post-WWII set forth the premise that merely following orders was not a defense to criminal behavior, thus extending culpability beyond active perpetration: “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity … is a crime under international law.” Beyond their technical applications, these principles articulated a paradigm for interpreting criminality beyond the usual invocations of individual culpability that (infrequently, at best) attribute responsibility to notorious despots or “a few bad apples,” as the case may be. These principles suggest a collectivization of responsibility for grievous actions, representing a mechanism for redressing not only acts of direct violence but ones yielding structurally violent outcomes as well. In this context, we can view issues such as endemic racism, gross inequality, environmental injustice, and more through a lens of shared responsibility that potentially includes a reclaiming of power as well. The central question posed in this paper is whether a “crimes of complicity” framework can serve as a viable mechanism for mobilizing engagement with intractable and routinized crises—particularly in terms of responses to climate destabilization, toxification and degradation, and other forms of environmental criminality.

Author

• Randall Amster, Georgetown University