Book Description

"This book represents an addition to the growing scholarship on the law of state responsibility in international law. It seeks to assess this body of law in a comprehensive and critical manner as such efforts have so far been relatively few. While the issues regulated by international law have expanded and diversified, as has the range of actors, state responsibility has remained a central institution of international law. These developments nevertheless motivate taking a fresh look at the law of state responsibility in order to ponder whether international lawyers need to adjust their thinking about state responsibility. My interest in state responsibility awakened in the aftermath of the commission of the abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. International legal scholars tended to have different ideas about what state responsibility was supposed to achieve in this particular case, and by what means. At times, remedying concrete wrongs appeared to be juxtaposed with the larger concerns for legality in the international legal order. Moreover, different opinions seemed to exist with regard to whether or not state responsibility had materialized with respect to the Abu Ghraib abuses. Around the same time, the ICC became operative and promised a different approach to the most serious violations of international law. International responsibility expanded to encompass various practices and ideas of responsibility, yet, a comprehensive understanding of the developments occurring within responsibility in international law seemed to be missing"--