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This chapter discusses forms of criminal responsibility from a comparative and international perspective. They include direct and indirect perpetration, co-perpetration, instigation — including ordering, soliciting, and inducing — planning, and aiding/abetting. These modalities can be referred to as ‘classic’ or ‘general’ in the sense that they feature in most international statutes and have equivalents in national criminal codes, often in the general part. The comparative perspective is important and has been added for two reasons. First of all, because the link with national criminal law is strongest with these forms of criminal responsibility; they are largely modelled on municipal criminal law. Secondly, a comparative perspective is useful in discerning the scope and limits of these concepts. Moreover, it may assist in understanding these concepts when used in the international arena. After all, judges and other legal practitioners at international courts and tribunals understand these forms of responsibility from their own national perspective, which may cause — and has caused — misunderstandings.

This chapter focuses upon the actus reus of genocide, outlining both the conduct elements of the offence and the complexities of identifying the contours of protected groups. It first discusses the various modes of perpetration for international crimes generally, including the doctrines of command responsibility and joint criminal enterprise. It then focuses on the actus reus of genocide and details the acts prohibited under Genocide Convention that constitute physical genocide (killing group members, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, and imposing destructive conditions of life upon them) and biological genocide (preventing births within the group and removing the children of group members). It also discusses distinctions and commonalities among the racial, ethnic, national, and religious groups protected under the Genocide Convention. It further details the complexities of determining the applicable criteria for group membership and assesses the benefits and drawbacks of ascertaining membership using subjective versus objective characteristics.

This chapter sets out that gender is critical to talking and theorising about sexual exploitation in two main ways: in understanding patterns of perpetration and victimisation, and in how policy and practice responds to young people. In the UK and around the globe, victims/survivors of sexual exploitation are disproportionately girls, and those who abuse and exploit them are mostly men and boys. Yet in much policy and public discussion, sexual exploitation is often framed as an issue involving ‘children’, without attention to the asymmetry between experiences of young women and young men. The chapter thus draws on bell hooks to suggest that sexual exploitation can be conceptualised as a form of patriarchal violence, an approach reflecting decades of feminist analysis that links sexual abuse and exploitation to patriarchal power. Throughout the chapter, implications for practice are highlighted and reiterated.

This chapter discusses crime-specific modes of liability and theories of liability that are referred to as ‘leadership modalities’. The former regard complicity in genocide and inchoate crimes of genocide. The latter concern liability theories that have been conceptualized or developed specifically to apply to political and military leadership. Leadership modalities, such as joint criminal enterprise at the leadership level and indirect (co-)perpetration, address the responsibility of intellectual perpetrators, those who are considered ‘most responsible’ for international crimes while being far removed from the scene of the crimes.

This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 examines several of the more complex issues facing prosecutors in the indictment process from Nuremberg to the present. Section 3 discusses the legal requirements of the indictment and includes a discussion of the standard of proof, legal sufficiency, and specificity. It considers issues on which tribunals have diverged, such as cumulative charging. It also outlines differences that have emerged in the development of co-perpetration — notably joint criminal enterprise — as a mode of liability. Section 4 discusses the indictment process and includes a discussion on the issuing of the indictment, the role of supporting documentation when the indictment is issued, and the process surrounding the confirmation of the indictment. It also looks at amending indictments, defective indictments, and how to cure defective indictments.

This chapter begins the discussion of the tribunals' jurisprudence concerning the modes of participation in a war crime or a crime against humanity by focusing on Article II(2)(a), (b), and (c) of Law No. 10. Section 1 examines a number of threshold issues concerning criminal responsibility, such as liability for omissions and the liability of corporations. Sections 2–4 discuss ordering, taking a consenting part, and command responsibility, respectively. Finally, Section 5 addresses two modes of participation referenced only in passing by the tribunals — perpetration by means and incitement — as well as the tribunals' rejection of attempt.

This chapter examines theories of LGBTQ IPV perpetration and the degree to which they are supported by evidence. These theories are divided into several categories: perpetration theories that are shared between HC and LGBTQ IPV (including theories focused on socialization, power imbalances, dependency, self-justifications, and psychological traits), contested perpetration theories regarding gender (including evidence supporting competing views in the literature that gender is a relevant factor for neither HC nor LGBTQ IPV, only HC but not LGBTQ IPV, or both HC and LGBTQ IPV), and perpetration theories unique to LGBTQ IPV (including theories regarding experiencing discrimination, internalizing discriminatory attitudes, and degree of outness). Relatedly, this chapter also examines barriers to escape for victims (including not recognizing IPV, dependency, fear, and hurdles in reaching out for help). Finally, this chapter exposes barriers that are making it more difficult to see the big picture of why LGBTQ IPV happens (including fears of excusing abusers and blaming victims, challenges in distinguishing causes from outcomes, and doubts over whether there are one or multiple explanations of IPV). Ultimately, this chapter emphasizes the complexity of IPV and calls for more population-specific theorizing. The chapter concludes with implications for future policy, practice, and research.

This chapter brings the theory of restorative justice together with its practice in cases involving hate crime. The data presented here illustrates the different ways that restorative practices have been used to effectively challenge offenders' prejudices which, in turn, has helped to reduce the recurrence of hate-motivated incidents. In particular, the chapter emphasises the role that restorative practitioners must play in facilitating inclusive dialogue between offenders and victims. It is these dialogical processes which support the formation of empathic connections between offenders and victims. Such connections help to break down the cultural barriers that previously divide the stakeholders of hate crimes. Examples of reparative work that is tailored to the moral learning of perpetrators of hate crime are also highlighted as encouraging offender edification. Finally, the chapter highlights the ways in which practitioners can best guard against the re-victimisation of participants during direct restorative meetings. It is hoped that the findings explored in this chapter will assist in the creation of policies that more effectively respond to hate crime.

The chapter gives a reading of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006), a historical novel that revisits the archive of Holocaust testimony through the memory of a fictional perpetrator. It frames this novel within the current anxiety that we have moved from the “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka) to the “era of perpetrators.” It positions the work within recent French debates on fiction’s displacement of history. In a broader argument for the historical and cultural value of Littell’s ethically risky treatment of complicity, it situates The Kindly Ones within the emerging field of comparative genocide studies.

This chapter discusses the history of sexual violence in US universities to see where things have changed and where they have not. It first explains the relevant terms, such as ‘higher education institution’, ‘college’ and ‘university’ as well as ‘on campus’, ‘sexualised violations’, and ‘sexual misconduct’. It then reviews the early research which overlooked the gendered nature of campus sexual violence, the initial efforts that sought to ‘teach women how to stay safe’ which were critiqued for implicit victim-blaming, and more recent prevention approaches which focus on bystander intervention and the role of friends, peers and social networks in preventing violence. It also examines victimisation and perpetration, along with the interrelationships between perpetration dynamics, campus culture and institutional governance. The chapter concludes with an analysis of issues relating to policy framing and victims' formal reporting.

This chapter focuses on the particular injustice of sexual violence because it emerged as a dominant theme in students’ reflections on party and hookup culture. If we hope to create a just sexual culture in which all college students are respected and treated as ends-in-themselves, we first need to confront the reality of sexual violence on college campuses. Drawing both on student perspectives and important research studies, this chapter first examines why sexual violence is so prevalent on college campuses and then identifies risk factors that increase the likelihood of victimization and perpetration. Lastly, the author examines the traumatic effects of sexual violence on sexual assault survivors.

This chapter shifts its perspective from the study of perpetrators to perpetration. Whereas the former term refers to the agency of the individuals who have perpetrated forms of mass violence against civilians, the latter concept refers to the process of collective commission of mass violence. The advantage of taking a processual view is that it caters for the complexity of the process of perpetration: different layers of authority, motives of involvement, rules of engagement, and most importantly, the changes in these factors over time. This chapter approaches perpetration as a socio-ecological model containing three distinct analytical levels: top-level (architects), mid-level (organizers), and bottom-level (killers). The heuristic device in this chapter fleshes out and discusses each level of analysis and applies theoretical insights. It develops a temporal processual model that focuses on the power relationships between groups of people, especially between perpetrators and victims, but also within the perpetrator group.

Michael Moore takes the point of double jeopardy to be proportionality of punishment: second jeopardies are either a waste or lead to punishments in excess of desert. Since it is disproportional to punish twice for a single wrong, this leads Moore to an account of wrong individuation under which two people can commit the same wrong. This chapter argues, contra Moore, that (1) the point of double jeopardy is to prevent the prosecution from magnifying the system’s tendency to fail to decide cases on the merits; and (2) criminal liability for joint perpetration requires holding that wrongs are relativized to agents.

This chapter discusses two approaches to organizational liability that have divided the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court (ICC): namely, joint criminal enterprise (JCE) and co-perpetration. JCE has a common law pedigree and has been widely used at ad hoc tribunals, and in particular in the ICTY. Co-perpetration, on the other hand, represents the civil law approach and has been particularly embraced as an alternative to JCE in cases at the ICC. Rather than attempting to choose one approach over the other, the chapter proposes a third approach, which is that of organizational liability.

This chapter takes up the enduring problem of human nature and mass atrocity through the lens of the Cambodian genocide. It considers the category of perpetrator; some of the assumptions underlying it; and, using a set of metaphors, the ideologies, cultural understandings, and microdynamics that inform and structure perpetration. It argues that the ways we think about perpetration misdirect us from understanding the actions of people like security chief Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), who, in 2010, was convicted of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.