Lawrence Douglas, "The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice" (Princeton UP, 2026)

About this episode

The episode features a discussion with Lawrence Douglas about his book on the legal responses to state violence and the challenges of international justice.

The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine. At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights. Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to…

People in this episode

Host: Eleonora Mattiacci

Guest: Lawrence Douglas

Topics covered

• international law
• state violence
• atrocities
• Nuremberg trials
• human rights
• criminal justice

Keywords

• law
• state aggression
• human rights violations
• international criminal law
• historical perspective
• political thought

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Princeton University Press

Books & works: The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice

Places: Congo, Ukraine

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