This book argues that accountability for extraordinary atrocity crimes should not uncritically adopt the methods and assumptions of ordinary liberal criminal law. Criminal punishment designed for common criminals is a response to mass atrocity and a device to promote justice in its aftermath. This book comes to this conclusion after reviewing the sentencing practices of international, national, and local courts and tribunals that punish atrocity perpetrators. Sentencing practices of these institutions fail to attain the goals that international criminal law ascribes to punishment, in particular retribution and deterrence. Fresh thinking is necessary to confront the collective nature of mass atrocity and the disturbing reality that individual membership in group-based killings is often not maladaptive or deviant behavior but, rather, adaptive or conformist behavior. This book turns to a modern, and adventurously pluralist, application of classical notions of cosmopolitanism to advance the frame of international criminal law to a broader construction of atrocity law and towards an interdisciplinary, contextual, and multicultural conception of justice.

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'tragedy of the commons' (though that is mentioned as well); rather, it is tragedy of the psychoanalytic variety that reference is made to, ie the internal tragedy experienced by the human rights lawyer, the international criminal lawyer, the international environmental lawyer, who is torn between their (presumptive) cosmopolitan outlook and the fact that international criminal justice seems to be at odds with peace, or that 'the world is not enough' to sustain both development and the biosphere (Pahuja 410). Perhaps it is because these fields and specialisations have developed into 'secular religions' (another recurrent term) that the specialists may experience such tragedy. Accepting their fields as just another arena for political contestation, as many chapters in the Companion indeed advise, might do much to help reroute their activism to more effective outlets. The Cambridge Companion to International Law will not help the reader deal with the prothysteron of opinio juris, nor will it explain to her the difference between reservations and interpretative declarations or the quirks of attribution of conduct to a State. For that there are other books. What the Cambridge Companion will do is to introduce the reader to international law's underlying contradictions, to its regressive tendencies, and to its liberating potential. International law, like all law, is a tool-and as a 'science of the superstructure' it is a tool used mainly to conserve and perpetuate the status quo; the Cambridge Companion comes at it from a decidedly critical (read: progressive) bend, exposes its biases, but also demonstrates how 'small change' (see chapter 17) may realise its power to liberate and protect.

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