The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats.

• Author: Muhammad, Patricia M.

Weisbord, Noah. The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 272 pages. Hardcover $35.00.

The development of international law since the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and the consequential establishment of the League of Nations ushered in the concept of jus cogens, which formulated the legal standards to prosecute those accused of egregious human rights violations. Noah Weisbord, associate professor at Queen's Law, begins his analysis of international custom, and the legal precedent which defines crimes against humanity, by discussing the various modes of modern warfare from World War II to the present. The author meticulously recounts specific military strikes, who ordered them, and whether the use of military force could be justified under municipal law. In doing so, Weisbord considers how the proliferation of new technologies complicates the international community's ability to define crimes of aggression under international law.

Weisbord discusses the political nature in which nation states assume legal authority to implement international standards against other, less powerful, countries alleged to have violated accepted norms--a controversy that has traditionally existed between Western and developing nations. It is within this geopolitical context that Weisbord intricately analyzes the history of modern armed conflict and the evolution of the United Nations' International Criminal Court (ICC) through the Rome Statute. Thereafter, the author discusses the decades-long struggle in which the U.N. Security Council endeavored to define the crime of aggression using the Nuremberg principles, and utilizing international legal jurisprudence as a guide. The Statute's amendments authorized the ICC to exercise in personam jurisdiction over government officials and leaders to hold them personally accountable for military strikes against another nation states or civilians within another country's borders.

Weisbord further examines the legal and political chessboard in which nations created alliances, instigated armed conflict, and used nuclear advancement to destabilize regions in order to justify military campaigns against an enemy nation-state. For example, the author discusses "AQ," an academic and scientist who fled India with millions of other Muslims. According to Weisbord, "AQ" became disillusioned with the current...