For the book review assignment, I chose to read “Crime and Human Punishment: Criminology of Genocide and Atrocities”. I chose this book, because the study of genocide is interesting to me, in learning about why it happens and how to stop it from happening in the future. In regards to the essay, it is going to be broken into three different parts. The first part, which is planned to be about half of the essay, will talk about some about a couple of the major themes of the book. The second part will consist of showing how the book is tied to content we have learned in class. And to wrap up the paper, I will talk about some of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The first major theme I am going to talk about is the criminology of genocide …show more content…
In this theme, I am going to talk about different courts and how they came to be. In addition, their effectiveness will be explored within the theme. It is first important to mention that the international courts were able to be established due to military victory in war (Savelsburg 78). Looking at the creation of the International criminal court, it came about from the Rome Statute of 1998. This statute entered full force in 2002 when sixty countries had ratified it (Savelburg 79). Six years after that, it has grown to 108 ratifications including the United States as one of the members. From here, international criminal courts began to come to the forefront. An example is the International criminal court. The ICC is made up of 18 judges that have a 9 year non-renewable term (Savelburg 83). One of the four jurisdictions the ICC has jurisdiction over, includes genocide. One argument that goes against the effectiveness of international courts talks about how perpetrators would not be receptive to any sort of negotiation nor the giving up of their powers if they are threaten by any type of legal action. On the contrary, the book makes notice of how courts can form judicial hearings by having countries have truth commissions and transitional trials. Lastly, the book mentions how holding trials have never led to any sort of conflict or dislodgement in the transition (Savelberg 91). With that …show more content…
First, the book’s talk about genocide is linked to our week four discussion on genocide. In our class discussion, we talked about the definition of genocide, the causes of genocide, and we touched on the International criminal courts a bit. All of this class content mostly relates to chapters three and four of the book as well as chapters six and seven. In those two chapters, they talk about the same things we as a class talked about. As far as the concept of genocide goes, our class content are very similar in terms of what we cover on the idea of genocide. The book had similarities with our class definition of genocide, which is the mass killing of a group of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, etc (Lecture 9/18). In addition, there is a link between the categories of what defines genocide. Some categories include the killing of a mass group of people, the serious physical and/or mental harm to people, and deliberately inflicting on the group’s condition of life (Lecture 9/18). The book and our class discussions both talked about the Nuremburg trials, which was where twenty-four nazi leaders and six nazi organizations were indicted on life sentencing charges. (Lecture 9/18). Lastly the book and lecture both talk about the factors that can lead to genocide. These factors include racism, weak