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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com
Whenever the International Criminal Court (ICC) opens an investigation into an ongoing war, versions of the following question will inevitably be asked: Does the pursuit of accountability risk leaving the warring parties with no incentive but to continue the fight?
The same question is again being asked now that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan has made the landmark decision to request arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders.
For years, I have tried to get to the bottom of what is often called the “peace versus justice” debate. I wrote a book about how that debate played out with the ICC interventions in Libya and Uganda. I have also published findings on the peace-justice relationship in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere. While responses to the debate are often driven more by assumptions and hypotheticals than incontrovertible facts, the reality is that there is no special key that helps unlock the relationship between resolving wars and achieving accountability for wartime atrocities.
