Cinema has devoted increasing attention to international criminal justice, especially in the last two decades. Viewers of films and TV series related to the prosecution of international crimes note that cinema can be very supportive of what international criminal justice is and how it works, either by conveying romanticized images about its aims and achievements, or by explaining – not to say justifying – its weaknesses. In some movies, it is depicted as an adequate and efficient tool to fight the impunity. It is also frequently pictured as a mechanism requested by victims, or at least called for in their names. Movies also show the fragility of international justice in the face of politics, underlining and condemning the reluctance of States and international organizations to cooperate, have suspects arrested and evidence collected. These films, however, do not fundamentally undermine the legitimacy of international criminal justice as we are frequently left with the impression that prosecutors and judges do their best to fight impunity and often succeed in overcoming political obstacles. Fundamental scepticism is also sometimes voiced suggesting that international justice is but a spectacle, a diversion, or subject to instrumentalization. These critiques, however, do not override the heroic role with which cinema generally entrusts international criminal justice.

Do films take rights seriously? This chapter argues that answering this question requires first examining underlying assumptions about what films do and the role of popular culture in the construction of socio-legal narratives. It moves on to argue that, rather than advocating the setting aside of humanitarian principles in pursuit of some vitally important ends, many films are best understood as depicting the moral dilemmas raised by the implementation of rights in extreme conditions and reflect some of the profound shifts that have recently occurred in the law and ethics of warfare. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the danger of 'sanitizing' warfare and the role of films in unsettling the liberal intuition that war can be fought humanely.

The chapter documents the capacious and immensely promising newish discipline of cine-legality, represented in this collection. The archive – what Gabrielle Simm calls ‘the panorama of world cinema’ – is immense, and in this chapter, the author tries to identify some fruitful directions it might take.

This chapter deals with the way movies approach and depict international law. Both cinema and law belong to an imaginary realm. The methods of law are conceptualization and action. The methods of movies are representations and dreams. It is therefore difficult for the cinema to dramatize international law, with the notable exceptions of criminal trials and war. It is noteworthy that the way a particular movie depicts international law will often depend on the country of production. For instance, American movies frequently resemble propaganda – soft or hard – but, at the same time, American cinema is also able to severely criticize US policies. British movies often convey a kind of imperial nostalgia, even in a parochial way. French ones are willingly self-deprecating, sometimes in a farcical way.

This chapter explores the salience of complexity theory, a relative newcomer to International Relations theory, to the study of UN peacekeeping. It demonstrates how the central tenets of complexity theory provide a valuable alternative framework for making sense of the existence as well as the effects of UN peacekeeping. The chapter highlights the importance of studying the UN peacekeeping machine as a complex social system that has idiosyncratic behaviours, some of which are antithetical to understanding through the exclusive application of simple logics and theories underpinned by linear philosophies. It focuses in particular on its value for understanding UN peacekeeping operations that are part of conflict and peacebuilding systems in highly dynamic and nonlinear environments. Drawing on the study of the UN peacekeeping system as a whole, it shows that thinking in terms of complex adaptive systems can provide important insights into the production of UN peacekeeping through global politics as well as their operation in practice. The chapter concludes by pointing to the potential of complexity theory in understanding the ways that the UN can become part of the conflict systems it seeks to manage and transform.

The imagination of new worlds represented in science fiction cinema is a fertile ground for reflecting on the nature of international law. Assumptions of international law can be further tested by stretching their conditions of operation. International law’s argumentative structure makes it quite flexible, maybe more flexible than first appears. Concepts such as State, territory or even humanity seemingly central to the nature of international law can be fundamentally altered or even removed; a recognizable form of international law continues to operate. Still, fidelity to some features of the liberal ethos is needed for international law to continue being relevant. What sci-fi cinema proves is that the ideology of international law is embedded not in States, not even in humanity, but in the equality of rights of groups displaying enough anthropomorphic features. The disappearance of these features marks the end of the explanatory power of the international law analogy. In-between these extremes, science-fiction cinema can further provide relatable materials to make us think radically about international law.

This chapter explores what a critical approach to UN peacekeeping entails and highlights the valuable contributions of Critical Security Studies (CSS) to capture the nature and significance of peace operations in international politics. It shows how CSS questions the values and representations that inform UN peacekeeping and the political order that peacekeeping interventions shape, promote, or sustain. It further discusses how CSS unpacks peacekeeping (often mundane and daily) practices and their political and social implications and takes into account non-traditional security issues. The chapter then relies on CSS theoretical and methodological tools to study the specific case of the rise of environmental practices in UN peacekeeping. Drawing on the concepts of securitisation and environmentalisation, it demonstrates how UN peacekeeping has been framed as relevant to environmental policies, while contributing to a broader process of securitisation of the environment.

The primacy of military force as an instrument of statecraft can often create greater insecurity, failed political objectives, and new problems. The reliance on force may cause the possibility of peace to grow more distant as the threat and use of force result in increasing counter-attacks, an arms race, bolstering a rival’s international political standing, undermining support in one’s own society for negotiations, strengthening a rival’s view that one is hostile, casualties and loss of territory, and the creation of a wholly new enemy organization. Moshe Sharett, in the 1950s, and Mahmoud Abbas, in the 2000s, both pushed for recognition of the dangers of always turning to a forceful resolution. Case studies of the Gaza Raid and Suez war (1955–1956), the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) that began in late 2000 show how force may backfire.