The Roman Empire was rooted in violent acts. The spread of Roman control over the provinces was a lengthy process, but one that fundamentally changed the nature of political relationships. Settlers extruded from Italy. Large amounts of wealth changed hands. Land tenure was reconfigured. The population was divided first into provinces, then into assize districts. Subject populations were registered, counted, and taxed. The process put immense amounts of strain on the internal structures of communities. Roman governors were tasked with administering this new political landscape, where their position was tenuous. They distrusted new local elites who, along with Roman settlers, were prone to take advantage of local people. These same people were also responsible for tax collection, which, along with keeping the peace, was the governor’s ultimate responsibility. This systemic tension opened a space for provincial legalism.

According to Dazai Shundai, the government of the sages uses laws and punishments with reluctance, but these still do play a necessary role. Laws are most effective when they are concise, easy for the people to understand, not frequently changed, and strictly and reliably enforced with appropriate punishments. Tokugawa Japan, however, lacks a proper system of laws.

According to Dazai Shundai, ritual and music are essential elements of the government of the sages. They complement each other, with ritual drawing strict distinctions of status and establishing ethical standards for different types of human relationships, while music functions as a gentle force for bringing people together in harmony. Compared with other methods of governing, the superiority of ritual and music lies in their ability to enter people on a deep level and transform their customs, creating long-lasting stability without the need to rely solely on explicit laws. In order for ritual and music to work properly, though, they must be established by rulers who look back to the traditions of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan learned such ritual and music from China and used these to govern, but in recent times, vulgar ritual and music have arisen from among the common people, with detrimental effects for Japanese society. To remedy this situation, vulgar ritual and music need to be suppressed and replaced with proper ritual and music.

The book’s conclusion assesses the extent of legalism in Korea and Japan, including other issue areas. It underscores the importance of studying the role of activists and lawyers in catalyzing sociolegal and institutional change. Legalism may take diverse forms, as demonstrated in the comparisons of Korea and Japan. The tobacco liability cases show that legalism is not emerging everywhere. The cases suggest legalistic governance is more likely when support structures for advocacy and legal mobilization exist, opposition is diffuse or weak, and activists sustain all five mechanisms. The conclusion considers what the expanding role of law and courts means for democracy in both countries. It ends on a cautiously optimistic note: the potential for rights realization and participatory channels has grown, especially in Korea. Although challenges in legal mobilization persist, and reform implementation faces human, resource, and attitudinal barriers, activists and lawyers are creatively engaging with legal frameworks in ways that strengthen legalistic regulatory styles.

The introduction outlines the book’s two main puzzles: First, why is legalistic governance emerging in South Korea and Japan, which were long known for their non legalistic regulatory styles? Second, what accounts for the varieties of legalism observed in Korea and Japan? Legalism describes a style of regulation that relies on more formal, detailed, and enforceable laws and regulations, as well as more participatory policy design and implementation processes. This book argues that activists and lawyers are often-overlooked societal drivers behind the emergence of legalism and the broader judicialization of politics in Korea and Japan.

This chapter addresses the origins and evolution of the fundamental institutional genes in Chinese society that aligned with and supported the adoption and establishment of totalitarianism in China. Based on the analysis here, Chapter 9 explains the reasons for the failure of the constitutional reforms and Republican Revolution in China; and Chapters 10 through 12 expand on how these institutional genes and their variations allowed Mao Zedong to adapt Soviet-style classic totalitarianism into a uniquely Chinese form – regionally administered totalitarianism (RADT).

This chapter describes the founding of the ancient Zhou Dynasty and its early articulation of Mandate of Heaven theory, which legitimated changes of Chinese dynasties. The loosely centralized Zhou eventually disintegrated into fully independent kingdoms called the Warring States. This became a time of cultural and intellectual ferment that gave birth to the Hundred Schools of classical Chinese thought, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Confucianism eventually became a defining feature of all East Asia. More immediately, Legalism helped transform the Qin kingdom into the most powerful of the Warring States, conquer all its rivals, and forge the first Chinese imperial dynasty. Qin excesses led to its rapid collapse, but Qin was succeeded by a more enduring Han Dynasty based on similar, though more moderate, imperial institutions. After four centuries of Han imperial unity, it too collapsed into warlordism, followed by the famous Three Kingdoms period.

Chapter 2 introduces and configures the concept of lawfare. This framework chapter sets the theoretical scene for what is to come. Whereas both legalism and lawfare, in the books conception, serve the standard functions of regulation in a given polity, the author demonstrates that only lawfare is intended qua system to also serve a function otherwise considered the hallmark of warfare. The chapter elaborates defining attributes of – and pathways to – lawfare. It also situates the books theoretical argument about lawfare in existing work on the rule of violence.

The chapter examines everyday citizenship among youth respondents from the angle of their relationship to the state or as citizenship-from-above. Youth respondents initially defined citizenship in terms of legal obligations to the state. Afrobarometer findings that indicate high levels of support for obeying the law and paying taxes echo those responses, though respondents provide nuance to the Afrobarometer data. Legalistic views of citizenship are closely connected to the building and maintenance of strong relations at the local level and, for some, notions of morality. Few youth defined citizenship primarily in terms of voting, though Afrobarometer findings indicate large percentages do participate in elections. Even fewer youth respondents described citizenship as engagement in activities such as joining with others to advocate or protesting to hold governments accountable, a finding that aligns with the survey data. For these few youth, it is their everyday relationships with friends and neighbors and communal experiences of marginalization that motivate actions. Protest examples from South Africa and Uganda show that citizenship-from-above and citizenship-from-below blur and that everyday citizenship manifests in creative and agentic ways.

Rules are a ubiquitous normative form across the human experience. The recent anthropology of ethics and morality has, however, tended to focus elsewhere, in part to redress a perceived earlier over-emphasis on rules within anthropology. Bourdieu’s scepticism as to the value of structuralist talk of rules, and favouring instead of ‘practice’, has been more widely influential. This chapter makes the case for a renewed and more sophisticated attention to rules within the anthropology of ethics. While the roots of anthropological rule scepticism lie in debates – often inspired by Wittgenstein – over whether the implicit norms of ‘ordinary’ social life should be thought of as ‘rules’, the prominence of explicit rules in many of the world’s great ethical traditions seems hard to ignore. And yet, the conceptual tools available to anthropologists for their nuanced ethnographic appreciation remain under-developed. Some potential resources from analytic and legal philosophy and moral theology are brought to bear on examples from the author’s research on the use of religious rules, specifically those of the Islamic sharia. Having demonstrated the diversity, complexity, and ethnographic interest of the practice of moral rules, the chapter ends by considering why some social contexts appear more ‘ruly’, or legalistic, than others.

Chapter 1 situates Responsibility on Trial within the existing interdisciplinary literature on international criminal justice and presents the research aims of the book. Chapter 1 highlights a gap in the existing literature: international criminal law norms are generally treated either as objective and static standards that are independent from states’ political interests (the ‘liberal-legalist’ thesis), or, conversely, as inevitably indeterminate concepts that enable the perpetuation of global structural inequalities (the ‘critical’ thesis). While both perspectives provide important insights into the operation of international criminal justice, they fail to examine the dynamic nature of legal norms as vehicles for both continuity and change in the field and the implications of those dynamics for the assessment of individual criminal responsibility for mass atrocities. To address this gap, Chapter 1 borrows insights from the work of Shklar and Kirchheimer and proposes building an ‘intersubjective’ framework of analysis that recognizes law’s inherent normativity not as an objective fact but as a form of social practice.

Chapter 10 discusses the main findings of this book concerning the politics of international criminal law practice and explores the question whether the norms and practices associated with the assessment of individual criminal responsibility are likely to continue changing in the future. This chapter presents a pluralist understanding of ‘legalism’, as a concept that entertains a range of different visions of international criminal justice. Next, this chapter highlights the importance of understanding the normative dynamics taking place inside the international criminal justice field, namely the battle of different visions of legalism over the construction of criminal responsibility rules, for analysing trial outcomes at the Court. Finally, Chapter 10 observes that it is possible that the restrained approach to criminal responsibility, displayed at the Bemba Appeals Chamber Majority and the Gbagbo and Blé Goudé Trial Chamber Majority, can create a backlash within the international criminal justice community, even if that backlash does not end up prompting reform at the ICC in the short term.

This chapter explores the place of compromise in transitional justice. While all-pervasive in politics, compromise is a neglected topic, almost a non-topic, within the current transitional justice literature. The chapter is an attempt to reverse this tendency and rehabilitate the notion of compromise. If, as pluralists hold, we are often faced with cases of hard moral choices where, whatever we do, something of value is irreparably lost, then the best we can hope for is some kind of acceptable compromise between clashing goods. The question about the limits of compromise thus features centrally in this chapter. How far should transitional societies go in their willingness to compromise? When is a compromise acceptable, fair, guided by principle, and when is it rotten to the core, simply illegitimate? To what extent is it acceptable to compromise deeply held values such as justice and truth for the sake of other equally important values such as, say, civil peace and democracy? While doubtful that we can settle such issues once and for all, the chapter identifies a range of questions that should be part of the collective conversation about when a political compromise is acceptable and when it is not. The discussion begins, however, with a concrete historical figure, the communist leader Joe Slovo, who played a critical role in South Africa’s negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy. Slovo’s reflections on the nature and limits of compromise in the South African context serve as a central reference point for my discussion throughout this chapter.