Depending on the construction of a particular crime, criminal responsibility is generally analysed in terms of an individual carrying out proscribed acts with a culpable state of mind. The framework of criminal responsibility can be extended in various ways and those extended forms will be synthesised and discussed in this chapter.The first extension category encompasses the inchoate crimes of attempt, conspiracy and incitement. The term ‘inchoate’ comes from the Latin past participle of ‘incohare’ meaning ‘to begin’ or ‘start work on’. These are substantive crimes which extend liability back in time and to other people so that conduct is criminalised, which arguably is not directly harmful but which is regarded as culpable for policy reasons and allows earlier intervention of law enforcement authorities to prevent the completed offence.The second category is complicity, which is a concept allowing for the extension of criminal liability to people other than the accused person who carries out the conduct with the requisite mental element constituting the offence. There are various forms of principal and accessorial criminal liability within the concept of complicity.

George Lippard popularized a new form of novel whose thickly interlaced plotlines and generic layering conveyed social and moral dimensions of urban experience inaccessible to more conventional literary and journalistic modes of depicting cities. Dwelling on various forms of nefarious association tethering and tainting Philadelphia’s citizens, Lippard’s sensational novel, The Quaker City (1845), focuses on two social “shapes” urban participatory sin can take, structural complicity and network complicity. It devotes major plotlines, each featuring a distinct narrative form, to the investigation of each. Each kind of complicity imposes crucial aesthetic constraints on its own narrativization, and these constraints are overcome, the novel suggests, only when these two narrative forms are subsumed within a totalizing vision of Christian eschatology, or apocalypse.

Between 1830 and 1860, new conceptions of moral complicity sparked fierce debates in the United States. Reformers, religious authorities, novelists, market activists, and politicians zealously spelled out how moral liability flowed across legal systems, commercial networks, conspiracies, and political structures. The Introduction begins by illuminating the religious roots of this activist discourse. Then it outlines gendered threads of northern complicity critique, especially the focus on urban sexual vice, and plumbs abolitionism’s preoccupation with thickening social ties and causal webs that connected individuals and institutions to remote and widely distributed evils. Finally, an overview of the book’s chapters introduces key concepts such as moral ensembles, organic sin, tolerance complicity, moral taint, the Black market, and democratic complicity. Throughout, the Introduction highlights how complicity critics adapted old imaginative grammars and developed new ones to capture new forms of moral enmeshment and convey their dynamics and dangers.

Between 1830 and 1850, anti-Catholics in the United States fixated on the ritual of Catholic confession and priests’ alleged sexual interrogation of young women, especially Protestant teenagers in convent schools. Protestant propagandists tied the moral and sexual contamination of confession to Rome’s supposed political and religious designs in the United States. This chapter examines how female sexual speech, public testimony, and the Protestant press were seen to abet this conspiracy. The first half of the chapter centers on Maria Monk’s blockbuster convent exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), and its sensational delineation of young women’s subjection to and participation in confessional sex talk and systemic convent turpitude. The second half studies the dilemma that preoccupied every Protestant publisher who sought to expose the purported sexual dangers of Catholicism and confession: How could one contain Rome’s defiling designs if by exposing Catholicism’s contagious carnality one risked infecting readers and adding them to the conspiracy’s ranks? The chapter’s final section examines the media storm around the Protestant publication of Catholic confession manuals.

Edward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe developed accounts of participatory sin and moral complicity that wed the moral critique of the slave system to the religious and moral assessment of individuals occupying diverse roles in the system. In different ways, the siblings insisted that personal sin and responsibility must be rethought from a system perspective. The first half of the chapter examines Beecher’s controversial notion of organic sin and how it staked a middle ground between antislavery conservatives and radicals. The second half of the chapter discusses how Stowe, like her brother, battled rigid moral individualists who dismissed system thinking as methodologically and morally misguided. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), broadening moral realism to include system analysis, figures the slave system as a moral object that demands examination and critique. Moving beyond the capacities of the sermon and debate essay, the literary allowed Stowe to perform this exposure and critique.

The German home front was a vital part of the war Nazi-Germany waged. Skilfully deploying the country’s workers, its women, and its youth organizations, the regime would come to subject most of its economy to the war effort. The Wehrmacht’s campaign into the Soviet Union would permanently alter the way Germany structured its economy. The home front benefitted tremendously from the Nazi conquest of the East, and before long hundreds of thousands of slave labourers were forcibly drafted into its factories and its agriculture. As the war went on, the regime also increasingly deployed concentration camp inmates in the war effort and also used the threat of violence or imprisonment to coerce it own population. Determined to prevent a repeat of the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, the home front was treated with increasing suspicion, while Allied bombing raids and the introduction of ever stricter rations put further strain on Germany’s citizens. Notwithstanding, resistance was rare, and the home front remained largely intact until the very end of the war: the vast majority of Germans only laid down their tools once Allied forces arrived.

This sixth chapter explores issues surrounding collective acts of conscience. Specifically, it focuses on the issue of complicity as well as institutional conscience. Complicity in conscience is a frequent subject of discussion, as many conscience claims, such as referrals of treatment or supervision, rely on notions of complicity. However, complicity in conscience is significantly different from complicity in other areas of law and ethics, and there is insufficient exploration as to why. This chapter provides a firmer grounding for complicity. From there, the chapter moves to a discussion of institutional conscience. The chapter explores the reasons generally used in support of institutional conscience but argues that most do not survive scrutiny. Instead, it claims that institutional conscience does not provide any adequate protection for individual conscience and, instead, often overrides or limits it. It then provides reasons for an alternative view of how institutions ought to engage with conscience.

This chapter critically reflects on the “bystander” category, and the fluidity and diversity of “collaboration” depending on perspective (also postwar); points out differences in occupation regimes East/West, North/South, and early/late and their impact on level of violence; and outlines pre-occupation interests that impact local (group/societal) behavior after the arrival of the Germans and outlive their retreat.

The paragraphs of article III of the Convention set out four ’other acts’ governed by the Convention: conspiracy: conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. The first three of these are ’inchoate’ offences in that the crime of genocide is not actually committed. If a conspiracy succeeds, the relevant offence is genocide, or complicity in genocide. A conspiracy that does not succeed is punishable under article III. The same holds for attempt and for direct and public incitement. Incitement that results in genocide is punishable as genocide, or complicity in genocide. Complicity in international criminal law is developed in the statutes of the various tribunals and by case law, although there is no unanimity as to its form. The ad hoc tribunals developed a doctrine known as ’joint criminal enterprise’ whereas at the International Criminal Court complicity may be addressed as ’co-perpetration’ or ’indirect co-perpetration’. It is also possible to prosecute genocide under the superior or command responsibility doctrine.

Chapter 7 sets out the key components of State responsibility under international law and then uses a series of case studies to demonstrate that responsibility in practice. Responsibility for a State’s negligent failure to prevent a terrorist attack looks at the acts and omissions of the Russian authorities with respect to the school siege at Beslan in 2003. Three cases have been chosen to exemplify the direct perpetration of terrorism by a State. The first case is the bombing by French agents of the Greenpeace boat, Rainbow Warrior, by French agents in New Zealand in 1985. The second involves certain acts of Syrian authorities following the protests related to the Arab Spring, in particular the widespread and systematic torture and summary execution of opponents of the regime. The third case is the conduct of Russian forces in Ukraine following its invasion on 24 February 2022. Examples of State responsibility as accomplices to acts of terrorism are the responsibility of Liberia for the actions of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighbouring Sierra Leone during the civil war and the potential responsibility of Syria for the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in Beirut on 14 February 2005.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.