After WWII, there was a growing number of significant non-state actors in international relations, like the United Nations or various specialist agencies connected to it. Nevertheless, two key developments stimulated the growth of such organizations after 1945:

A.    The realization that building cooperation and collective security was a much wider task than merely deterring aggressors in traditional attacks on the fixed international order. It, therefore, involved finding ways of agreeing on international policy in a variety of practice areas.

B.    The coverage of international law is increasing to include new foci, including human rights, social justice, the natural environment, and war crimes.

The final result of such post-WWII developments in international relations and global politics was that the application of the UN’s system took place within the context of the growth and expansion of international law, which also dealt with war crimes. As a consequence, international relations became less concerned with the state’s freedoms and independence alone, but was becoming more interested in general welfare concerning and including those affecting various non-state actors, such as pressure groups of different kinds, not least those demanding the investigation of war crimes, including ethnic cleansing and the forms of genocide.

However, since the Cold War’s two nuclear Superpowers for geopolitical reasons have often been supporters of anti-democratic regimes that notoriously violated their own citizen’s rights, like the US support for the regime of General Pinochet (1973-1990) in Chile, conditions favoured countries where violation of human rights required investigation especially in cases of civil wars connected with war crimes.

The phenomenon of war crimes is commonly understood as individual responsibility for violations of internationally agreed-upon laws and customs of warfare. This includes covering both commission of war crimes in a direct way and ordering or facilitating of them. In principle, the rule violated must be part of the international customary law or part of an applicable treaty.

Chronologically, the first and unsuccessful attempts at the prosecution of war crimes came after the Great War (1914-1918). The first massive war crimes against the civil population during WWI were committed by the Austro-Hungarian army in West Serbia in August 1914. The same problem of individual responsibility for war crimes arose again during and after WWII, with declarations in 1942 and 1943 by the Allied coalition. It was, basically, an expression of determination to prosecute and punish at least major war criminals on the opposite (lost) side, but, unfortunately, not on their own side (for instance, the 1945 Dresden Massacre). Another practical purpose was to establish tribunals for such cases (Nüremberg in Germany for Nazi German war criminals) and Tokyo in Japan (for Japanese war criminals).

The war crimes committed in WWII covered the so-called “crimes against humanity” as defined by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal established in Nüremberg, like killing, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhuman acts committed against the civilian population either before or during a war. The same category of war crimes covered political, racial, or religious foundations, followed by the crime of aggression and crimes against peace, like planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression.

War crimes are understood in terms of all those acts defined as “grave breaches” of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol 1 of 1977. Later, the acts of war crimes were defined in the 1993 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the 1994 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, followed by Article 8 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

In the 1990s, it was a greater willingness by some states to establish the so-called “international” courts to prosecute potentially committed war crimes that led to the first tribunal established after WWII dealing with cases from the territory of ex-Yugoslavia, followed by a similar court for Rwanda, and successful negotiation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The conflicts that followed the brutal destruction of ex-Yugoslavia (1991-1995) have been widely referred to as Europe’s bloodiest conflicts after 1945, partly because of the severity and intensity of the actual warfare and partly because of mass ethnic cleansings on all sides. Yugoslavia’s destruction in the 1990s became officially the first military conflict after WWII formally to be judged as genocidal by the Western part of the international community.

Regarding the process of persecution of war criminals, it was a 1998 international conference in Rome that led in formulating a treaty for signature and ratification of a new statute for an International Criminal Court (ICC). The court had to have global jurisdiction, to be complementary to national courts dealing with cases of genocide, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. The ICC was imagined to be a permanent institution, unlike previous courts for the investigation of war crimes (for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for instance). However, three states openly announced not to vote for the creation of the ICC: USA, China, and Israel under the claim (at least by the US) that their soldiers or/and peacekeepers abroad could be easily brought before the ICC on politically motivated charges rather than real war crimes evidences.  

Warlordism

Concerning warlordism – a phenomenon and term directly connected in many cases with war crimes, it is a broader term used to mark a condition of the weak central government of failed states in which a single warlord, or rival warlike militants, each led by one dominant military leader. Such leaders are in control of a significant portion of the state’s territory, opposing official governmental forces and exerting power within that controlled territory as a private independent state. in many if not the majority of cases, warlordism is a direct result of a military coup or civil war within a state, which causes a division of that territory between warring parties (for instance, the Bosnian Muslim extremist Naser Oric in the town of Srebrenica in 1992-1995).

Historically, warlordism is mostly associated with Chinese provincial /regional military commanders during the first half of the 20th century. In 1916 (after the death of Yuan Shikai), Chinese territory was divided between several regional warlords and rulers. They all claimed to have military /political power over their territory based on a personal /private army. Originally, those Chinese (and many other) warlords were mostly former soldiers of the official governmental authorities who were at the same time a kind of gangsters, bandits, and even local officials.

In principle, all warlords are highly dependent on revenue from the local community (towns and agricultural areas) for supporting their military troops to defend against their local rivals. The winning warlords (like Pancho Villa in Mexico) successfully controlled easily defended areas, even entire provinces of the country. Nonetheless, the bloodiest wars between rival warlords and governmental authorities required massive (forceful or voluntary) mobilization of the local inhabitants.

In the majority of the cases, warlords controlled a certain territory depending on their military power, which had strong (local) logistical support. Such a situation on the ground enabled the warlords to collect (forcefully) taxes (for “national liberation /independence”) with the control of other (material /natural /human) resources, including food production.              

The practice of warlordism can occur when the central authority of the state fails, where multiple warlords and their loyal militias or paramilitary troops fill vacuums of power through violence and fear (for instance, Taliban units in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021). Although warlordism is a prominent historical feature, like in ancient China or Medieval Europe, recent instances of warlordism still exist in several countries in Africa, Asia, or South American Colombia.