Upholding Just and Accountable Legal Institutions

Growing up in a multinational household in the United Kingdom, Tom Dannenbaum was immersed in a world where diverse identities intertwined daily. From a young age, he understood that the “rules of engagement" matter. 

“The household always had three nationalities baked into the family unit,” said Dannenbaum. “For as long as I can remember, I was interested in the connections that exist across national borders and outside of particular national political communities. I thought a lot about the politics of different states and the apparatuses that connected or failed to connect them.”

Dannenbaum’s journey into global legal justice began with a foundation in philosophy during college and his involvement with protests against the Iraq war. These experiences sparked a passion for tackling practical policy questions. He was inspired to investigate issues of transitional justice in his doctoral research and spent his summers during law school working on international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone. 

“Those experiences concretized for me that that was the area in which I wanted to work,” he said. “I thought there were many questions that were not adequately answered, or that were answered in ways that I didn't find persuasive.”

“That, for me, played a significant role in motivating the kind of work that I do, which is mostly about identifying precisely those kinds of questions and seeking to provide new ways of answering them,” he added. 

Prosecuting Crimes of Aggression

From his post at The Fletcher School, Dannenbaum teaches and investigates critical questions of international law and accountability. In recent years, he has focused on the criminalization of aggressive war and the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. He examines these and many other topics in his courses, International Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Justice and Ethics in the Practice of Foreign Affairs. 

One of Dannenbaum’s main areas of scholarship is the crime of aggression – going to war without a legal basis. Among other issues, he scrutinizes the prosecution of aggression as distinct from war crimes committed once it is already underway. The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides a key focal point for this analysis. 

“There's already an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin from the International Criminal Court for the transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia, which is a war crime in the context of belligerent occupation,” he said. “Why, given that, is it also important to pursue the crime of aggression?”

“Part of what I've been doing is articulating an answer to that question and thinking about how it relates to the institutional imperatives regarding a viable tribunal for the prosecution of aggression: who should be involved in it, how it should be created, what kinds of authority it would have, what kind of precedent it might set, and how it would relate to the International Criminal Court,” he added. “Those are all questions that are highly salient in the current moment and that I think are important, not just in relation to the particular situation in Ukraine, but also in relation to the viability of the criminalization of aggression going forward.”

Dannenbaum brings these perspectives to high-level stakeholder meetings addressing the crime of aggression in the context of Ukraine. Recognizing the challenges that international legal institutions face in achieving both accountability and legitimacy, he advocates for processes that are defined by those imperatives and structured to ensure neither is sacrificed in the service of the other.

Confronting Starvation as a Weapon of War

Dannenbaum leverages this same scrutiny in confronting starvation as a method of war. 

“Part of what I've been working on is understanding and specifying the normative crux of this crime,” he said. “What's at stake that makes this crime distinctive and makes it important to pursue accountability for it?”

Dannenbaum's work sheds light on the challenges and possibilities of prosecuting starvation at the international level given the thresholds that must be met to hold perpetrators accountable. Starvation operations tend to take place over a longer period of time than most war crimes, occurring along a slower trajectory and often involving multiple converging causal factors. This can render the overall analysis more complicated. In the face of this complexity, he seeks to identify what is at stake, why this crime has a distinct importance and how to pursue accountability when it occurs.  

Dannenbaum has brought this expertise to bear on the use of starvation in multiple ongoing and recent conflicts, including those in Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. He has twice testified before Congress about starvation, speaking both about the starvation of civilians as a war crime generally and subsequently about the specific pattern of such crimes in Sudan. 

“Working on these issues, it is vital not only to speak on campuses and write in academic journals, but also to communicate to those who have the institutional capacity to pursue change,” he said. “When those opportunities arise, it is crucial to take them and to make the case for change as forcefully as possible.”

Read more about Fletcher’s Master of Laws in International Law degree program.