These three books raise a number of important but ultimately unanswerable questions. The volume by Ellen L. Lutz and Caitlin Reiger goes through some well-known recent cases in which heads of state throughout the world have been prosecuted for crimes ranging from mass murder to corruption. It concludes that even though some of these trials took much too long and were very costly, and others seem to have been primarily provoked by a desire for political vengeance, they point to an increasing awareness throughout the world that being a head of state does not grant immunity from prosecution for evil acts.

Unfortunately, only political leaders who have lost power have been tried. Much worse mass murderers than Augusto Pinochet or the far bloodier Slobodan Milošević, for example, Stalin and Mao Zedong, were never tried. Nor will Vladimir Putin ever have to face a court for the bloody repression imposed on Chechnya.

Also, as Prosecuting Heads of State ably points out, even some of these losers, like Saddam Hussein, Milošević, or the notorious Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, were at one time viewed by leaders in other countries, by neighbors and some world powers, as useful assets. Their bloody acts were tolerated so long as they remained in the good graces of those other states. Chile's Augusto Pinochet and Peru's Alberto Fujimori were once heroes to many of their countrymen because they applied harsh measures, including arbitrary killings and torture, to put down leftist movements and restore economic and political stability. In fact, we have to suspect that the international ire against Pinochet had more to do with the European Left's anger because he destroyed a fashionable leftist regime than because he killed a few thousand people. That same European Left never seemed terribly upset by outrages committed by Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba.

As for the cases in which fallen leaders have been prosecuted for corruption, such as Joseph Estrada in the Philippines and Frederick Chiluba in Zambia, their countries have been so consistently and thoroughly corrupt, both before and after these trials, that it appears almost arbitrary, and more a matter of political convenience, that these particular ex-presidents were prosecuted.

Mark Osiel's approach is a lawyer's. The arguments he presents are aimed at legal specialists wrestling with the technical and moral issues facing those prosecuting perpetrators of mass atrocities. The most critical problem they face already came up during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after World War II. How is guilt to be assigned? The three most common pleas heard from the defeated German leaders were that they did not know about the genocides being committed throughout Europe by the Germans, that they were merely following orders, or that what happened was outside of their own area of responsibility. Those are heard in trials today. The first response is almost always a lie. Everyone in the top German leadership, and almost all German officers and minor officials, knew what was happening. This has been as true in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and other cases where far fewer but still substantial numbers were killed, as in Argentina under its generals. The second defense may be true, but if it were accepted, hardly anyone except for a handful of top leaders would ever be guilty of politically motivated acts. As for the third defense, it all depends on the actual behavior of various officials.

In Making Sense of Mass Atrocity, Osiel explains that there are two approaches to the question of how to apportion responsibility. “Superior responsibility” looks at the chain of command and places the higher blame on top officials. The other strategy is to invoke “enterprise responsibility,” which places blame on an entire organizational network, including individual members at many levels. An appropriate analogy is the prosecution of individuals in criminal gangs, where the lowest of perpetrators cannot plead innocence by claiming that his boss “ordered him” to do it. That raises the question of how far to go. What if a very large number of members of a society participated in mass murder, as in Rwanda, Germany, or in many communist countries? West Europeans realized after World War II that if all those guilty of collaborating with the Nazis in occupied countries were to be tried, societies might never recover.

Do prosecutions act as deterrents? Perpetrators who commit atrocities know perfectly well that they are engaged in something very dangerous that could lead to massive retribution (with or without fair trials) if they lose. Furthermore, to what extent will leaders hold on ever more desperately to power if they know that there is no way out except prison or death? Would South Africa's white leaders ever have given up power peacefully if they had not been guaranteed immunity?

Osiel concludes that those prosecuting mass atrocities should use some version of “enterprise responsibility” by going after the institutions most responsible. In most cases, these would be the army and security services. He even suggests that using fines might be a way of resolving the problem of how to treat those lower down in the hierarchy. At the same time, going too far with this approach could threaten social peace, and so hierarchies of control, both formal and informal, have to be examined to find those individuals most responsible for encouraging, sanctioning, and ordering the killings and torture. He concludes by acknowledging that mass killing is rarely, if ever, a purely bureaucratic phenomenon, that legal fictions have to be invented to convict those who may well have been acting within the legal framework of their own time and place, and that in the end, lawyers are unable to resolve all the dilemmas presented by such cases.

The proliferation of international tribunals since the 1990s has encouraged many with political grievances to demand “justice.” Are Israeli leaders guilty of war crimes for killing civilians in Gaza or Lebanon? Are members of George W. Bush's administration guilty of crimes for having invaded Iraq, not protecting its civilians from subsequent violence, and sanctioning torture? Ultimately, are any leaders of countries involved in wars, or even counterterrorism, entirely blameless? I would never argue that Nazi crimes can be excused as acts of war, but once we start accusing Pinochet or Ariel Sharon of genocide, and suggesting that Henry Kissinger or George W. Bush committed war crimes, where is the line to be drawn?

This is why Peines de guerre, edited by Isabelle Delpla and Magali Bessone, is so valuable. Its 18 incisive, thoughtful essays by different authors look at just one case, former Yugoslavia. There are contributions from legal experts, some of whom were directly involved in criminal prosecutions of former Yugoslav leaders, as well as essays by moral philosophers, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists. There is no single conclusion, but the many different aspects of trying to prosecute terrible abuses are exposed in all of their ambiguities.

Even more than in Osiel's book, the contradictions between common (Anglo-American) and civil (continental European) law are brought out. Many Yugoslavs were outraged by the ability of some accused to plea-bargain for lesser sentences, something Americans are used to, but which left victims feeling cheated.

Another critical issue is that the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia depended on Western, Enlightenment-based moral and legal philosophy. When “the international community” is brought up in these kinds of cases, this really refers to the opinion of a few Western states. How, then, can this be fairly used in societies with very different traditions? A historian in this volume looks at how certain participants in the terrible Yugoslav civil wars during World War II were tried by communist courts, and concludes that these were fixed political persecutions, not fair trials. This was the norm in all communist societies when it came to political acts that went against the regime. So it is no wonder that many Yugoslavs were skeptical about the fairness of the international tribunal.

This leads a careful reader to wonder what happens when similar Western traditions are applied in entirely non-European cases in Africa or Asia? We easily wind up with costly, lengthy, and almost absurdly irrelevant trials like the international tribunal for Rwanda, or empty and probably self-defeating gestures like the indictment of President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan.

What the Delpla-Bessone volume tells us is that each case has to be carefully examined, its peculiarities understood, and that applying general rules everywhere in the world may not be appropriate. Some of the articles also show that when political and ideological issues are involved, even so-called expert testimony is likely to be biased.

Yet, in the end, there are atrocious crimes committed by those in power in many places. In some cases, particularly when a society judges its own, as has been happening in Argentina, the outcome of prosecutions can be satisfactory. But if, as in the case of Cambodia, those in charge delay prosecutions, or as in Rwanda, turn them into ideological weapons against their enemies, no amount of international involvement will really make the situation any better.