Incitement on Trial Prosecuting International Speech Crimes

International and national armed conflicts are usually preceded by a media campaign in which public figures foment ethnic, national, racial or religious hatred, inciting listeners to acts of violence. Incitement on Trial evaluates the efforts of international criminal tribunals to hold such inciters criminally responsible. This is an unsettled area of international criminal law, and prosecutors have often struggled to demonstrate a causal connection between speech acts and subsequent crimes. This book identifies 'revenge speech' as the type of rhetoric with the greatest effects on empathy and tolerance for violence. Wilson argues that inciting speech should be handled under the preventative doctrine of inchoate crimes, but that once international crimes have been committed, then ordering and complicity are the most appropriate forms of criminal liability. Based in extensive original research, this book proposes an evidence-based risk assessment model for monitoring political speech.

1. Inciting speech in international law and social science; 2. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide: an inchoate crime; 3. Causation in international speech crimes; 4. Instigating persecution: the prosecution case against Vojislav Šešelj; 5. Metaphors, agency and mental causation in speech crimes trials; 6. Social research in international speech crimes trials; 7. The social science of persuasion; 8. A new model for preventing and punishing international speech crimes.

Richard Wilson has published ten books on human rights and justice. His most recent book, Writing History in International Criminal Trials (Cambridge, 2011), was selected by Choice in 2012 as an 'Outstanding Academic Title' in the law category. He writes widely on human rights and has published in the Washington Post (US), Dagbladet (Norway), The Independent (UK), NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands) and the Times Higher Education Supplement (UK). He has held prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Russell Sage Foundation, and he has consulted for various policy agencies including UNICEF in Sierra Leone. He served as Chair of the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 2009–13.