"Winner of the 2012 Book of the Year Award, American National Section of L'Association Internationale de Droit Pénal (AIDP)" "Selected for the Washington Post's "Best of 2012: 50 notable works of nonfiction"" David Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law. He led American initiatives on war crimes tribunals during the 1990s, served as the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues (1997-2001), and was named one of Foreign Policy's "Top Global Thinkers of 2011."
The behind-the-scenes story of how today's war crimes tribunals came to be
Within days of Madeleine Albright's confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she instructed David Scheffer to spearhead the historic mission to create a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As senior adviser to Albright and then as President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls is Scheffer's gripping insider's account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time.
Scheffer reveals the truth behind Washington's failures during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the anemic hunt for notorious war criminals, how American exceptionalism undercut his diplomacy, and the perilous quests for accountability in Kosovo and Cambodia. He takes readers from the killing fields of Sierra Leone to the political back rooms of the U.N. Security Council, providing candid portraits of major figures such as Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Richard Goldstone, Louise Arbour, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark, among others.
A stirring personal account of an important historical chapter, All the Missing Souls provides new insights into the continuing struggle for international justice. "All the Missing Souls is a very personal history, an angry book by an often bitter man caught in the middle, conflicted in his loyalties, trying to advance the American agenda on international justice, while simultaneously having to tell potential allies in other countries that the agenda did not apply to Americans. . . . [T]he question of whether the establishment of international justice was actually worth it hangs over David Scheffer's narrative. . . . Justice--imperfect, partial, expensive--has been done and even been seen to be done. In these places, murderous rages have subsided. Some have reconciled. States have achieved stability. People are moving on. One of the reasons for this may be that in some cases justice was done. If so, David Scheffer can be proud of what he tried to do."---Michael Ignatieff, New York Review of Books "The story [Scheffer] tells is fascinating, for it makes clear that his principal adversary in the struggle for international justice wasn't African warlords or Balkan nationalists but members of his own government."---Lawrence R Douglas, Times Literary Supplement "A diplomat fights an uphill battle to bring the worst criminals to justice in this dogged memoir. . . . Scheffer's narrative is an epic diplomatic history. . . . In it we see the birth of a more responsible and civilized world order." "David Scheffer, a former State Department official who was a major architect of the five new tribunals of the 1990s, takes a refreshingly different approach to American pride in his semi-autobiographical study of the new courts. He is critical of his president (Clinton), he is critical of his secretary of state (Albright), and, remarkably and refreshingly in an American memoir in the twenty-first century, he is critic
