After a quarter- century of intense normative growth, professional expansion, and institutional consolidation, international criminal law may presently feel a little exhausted and in need of a break. Finding itself suddenly in the hurly- burly of global politics, the anti- impunity project has begun to re- think its self- image as an intrinsically neutral servant of the values of an ‘international community’. Instead of a world united behind such values, criminal lawyers have encountered political communities, diplomats, and politicians intensely confronting each other, in the dramatic image of Hobbes, ‘in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another’.1 What does it do to the principles of criminal law that they are applied in the context of deep adversity that is sometimes directed against the criminal process itself? How do those principles appear in the eyes of men and women not already committed to the global institutions that flag them? To answer such questions, it may seem useful to gaze backwards for a change, and to examine the ideological and professional assumptions that have conditioned the anti- impunity project so far. This is the welcome ambition of this book. As many of the essays below acknowledge, the growth of the discipline was always accompanied by a rather precise historical narrative. Even today, textbooks situate the origins of international criminal law somewhere in the latter part of the nineteenth century, traversing thereafter a number of familiar European locations— Versailles, Nuremberg, and The Hague, with a brief detour to Arusha/ Kigali. But the bulk of the activity was concentrated in the 1990s where the anti- immunity project found itself in the company of a other institutional processes abbreviated as ‘globalization’— massive growth of human rights, environmental, and trade law, an expanding sense that the end of the Cold War had unleashed the forces of Whig history; humankind turning from egoistic and dangerous sovereignty towards peace and common values.