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International criminal law lacks a coherent account of individual responsibility. This failure is due to the inability of international tribunals to capture the distinctive nature of individual responsibility for crimes that are collective by their very nature. Specifically, they have misunderstood the nature of the collective action or framework that makes these crimes possible, and for which liability can be attributed to intellectual authors and leaders. In this paper, I draw on the insights of comparative law and methodology to propose a new doctrine of perpetration that reflects the role and function of high level participants in mass atrocity while simultaneously situating them within the political and social climate that renders these crimes possible. This new doctrine is developed through a novel approach which combines and restructures divergent theoretical perspectives on attribution of responsibility in the English and German domestic criminal law systems as major representatives of the common law and civil law systems. At the same time, it harnesses social science literature to identify and capture, in doctrinal terms, the unique circumstances in which mass atrocity occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has been developed and updated from a paper delivered at the Grossbritannien-Zentrum, Humboldt University at Berlin, June 2000. Traditionally, sport has been marginalized, even treated as an irrelevance, in the study of International Relations (IR). The 2002 World Cup Finals raised yet again questions about the realism of continuing to write sport out of IR, and particularly to ignore its impact upon such relationships as those between Britain and Germany. Football's role in mirroring, influencing and articulating British perceptions of Germany, at least at the popular and media level, is presented as a case-study, since the football field proved another important British_German battleground throughout the twentieth century. This trend continues. Already, three high profile football internationals played during 2000–1 as well as rivalry to host the 2006 World Cup tournament have illuminated the problematic state of the British-German relationship, particularly the fact that history, most notably world war imagery, imparts en enduring extra-sporting sub-text for any England-Germany footballing encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]