Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the basic concepts of international criminal law. To understand the international legal order in the field of criminal law, one needs to ask three elementary questions. What is international law? What is criminal law? And what happens to these two fields when they are joined together? International law is about the legal obligations that arise between and among states. Meanwhile, the concepts of crime and criminal law are more complex than meets the eye. The chapter then considers the Dogmatik of international criminal law and the relevance of the law of war. The most significant contribution of the Dogmatik for criminal law was the invention of the tripartite system, namely the three levels of analysis that determine the structure of every criminal offense.