Despite important differences in the war aims and conduct of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, war crimes trial policies emerged as globally connected domains of meting out justice that cut across the borders of nations, cultures, and continents. The aim of this conference, which is open to historians, political scientists and legal scholars alike, is to analyze and compare the transnational interconnections among the political, administrative, legal and social mechanisms of Allied transitional justice in the reshaping of the post-World War II world, with the prospect of an edited publication.

Far from a unidirectional imposition of “Western norms” on global conceptions of justice, experiences in Asia turn out to also have shaped legal perceptions in Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The emerging geopolitics of the Cold War met with those of civil wars and decolonization in Asia, with huge implications not only for former colonies but for the European metropoles as well, including the former Axis powers themselves.

We plan to identify geographically ‘mapable’ patterns of meaningful intersection (and divergence) across the globe in (1) the political will to pool legal expertise in order to conduct trials of Axis war criminals, (2) the hierarchies of the program’s administration by military authorities in different theaters, (3) comparable categories of crimes adjudicated on the basis of local jurisdiction, (4) crucial political contexts observable in both Asia and Europe, and (5) post-trial efforts to bring the program to an end in the 1950s by former Allies and Axis alike.

This conference is jointly organized by: Dr. Kerstin von Lingen, a historian leading the research group “Transcultural Justice: Legal Flows and the Emergence of International Justice in East Asian War Crimes Trials, 1946-53” at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in Global Context” at Heidelberg University, Germany; Dr. Wolfgang Form, political scientist and coordinator of the International Center for the Research and Documentation of War Crimes Trials at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, which holds the largest single repository of European and Asian trial records; Assoc. Prof. Franziska Seraphim, Boston College, a Japanese historian currently working on the spatial architecture of the Allied war crimes program comparatively; and Assoc. Prof. Barak Kushner, Cambridge University, a Japanese historian and senior lecturer, leading an ERC funded research project on “War Crimes and Empire. The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East-Asia”.