The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives
International criminal law is at a crucial point in its history and development, and the time is right for practitioners, academics and students to take stock of the lessons learnt from the past fifteen years, as the international community moves towards an increasingly uni-polar international criminal legal order, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the helm. 
 
This unique research companion takes a critical approach to a wide variety of theoretical, practical, legal and policy issues surrounding and underpinning the operation of international criminal law as applied by international criminal tribunals. The book is divided into four main parts. The first part analyses international crimes and modes of liability, with a view to identifying areas which have been inconsistently or misguidedly interpreted, overlooked to date or are likely to be increasingly significant in future. 
 
The second part examines international criminal processes and procedures, and here the authors discuss issues such as victim participation and the rights of the accused. The third part is a discussion of complementarity and sentencing, while the final part of the book looks at international criminal justice in context. The authors raise issues which are likely to provide the most significant challenges and most promising opportunities for the continuing development of this body of law. 
As international criminal law becomes more established as a distinct discipline, it becomes imperative for international criminal scholarship to provide a degree of critical analysis, both of individual legal issues and of the international criminal project as a whole. This book represents an important collective effort to introduce an element of legal realism or critical legal studies into the academic discourse.
Inescapable Dyads: Why the International Criminal Court Cannot Win
Abstract The International Criminal Court (ICC) is surrounded by controversies and criticisms. This article highlights some patterns in the arguments, showing that many plausible criticisms reflect inescapable dyads. For any position that Court could take, one or more powerful criticisms can inevitably be advanced. The tension can be obscured because shared terms are often recruited for opposite meanings. Awareness of these patterns can (i) provide a framework to better situate arguments, (ii) reveal the deeper complexity of the problems, and (iii) help us to evaluate and improve upon the arguments. Awareness of dyadic structures can lead to a debate that is more generous, as we acknowledge the difficulty and uncertainty of choosing among flawed options, yet also more rigorous, as we attempt to articulate and improve upon our frameworks of evaluation. The goal of this article is to encourage a better conversation that can generate better insights.
Evaluation of buckling load and dynamic performance of steel shear wall retrofitted with strips made of shape memory alloy
One of the most imperfections of the steel shear wall is out of plane displacements that cause severe damage in both structural and non-structural elements. In this paper, the effects of shape-memory alloys on steel shear walls are investigated. First, a numerical analysis using the finite element method in ABAQUS software has been carried out according to an experimental test. The results of the numerical analysis have been verified with experimental results. Next, shape-memory alloy fibers have been added vertically and horizontally to various parts of the steel shear wall. The results show that retrofitting with the shape-memory alloy reduces the out-of-plane displacement of the steel shear wall under both cyclic and seismic loadings. Besides, the buckling load in the steel shear wall increases when it is retrofitted with the shape-memory alloy. Also, the total out-of-plane movement (accumulated absolute displacements) of the steel shear wall and non-structural damage are controlled by the characteristic of a shape-memory alloy material called “super-elastic”.