Ecocide, evil and the corporation

A contemporary debate within the field of international criminal law is whether there ought to be a fifth international crime of ecocide. In its widest sense, ecocide refers to devastating environmental harms. While theoretically any actor with sufficient resources could cause damage to the environment on a large scale, ecocide is a type of wrong that has been linked to modern industrial organisations: a paradigmatic state-corporate crime of growth capitalist economies. In this light, in this chapter I reflect on ecocide as a potential fifth category of international crime in two ways. The first is the perceived ‘evil’ of ecocide, which might be said to justify its inclusion in the corpus of international criminal law. To explore this idea, among other things I consider how contemporary philosophical literature on the nature of evil might inform debates as to the proper scope of an international crime of ecocide. The second matter to which I then briefly turn is the potential implications of adopting an international crime of ecocide in terms of the ways in which atrocity law might construct the ‘evil’ and ‘virtuous’ corporation, in light of the field's tendency toward such binaries.