Afterword: the ecological challenge: international crime or systemic transformation?

In this afterword, the appeal of proposals to recognise ecocide as an international crime are acknowledged as representing a significant response to the ecological crisis. The afterword argues that that current proposals are, however, structurally limited and risk obscuring the systemic causes of ecological destruction. By concentrating on discrete events and individual perpetrators, criminalisation diverts attention from the everyday, normalised forms of ecocide produced by capitalism, state – corporate collaboration, and unequal core – periphery relations. Falk contends that international criminal law, particularly given its inability to hold states and corporations accountable, cannot address the depth or persistence of the ecological crisis. Drawing on his earlier work on environmental warfare, coloniality, and intergenerational harm, he calls for a shift from event-oriented legal remedies to a process-oriented political project of systemic transformation. The afterword concludes that meaningful resistance to ecocide requires reimagining political economy beyond capitalist imperatives, seeking ecologically grounded, egalitarian, and democratic alternatives.