The Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare at West Point has published an analysis titled "Built Without a Battlefield: Challenges of a Cold Case War Crimes Prosecution," examining the structural difficulties prosecutors confront when they build war crimes cases years after the underlying events.

The piece addresses a recurring problem in atrocity justice: cases assembled without the evidentiary foundation that a live battlefield or immediate crime scene would ordinarily supply. Its central premise, conveyed in the title itself, is that the absence of a battlefield at the time of prosecution shapes nearly every dimension of the case — from evidence collection to witness availability to legal strategy.

Why the Delay Matters

War crimes prosecutions that begin long after the events face a distinctive set of pressures. Physical evidence degrades or disappears. Witnesses scatter, relocate across borders, or die. Memories fade and fragment. Command structures that might establish individual criminal responsibility dissolve. Documentary records — orders, rosters, communications — may be destroyed, hidden, or never created in retrievable form.

The Lieber Institute analysis frames these obstacles as intrinsic to the "cold case" model rather than incidental to it. The title's phrase "built without a battlefield" captures the core difficulty: prosecutors must reconstruct the factual and command context of armed violence using materials gathered far removed in time and place from the violence itself.

The Institutional Context

The Lieber Institute, based at the United States Military Academy at West Point, serves as a forum for scholarship on the law of war and national security law. Its publications regularly address accountability for violations of the law of armed conflict, including the evidentiary and doctrinal questions that arise in international criminal prosecutions.

This analysis contributes to an ongoing conversation among practitioners, scholars, and military lawyers about how — and whether — delayed prosecutions can satisfy the evidentiary standards that domestic courts and international tribunals demand.

Practical Stakes for Practitioners

For prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges, the challenges identified in this line of analysis have concrete consequences. Proof beyond reasonable doubt becomes harder to secure when testimony rests on decade-old recollections and forensic material no longer exists. Linking a specific accused to specific criminal conduct — the central requirement of individual criminal responsibility — depends on evidence chains that delayed collection strains. Investigators must prioritize witness location, open-source verification, and documentary reconstruction from the outset, because opportunities lost in the immediate aftermath rarely return.

For defense teams, the passage of time cuts both ways: it weakens the prosecution's evidence, but it also hamper the ability to muster exculpatory witnesses and alibi proof. Courts must weigh these asymmetries when assessing fairness and reliability.

A Persistent Question

The analysis arrives amid continuing global efforts to prosecute alleged war crimes from conflicts stretching back decades, pursued through international tribunals, hybrid courts, and universal-jurisdiction proceedings in national courts. Each such case confronts, in some form, the problem the Lieber Institute's title names: the prosecution is built without a battlefield, and the battlefield cannot be rebuilt.

Readers seeking the full argument, including the specific case references and doctrinal analysis the author develops, should consult the original publication on the Lieber Institute's platform.