Criminal Liability in Conflictological Discourse

The paper deals with the history of criminal law and criminal liability in conflictological discourse. On the basis of ideas of legal pluralism, the authors investigate the transformation of the criminal and legal mechanism of conflict resolution from ancient times to the present. They study the customs of exile, blood vengeance, blood reconciliation, as well as a number of other customs of Amazonia and North America. The paper explains that such customs remain until now due to the expressed compensatory character and evaluates the origins of ritualization of conflict resolution procedures in ancient society. The authors examine the circumstances of the disappearance of the victim concept from repentant law, as well as the borrowing of the religious concept of responsibility not before the victim, but before the suzerain by secular law.The authors note that many generations of lawyers have formed their professional consciousness under the influence of an indispensable formal cliché: for the committed crime the perpetrator must be held criminally liable not before the injured person, but before the State that is not in the least at times guilty of failing to provide the victim with a safe life. Few doubted that the postulate given is the only one true. This example of survivability of ancient criminal law customs demonstrates the interest of society in alternative ways of solving criminal law disputes. The authors conclude that legal pluralism is natural for the area of criminal law due to the expressed compensatory tendency in the society’s perception of criminal liability. The penetration of compensatory elements into modern criminal law is assessed as a positive and only possible trend of further criminal law development.