“No Right to Judge”: Alessandrini on Çubukçu, For the Love of Humanity

March 11, 2019 by
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This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Attempting the Impossible, Doing the Necessary Sometimes, in trying to think through the history of the present, it’s helpful to begin at the end and work your way back. The reader who takes this approach to Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq will be Continue reading →

Allen on Çubukçu, For the Love of Humanity

March 11, 2019 by
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This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. For the Love of Humanity tells the story of the global anti-war movement’s efforts to put the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies on trial for crimes committed during the invasion and occu­pation of Iraq. It is an intensely creative and also a vexing book. How it troubles Continue reading →

Hopgood on Çubukçu, For the Love of Humanity

March 11, 2019 by
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This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Much as its liberal cosmopolitan advocates might wish otherwise, “human rights” are a floating signifier. Small libraries have been built on the effort to give “human rights” settled and permanent philosophical and legal meaning, as well as cultural and historical grounding in a variety of genealogies of moral progress, but Continue reading →

Krever on Çubukçu, For the Love of Humanity

March 11, 2019 by
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This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. When Bertrand Russell organized an International War Crimes Tribunal in 1966 to investigate and condemn United States imperialism in Vietnam, the institutional form chosen was highly original. Backed by no state and unable to compel individuals to stand accused or to impose sanctions, the tribunal would nonetheless use the model Continue reading →

Wilder on Çubukçu, For the Love of Humanity

March 11, 2019 by
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This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Ayça Çubukçu’s original and insightful book is an exemplary work of critical scholarship for our times. This ethnography of the 2003–2005 World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), of which she was an organizer, boldly relates theory to practice as well as scholarship to activism. Her method, which she calls “political philosophy Continue reading →

Çubukçu: Response to the reviews

March 11, 2019 by
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This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. I would like thank the remarkable scholars gathered in this book symposium from the fields of anthropology, history, international law, international relations, and English literature, who have responded in challenging ways to my book, For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, and to what the book describes, Continue reading →

Statement from the New Editorial Collective, 2019

January 17, 2019 by
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The journal Humanity was founded in 2010 to examine the politics of “humanity” found in the convergence of human rights, humanitarianism and development. This was a period when a critique of human rights and the entanglements of humanitarianisms with empire was also gaining momentum. The current editorial collective affirms Humanity’s founding mission while attuning to new challenges. A complex dynamic of old problems and emerging obstacles has occasioned a chastened turn to human rights and humanitarianism: a renewed call to humanity has gained traction in Continue reading →

Dead bodies (do not) matter

November 9, 2018 by , and
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Edinburgh, October 2018 From migrants facing death at borders around the world, to the different chapters of the “War on Terror,” to the politics of post-genocide, our era seems to be marked by the constant politicisation of death. Social and physical death are increasingly intertwined in various spectacles of horror. Clearly, not all deaths are treated equally. Trenchant questions remain over what kinds of death are deemed morally, political and legally significant; and what kinds of death are rendered visible or invisible, and with what Continue reading →

The global war on migration, human shields, and the erosion of the civilian

November 9, 2018 by and
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This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. From the Mediterranean Sea to the US-Mexico border and all the way to the Australian coast line, for some years now states have been deploying military forces to arrest migration and refugee flows. In several countries, the humanitarian approach used to manage the influx of migrants has been increasingly combined with a military one, with some governments waging a Continue reading →

Politics, Deathwork, and the Rights of the Dead

November 9, 2018 by
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This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. I want to address, here, the dead body itself. Not just any dead body, but the mass dead victims of politically animated atrocity, some of which, sometimes, become the subject of large-scale justice processes, such as those in Argentina, Rwanda and Bosnia. These dead are not only the objects of humanitarian concern and legal action, but also the site Continue reading →