Ayca Cubukcu, "For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
Harkening back to the tribunal on Vietnam once convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged in 2003 from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by a US-led coalition.\xa0 This decentralized, transnational network of antiwar activists attempted to document and give grounds for the prosecution of war crimes committed by the allied forces.\xa0 Ay\xe7a \xc7ubuk\xe7u's For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) is a remarkable investigation of the WTI, combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of political and legal theory. \xc7ubuk\xe7u provides on the ground accounts of the debates and discussions within the WTI, reading them with and as examples of political philosophy in action.\xa0 The book engages with urgent questions about the challenges and potentials of horizontal, network forms of political action, transnational politics across differences, and perhaps most fundamentally, with the challenges any anti-imperialist politics faces today.\xa0 Through her careful, incisive analysis, \xc7ubuk\xe7u convincingly shows that the language of law and global human rights was not merely cynically appropriated by those who pushed for the war on Iraq.\xa0 Instead, in complex ways, the ideals of international law and human rights underwrote both the arguments for the war in Iraq and the anti-war praxis of the WTI.\xa0 The book thus complicates any attempt to, as the author puts it, simply counterpose \u201claw\u2019s empire\u201d with \u201cempire\u2019s law\u201d, raising critical questions about the relationship between law, human rights, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism.\xa0 Required reading for those interested in the contradictions of imperialism and anti-imperialism today, \xc7ubuk\xe7u's study attests to the promise and peril captured in the phrase \u201cthe love of humanity\u201d.\nKamran Moshref is a PhD candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY.\xa0 He is a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast.\n\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law