For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq
Why is the use of international law becoming increasingly prevalent in global affairs? What are the consequences of the widespread use of such an incoherent, colonial and imperial law as the lingua franca? In For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, Ayça Çubukçu asks these highly important questions and reveals the ambivalent role of international law in legitimising and/or delegitimising human rights violations. The book illustrates how different and sometimes colliding understandings of justice, human rights, legitimacy and international law co-existed in response to the Iraq occupation through the case of the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) (6). The WTI was organised from 2003 to 2005 by a transnational network of anti-war activists (eyewitnesses, lawyers, journalists, scholars and so forth) in Barcelona, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Istanbul, Lisbon, London, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Seoul, Stockholm and several cities in Japan in order ‘to tell and disseminate the truth about the Iraq war’ (3-4). Çubukçu defines herself as ‘a participant observer during the conceptualisation and practical formation of the WTI, committed as an activist and anthropologist at once’ (3). In addition to creating ‘an ethnographically grounded critical analysis of the politics of human rights, international law, and cosmopolitanism in the early twenty-first century’ (12), with this book Çubukçu forges a space where the politics of human rights and international law can be discussed in relation to other cases too: after all, there are other victims of empire. Read more