For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq

Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

by Ayça Çubukçu

On February 15, 2003, millions of people around the world demonstrated against the war that the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies were planning to wage in Iraq. Despite this being the largest protest in the history of humankind, the war on Iraq began the next month. That year, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation. Like the earlier tribunal on Vietnam convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the WTI sought to document--and provide grounds for adjudicating--war crimes committed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allied forces during the Iraq war.

For the Love of Humanity builds on two years of transnational fieldwork within the decentralized network of antiwar activists who constituted the WTI in some twenty cities around the world. Ayça Çubukçu illuminates the tribunal up close, both as an ethnographer and a sympathetic participant. In the process, she situates debates among WTI activists--a group encompassing scholars, lawyers, students, translators, writers, teachers, and more--alongside key jurists, theorists, and critics of global democracy.

WTI activists confronted many dilemmas as they conducted their political arguments and actions, often facing interpretations of human rights and international law that, unlike their own, were not grounded in anti-imperialism. Çubukçu approaches this conflict by broadening her lens, incorporating insights into how Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Iraqi High Tribunal grappled with the realities of Iraq's occupation. Through critical analysis of the global debate surrounding one of the early twenty-first century's most significant world events, For the Love of Humanity addresses the challenges of forging global solidarity against imperialism and makes a case for reevaluating the relationships between law and violence, empire and human rights, and cosmopolitan authority and political autonomy.

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 14, 2018

Reviews

[Naeem · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concluding chapter (ch 4) "Humanity Must be Defended" is fabulous. It seamlessly synthesizes the deeper theoretical issues that contemporary humanitarianism faces with the actual fissures dividing the WTI participants as they convene the tribunal. The reader sees what is at stake as competing activists and contending theorists face the dilemmas of producing a cosmopolitan justice in an imperial setting. Cubukcu shows the impossibility of the situation while also invoking the long European and Christian history that produces the dilemma of a justice produced by force. Theory and activism come alive in capturing the urgency of prosecuting the U.S. and its coalition for their invasion of Iraq.

The rest of the book does not quite measure up for me. The best parts are when Cubukcu acts as an ethnographer of World Tribunal on Iraq and allows the various strands to speak to complexity of the issues. Less successful are the forays into theory/theorists that Cubukcu's own proclivity for jargon and love of complex sentences do little to illuminate. Chapter 4 is when the author finds the rhythm and the balance making prose swing like jazz.

If you have the patience this is an excellent addition to the literature that shows the violence and danger of liberal humanitarianism. It also provides an electric sense of the debates around the invasion of Iraq.

[Onur · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful history of an ambitious and necessary endeavour, and a testament to the true power of activism. A must read for any student of this turbulent period in human history and international relations.