Sinja Graf's Humanity of Universal Crime

Session Submission Type: Virtual Author meet critics

Session Description

This author-meets-critics panel will bring together prominent scholars of international political theory, political thought and empire, and global and transitional justice around a discussion of Sinja Graf’s important and timely new monograph, Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021).

The book engages the international crime of "crimes against humanity", which has become a central theme of contemporary political and legal discourse. However, the conceptual core of the term—an act against all of mankind—has a longer and deeper history in international political thought than scholars and practitioners have so far appreciated. In an original excavation of this history, The Humanity of Universal Crime examines theoretical mobilizations of the idea of universal crime in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Graf demonstrates the overlooked centrality of humanity and criminality to political liberalism's historical engagement with world politics, thereby breaking with the exhaustively studied status of individual rights in liberal thought. Graf argues that invocations of universal crime project humanity as a normatively integrated, yet minimally inclusive and hierarchically structured subject. Such visions of humanity have in turn underwritten justifications of foreign rule and outsider intervention based on claims to an injury universally suffered by all mankind.

Foregrounding the "political productivity" of universal crime, the book traces the intellectual history of the rise, fall, and reappearance of notions of universal crime in political theory over time. It looks particularly at the way European theorists have deployed the concept in assessing the legitimacy of colonial rule and foreign intervention in non-European societies. The book argues that an "inclusionary Eurocentrism" subtends the authorizing and coercive dimensions of universal crime. Unlike much-studied "exclusionary Eurocentrist" thinking, "inclusionary Eurocentrist" arguments have historically extended an unequal, repressive "recognition via liability" to non-European peoples. Overall, the book offers a novel view of how claims to act in the name of humanity are deeply steeped in practices that reproduce structures of inequality at a global level, particularly across political empires.

The panel has been carefully assembled so as to comprehend the book’s multidimensional interventions in the history of international political thought, political liberalism, and critical international relations theory. The distinguished group of scholars who have agreed to participate are: Barbara Arneil (University of British Columbia; author of John Locke and America); Sonali Chakravarti (Wesleyan University; author of Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger After Mass Violence); Catherine Lu (McGill University; author of Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics); and Inés Valdez (Ohio State University; author of Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as Political Craft). The panel will be chaired by Turkuler Isiksel (Columbia University), and Sinja Graf (National University of Singapore) will offer a response.

The panel will engage political theory scholars who study a wide range of topics and represent a diversity of perspectives within the subfield. In addition, it will be of interest to political scientists who study international law and international relations.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Turkuler Isiksel Columbia University

Presenters

• Inés Valdez Ohio State University

• Sonali Chakravarti Wesleyan University

• Barbara Arneil University of British Columbia

• Sinja Graf London School of Economics and Political Science

• Catherine Lu McGill University