“The Conscience of the Civilized World”

This chapter assesses the role of universal crime in nineteenth-century European arguments on the legitimacy of imperial rule. British abolitionist arguments redeployed the concept by overlaying “humanity” with the discourse of civilizationalism. Abolitionist uses of universal crime hence targeted imperial Britain rather than colonized societies. Refracting “humanity” through the lens of civilizational distinction indicates nineteenth-century changes in European international thought that lessened the popularity of the concept of universal crime. Overall, the chapter argues that a turn from an “inclusionary Eurocentrism” to an “exclusionary Eurocentrism” subtends these changes. Analyzing John Stuart Mill’s and Tocqueville’s evaluations of European imperialism shows that they discussed the legitimate conduct of colonial rule not in terms of humanity’s laws, but in terms of national identity and reputation. The chapter further assesses in detail those features of nineteenth-century international theory that engendered a normatively fractured vision of humanity that was inimical to its imagination as universally injured.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter critiques current scholarly trends to discuss crimes against humanity based on the feelings of horror they create and argues that an analysis of the power politics waged through their discursive mobilization requires analytical scrutiny. The conclusion therefore appraises the difference between hegemonic and counterhegemonic deployments of crimes against humanity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twenty-first-century deployments comprise the designation of slavery and apartheid as crimes against humanity (a designation that resulted from international political activities by actors from the Global South) as well as the denunciation of the 2003 US-led military campaign in Iraq as a crime against humanity (by transnational social movements). The chapter closes with a critique of debates on the Anthropocene that posit humanity as an undifferentiated, totalizing geological force and argues that, once again, scrutiny of the concrete, differential power positions structuring humanity is imperative for assessing the social causes of climate devastation.

From Humanity to Sovereignty

Chapter 2 analyzes Locke’s notion of a “trespass against the whole species” in the Second Treatise of Government. It reconstructs his argument for private property and political government through the lens of universal crime in a colonial context. Once humanity is stipulated as the earth’s stakeholder in the state of nature, the failure to enclose land via labor wastes the earth’s potential and instantiates an offense against mankind. Presenting the figure of the Native American as the quintessential universal criminal failing to perform agricultural labor as a dictate of natural law, Locke’s argument reveals an inclusionary Eurocentrism that includes non-European peoples insofar as they violate humanity’s supposedly universal norms. Furthermore, once the introduction of money enables accumulation without spoilage, those wasting the earth’s productivity become scarcely recognizable as universal criminals, and humanity as the natural law’s subject becomes destabilized. Founding separate peoples under sovereign government hence becomes necessary to recreate law-governed collective life.

Introduction

The introduction develops the conceptual framework for the notion of universal crime and details its analysis via the methodological angle of political productivity. Further, this chapter theorizes the normative conception of humanity entailed by conceptions of universal crime. The stakes of articulating humanity through criminality are thrown into sharper relief through an engagement with Carl Schmitt’s political theory of enmity. The hierarchical and coercive features of the concept further inform a discussion of its inclusive effects, which yield an inclusion that is minimal as well as unequal. Deployments of universal crime in European theorizations of world politics have therefore historically bestowed a repressive “recognition via liability” upon non-European peoples. Accordingly, this chapter outlines the distinction between an inclusionary Eurocentrism that subtends notions of universal crime and more commonly studied exclusionary Eurocentric thinking.

“To Regain Some Kind of Human Equality”

This chapter provides the book’s theoretical framework and elaborates its focus on the political productivity of the notion of universal crime that accentuates the figures, relationships, and forms of authority and agency entailed by the concept, in contradistinction to individual rights. The chapter argues that the concept of an offense against mankind casts humanity as a normatively unified, yet minimally inclusive and hierarchically ordered, subject of world politics. The notion of universal crime grants normative recognition to the offender against mankind, because the criminal is a figure well recognized within the symbolic order of the law. Nonetheless, this normative inclusion is minimal in the sense that the universal criminal is humanity’s least desired member. Furthermore, universal crime projects humanity as a hierarchically ordered political subject, because those abiding by humanity’s universal law hold the authority to enforce it over those contravening it.

Cosmopolitanism and Crimes Against Humanity

Chapter 4 examines deployments of “crimes against humanity” by post–Cold War liberal cosmopolitan thinkers across international relations theory and political theory. Liberal cosmopolitans routinely use “crimes against humanity” to recast foreign military intervention as global policing, rather than warfare. This rearticulation of cross-border military coercion disavows its irreducibly violent character and privileges the hierarchy between criminals against humanity and the enforcers of its laws over the principle of combatant equality that defines the international law of war. In this light, the chapter analyzes Jürgen Habermas’s reliance on crimes against humanity as “fixes” in moments in which his canonical theory of human rights and the democratic authorization of coercive law enforcement cannot justify Western-led military intervention in non-European states that he nonetheless endorses. Shifting away from long-standing theoretical commitments, Habermas’s cosmopolitanism yields an “affective turn,” which claims that public expressions of normative emotions against atrocities abroad serve to legitimize foreign intervention.