Description
Debates on the relationship between normative universals and political violence in post-Cold War world politics have examined liberal mobilizations of universal individual rights to justify aggressive foreign policies. Scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and international law has analysed the centrality of human rights, codified in international human rights law, in Euro-American arguments for the legitimacy of violent political campaigns directed at Non-Western states. This project turns away from the well-researched role of universal individual rights and towards the notion of universal crime in arguments that justify coercive political interventions in non-Western polities. The concept of universal crime captures the elemental idea that all of humanity can be injured by certain acts, today codified in international criminal law’s ‘crimes against humanity’. As such, this project centres the nexus between humanity and criminality, rather than individuality and rights, in arguments on legitimate violence in world politics. This endeavour yields two arguments. First, claims to a humanity universally injured de-particularize specific political interests and thereby have self-authorizing effects for those invoking it. Second, the notion of universal crime yields a distinct vision of humanity as the collective, yet hierarchically structured and minimally inclusive subject of world politics.
