For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq by Ayça Çubukçu (review)

What is the legacy of the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI)? How can “for the love of humanity” be understood when it is used for both imperialist and anti-war arguments? These issues are elegantly interrogated by Ayça Çubukçu, an associate professor in human rights at the London School of Economics. Çubukçu writes as critical theorist, ethnographer, and co-coordinator of WTI hearings in New York and Istanbul.

The WTI took place from 2003 to 2005. It arose from the worldwide coordinated anti-war protests on February 15, 2003, to resist war in Iraq. The activists’ outrage escalated when the United Nations granted the United States and United Kingdom the role of the Coalition Provisional Authority, closely tied to the US Department of Defense.¹ A highly diverse global network coalesced into an action planning group operationalizing the WTI in three meetings, hearings in 20 cities worldwide, and the culminating session in Istanbul in June 2005. The activists aimed to stop the war and, more modestly, to document a historical counter-record to imperialist accounts.

Surprisingly, the war and occupation of Iraq are secondary.²Çubukçu’s ethno-graphic concerns are exasperating challenges to political solidarity within the WTI. She documents organizers’ conflicts at two junctures: first, using transcripts of the founding meeting to deliberate the WTI Platform, and, second, using email texts from the WTI’s global network List-serv of a post-project deliberation on how the WTI might continue. She follows the ethnographic inquiry-oriented descriptions with theoretical chapters. The book’s appendices provide readers with WTI’s platform and conclusions.³

The WTI was a horizontally organized tribunal project. The coordinators aimed to enact decision-making through consensus. A fine writer, Çubukçu’s valuable perspective as a participant gives what amounts to the backstage view of the WTI’s argumentation, a contrast to the performative dimension in the WTI public texts. We see that global participants held varied positions, aims, ideologies, and expertise evincing an irreconcilable divide of “overlapping yet rival cosmo-politics, offering competing visions of global peace and justice” (p. 45). International lawyers argued for legal bases to legitimize the tribunal, but others argued for political legitimacy, among them anarchists, anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, and anti-occupation activists—many from the global South and Palestinian solidarity movements. The political advocates outnumbered the legal ones, so that according to Çubukçu, the WTI engaged the “politics of legitimacy as a challenge to legality” (p. 90) (emphasis added).

Despite these tensions, the Culminating Session and project were completed in July 2005. But in September of that year, the final conflict was enacted through the Listserv. Various participants grappled with if and how the WTI would react to Amnesty International’s support of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s writing of a new constitution for Iraq. Amnesty, a leading global human rights organization, saw it as “‘the unique opportunity’ and legal chance . . . in the drafting of a new, possibly ‘human rights–based constitution’ in Iraq” (p. 90). But WTI activists critiqued Amnesty’s involvement as politically illegitimate because the occupation government itself was illegitimate. Moreover, formalizing the WTI or dissolving it were at issue.

Çubukçu uses Amnesty’s enthusiasm for the constitution-drafting “opportunity” to support her position that human rights, humanitarian law, and a cosmopolitan “love of humanity” are actually articulations of “empire’s law” (p. 147). To strengthen this point, Çubukçu critiques cosmopolitan theorists’ justifications and other international interventions—“human rights hawks” (p. 146) who defended the invasion of Iraq, the Iraq High Tribunal trial of Saddam Husayn, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 operation in Kosovo, and the UN’s 2005 adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a framework for international intervention. For her, these cases demonstrate that the cosmopolitan cry that “humanity must be defended” (Chapter 4) paradoxically supports violent interventions. She argues that “the historical constitution...