In her excellent new book, The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought, Sinja Graf draws on an array of early modern and modern texts and empirical cases to explore ‘the … elemental idea that humanity as a whole can be offended’ (p. 2). By giving an account of this concept, which she dubs ‘universal crime’, and which extends beyond the more familiar idea of ‘crimes against humanity,’ Graf urges readers to examine more closely the patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and the hierarchies and asymmetries, that constitute notions of humanity as they are deployed in international political and legal theories and discourses. Graf’s innovative argument in The Humanity of Universal Crime calls on readers to recognize humanity for the ‘conflictual and conflicted whole composed of unequally positioned actors’ that it is, in lieu of simply assuming it is a community of equals (p. 182). Her work thus functions as compelling ideology critique, as she helps readers see more clearly that the oft-invoked but poorly understood political idea of humanity frequently marks out a global network of relations of authority, many of them hierarchical and colonial in form and dependent on problematic exclusions and equally troubling inclusions.
By working at the conceptual intersection of ‘humanity’ and ‘universal crime,’ Graf thus establishes that holistic invocations of humanity in ethical, political, and legal discourse have not always prompted interventions that have improved the moral landscape of our world. Put another way, appeals to humanity as a collective, injured subject do not necessarily serve an emancipatory purpose, as we might expect them to do. Instead, they have yielded a much more mixed legacy in international politics and law, one illuminated by thinking about the mutual imbrication of the ideas of humanity and universal crime. As Graf explains, ‘encounter[ing] humanity in its nexus with criminality’ stands as ‘one of several ways of articulating the hierarchies of humanity in a normative key’ (p. 173. Emphasis added.). The Humanity of Universal Crime’s key contribution to political theory is precisely this: it brings into open view the moral and political ambiguities within this nexus and draws out how different political actors have exploited them differently, at times to legitimate the exercise of political power by sovereign states and at other times to militate against it.
As Graf emphasizes, then, the use of ‘humanity talk’—in political theory, in the international criminal courts, and in everyday political language – is politically productive of different forms of order (p. 183). Her book has a far intellectual reach, as it engages scholarship in several fields: the history of liberal political thought, international law, international politics, human rights, and the history of colonialism and de-colonialism. Scholars in these fields will thus find much in The Humanity of Universal Crime that speaks to their interests and challenges their assumptions. Just as significantly, however, The Humanity of Universal Crime draws critical attention to the work of practitioners – lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, journalists – who operate within the nexus of humanity and universal crime that Graf so carefully excavates. While primarily a work of political theory, Graf’s book has bold implications for political and legal praxis, too. Political and legal theorists and practitioners will no doubt want to read, learn from, and productively debate with Graf and her scholarship for years to come.
To support her argument about the political productivity of invocations of humanity in international politics, Graf relies on several different approaches to political theory, each of which she executes expertly. First, she does deep conceptual work, particularly in the introduction and Chapter 1. There she sets up the conceptual framework – explained above – that guides the interpretive work that follows. Next, in Chapters 2-4, Graf performs a critical genealogy of the idea of ‘universal crime’ by tracing its formation and development across the work of canonical figures in the liberal tradition of European political thought, including John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Jürgen Habermas. Scholars who focus on these particular thinkers would do well to engage Graf’s original and critical interpretations of their respective arguments. But the whole of her interpretive chapters is more than the sum of its parts, as her genealogical approach shows precisely how the hierarchies of international politics have been developed and reproduced over time by political theorists. Finally, The Humanity of Universal Crime benefits throughout from Graf’s attention to specific cases, ranging from national efforts to criminalize the IRA and RAF, to cases of international law enforcement such as the 1999 NATO intervention in the Balkan conflict. These empirically flesh out her theoretical insight that since ‘reference to a crime calls forth the existence of a political community … universal crime lays claim to humanity as a collective political subject structured by shared norms and laws, the violation of which leaves its normative bonds “in need of being repaired,” via acts of coercive enforcement’ (p. 47. Emphasis added.). In the book’s conclusion, she links her work to more recent cases of political and state violence. Further still, she also provocatively suggests how mounting international crises (e.g., capitalogenic climate change) might be better understood through the critical conceptual apparatus she offers, vis-à-vis other, more anthropocentric approaches. Graf concludes the book, then, by paving future avenues of research both for herself and for scholars inspired by her work.
In a short review, it is impossible do justice to everything Graf accomplishes in The Humanity of Universal Crime. Scholars in the different fields she rigorously engages are likely to value and debate different parts of her work. As a political theorist who focuses on early modern European thought, I found Graf’s original and thought-provoking interpretations of Locke (Ch. 2) and Mill and Tocqueville (Ch. 3) to be among the most captivating features of her argument. Chapter 3 in particular holds an intriguing place in Graf’s narrative arc, because it analyses a marked decline in the circulation of the language and idea of universal crime coincident with nineteenth-century European efforts to establish international law. As she notices, however, the relative dearth of references to universal crime in this period sits rather uncomfortably alongside the frequent deployment of notions of crimes against humanity, by both abolitionists arguing for an end to the transatlantic slave trade and – to a lesser extent – by French and British critics of their states’ conduct as imperial powers. How can these two phenomena be reconciled? Graf shows how they hold together, if we view them through the critical theoretical lens she offers. Debates about international law, abolition of the slave trade, and proper imperial conduct turn out to be a rich collective repository for scholars who want to see for themselves how notions of humanity are ultimately fungible; how the idea of universal crime contains ambivalences that can be exploited in different ways; and how ‘humanity talk’ has sometimes buttressed exclusionary and hierarchical political orders, with brutal consequences.
Graf’s work on nineteenth-century political and legal discourse during the heyday of European imperialism reveals the fundamental political malleability of the concepts she centres. Through novel readings of Mill, Tocqueville, and some of their interlocutors, she traces how nineteenth-century critics of colonialism invoked the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’ to lend moral and political force to their critiques of imperial states and their governments. At the same time, however, they made these arguments on what turned out to be national, rather than universal grounds. At first glance such a move might seem self-undermining, but Graf shows that Mill, Tocqueville, and others grounded their political and legal arguments for abolition not in universalist appeals to humanity, but by calling on national (and in fact imperial) sensibilities about British and French civilizational development. In other words, they argued that certain forms of violence and rule (e.g., British suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in colonial Jamaica, practices of enslavement in the French colonies) were a violent stain on their respective states’ ‘superior standing within the normative universe of mankind’ and their corresponding abilities to serve as effective and legitimate colonial rulers within a civilizational hierarchy where they were located at the top by dint of occupying a superior stage of development (p. 78). To be clear, then, Mill, Tocqueville, and their fellow critics were not claiming that these violent political events tore at the fabric of humanity, understood as a group of equal persons held together by shared norms and laws. Rather, they were evaluating specific forms of violence as conduct unbecoming of European nations at advanced stages of civilization. As Graf carefully documents, ‘these arguments on the limits and appropriate conduct of European imperialism drew on concepts and lenses that are ill-fitted to the idea of a universal crime that denounces infractions of a universal law governing all of mankind’ (p. 79). Instead, they drew on and developed concepts that would become cornerstones of a system of international law rooted in a differentiated, hierarchical conception of humanity, one founded in Eurocentric ideas of civilization and stadial history as ordering principles. Humanity, such as it was conceived, was thus held together by these hierarchical principles, ones that ultimately supported imperial governance over peoples that were figured as uncivilized and on the periphery of a global order. This hierarchy was further buttressed by the ambivalent notion of what counted as a crime against so-called humanity. By engaging and interpreting these nineteenth-century sources, Graf throws into sharp relief the fungibility of the idea of humanity and shows how the development of the concept of universal crime has a storied and violent history. She also gives us original readings of familiar political thinkers and reconfigures their places in the history of liberal thought.
As my all-too brief engagement with this single chapter shows, The Humanity of Universal Crime is an important scholarly intervention, one distinguished by its impressive intellectual scope and reach. Graf nimbly combines detailed analysis and interpretation of primary texts in the history of political and legal thought with work on colonialism and imperialism, human rights, and international law. The result of her efforts is a book that deserves – and will repay – careful attention from a wide scholarly audience. Political theorists, philosophers, legal scholars, and historians who work on liberalism, human rights, international law, and colonialism and de-colonialism can learn from and engage Graf’s account of the relationship between ‘humanity’ and ‘universal crime’ and her compelling argument about its power to produce and reproduce political orders and hierarchies. Her work will help these (often overlapping) scholarly communities proceed with newfound clarity as they engage the urgent questions at the heart of The Humanity of Universal Crime. As Graf establishes, ‘humanity talk’ is in no danger of abating any time soon, so we must focus our critical capacities on clarifying and confronting what it communicates and achieves politically in our own time.