I am grateful to Dirk Moses for his perceptive review. His searching reflections reveal the broader stakes of theorizing the violent politics of humanity and offer an invitation to query them further.
Moses probes the “efficacy” of differentiating the “enemy of mankind” from the “criminal against humanity.” This welcome query pivots on historical and theoretical understandings of “efficacy.” Moses highlights that the discourse of the pirate as humanity’s universal enemy has driven violent political projects in (post-)colonial settings. He is entirely right to point this out, and he is also correct in observing that I eschew literature on piracy. The book’s empirical backdrop would certainly have been more comprehensive had I engaged it. At the same time, one motivation for the book was precisely to turn away from the much-studied figure of the enemy of mankind, because political invocations of “humanity” cannot be fully understood if considered solely through the lens of enmity. And although the “enemy of mankind” and the “offender against the whole [human] species” may both appear in Locke’s Second Treatise, this does not mean that both figures are identical throughout the text nor that the presence of one precludes analysis of the other. My book’s examination of the conceptual nexus between criminality and humanity therefore generates complementary insights about political deployments of “humanity” that fall in the blind spot of “enmity.”
This is why it develops the concept of “universal crime,” an umbrella term that captures numerous articulations of the idea that humanity as a whole can be offended. This elemental idea entails an imagination of humanity as a normatively unified, minimally inclusive, and hierarchically ordered collective subject. Moses astutely notes that the focus on a crime against humanity shifts analyses of (proto)liberal political theory away from the individual and toward humanity, and away from rights toward criminality. The notion of universal crime also orders humanity hierarchically and captures the offender against humankind as its least desired subject, who nonetheless remains positioned within the symbolic order of humanity’s law. It is especially the ambivalent nature of this “criminal inclusion” as an “inclusion by liability” that the figure of the enemy of humanity fails to illuminate. Analyzed in their (post-)colonial settings, invocations of the universal criminal that attempt to legitimize the hierarchy between the colonizer and the colonized highlight normative inclusion, rather than exclusion as a vehicle of domination and control.
The Humanity of Universal Crime is, as Moses correctly notes, concerned with ideology critique more than with analyzing practical changes. And even though Libya and Syria are beyond the remit of the book, I hope its readers will find it insightful for assessing the respective justifications (or absence thereof) that distinguish the two cases. This is so especially because the UN Security Council authorized intervention into Libya only after it referred the Libyan “situation” to the International Criminal Court. Attention to justifications from criminality in dispensing violence in international relations thus focuses on the relationship between law, violence, legitimacy, hierarchy, and humanity in a way that an analysis of enmity would not.
