Sinja Graf’s debut book analyzes an understudied concept in international law and political theory: “humanity” as a collective subject that can be offended or violated. The book attempts to change the terms of debate about political liberalism from rights to criminality and from the individual subject to the collective subject of humanity. It is a work of impressive historical and theoretical reach with implications for historians, as well as for political theory and international law and international relations scholarship.

The conceptual basis of the modern “crime of humanity” reaches back as far as the English thinker John Locke (1632–1704), the subject of the first chapter. What is this notion? Graf deploys phrases like “the normative bonds constitutive of humankind” (p. 2) and “the normative unity of mankind such that anyone anywhere could offend against its universal norms” (p. 3). Graf argues that the significance of the notion, which is purposefully vague, is that it has accompanied and justified European expansionism since the early modern period—in other words, imperialism and colonialism—by licensing interventions in non-European lands in the name of humanity. For although humanity “was one,” it was also “empirically divided” between those who obeyed and those who broke universal natural laws; the right to punish infringements conveniently fell to the former and was similarly universal. Graf does not explicitly intervene in the enormous literature on humanitarian intervention but is doing so nonetheless on the side of the skeptics, such as Rajan Menon’s (2019) Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention. She is less interested in the contents of “humanity” than in what its invocation does: its political productivity.

Even though the preponderance of the evidence indicates that the discourse justifies colonial interventions, the author does not accept the Schmittian argument that invocations of humanity are but a fig leaf for particular interests. For the universalism of the discourse can be—and was—turned back on its wielders to expose their particular interests. Moreover, both forms of this discourse are related in a deeper way. For example, while the Western powers were justifying their war on Iraq in humanity’s name, their critics were alleging Saddam Hussein’s regime’s crimes against humanity in the form of a non-imperialist cosmopolitanism. Graf concludes that both forms of universal cosmopolitanism are complicit in positing a hierarchically ordered, globally conceived humanity: Once we assess discursive mobilizations of humanity,” she writes,

The book ends with a discussion of the debate about the Anthropocene, which Graf, like other critics, accuses of positing a false universal that holds humanity accountable for the unfolding climate catastrophe when, in fact, the Global North and the capitalist system are responsible. The literature about the “capitalocene” and “capitalogenic climate change” is consistent with her argument about humanity, she observes. The project, then, is less a genealogy than an ideology critique, exposing the differential political productivity of humanity. Thus, instead of writing a history of the notion of common humanity, which would require starting with the Stoics, Graf organizes the book into four long chapters depicted as snapshots or case studies of the discourse in action. Concluding on a nominalistic note, she writes, “Perhaps naming these orders is the most we can know about mankind” (p. 183).

In prosecuting this argument, Graf makes important temporal and analytical distinctions concerning this discourse of humanity. She distinguishes between inclusionary Eurocentrism and exclusionary Eurocentrism. The former characterized the early modern European powers whose ideologues, mainly theologians like those in the Spanish Salamanca school (which is mentioned in passing, although its members wrote a century before Locke), posited natural law as universally applicable to a Christian-inspired understanding of a common humanity. It was replaced in the nineteenth century by exclusionary Eurocentrism, a shift that effectively replaced humanity with stark hierarchical binaries like civilization and barbarism, the rational and irrational, the racially superior and inferior. Although Graf seems to reject the alignment of this argument with the succession of positivism over natural law in the law of nations (see Luke Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History, 2014), the timing is the same. The historian would want to ask whether any differences in justification reflected or led to differences in colonial practice.

At any rate, Graf perceives the continuity of Eurocentric humanity in Jürgen Habermas’s influential arguments for military intervention by NATO forces in Kosovo. The author hones in on Habermas’s particularistic affective argument to the effect that, as David Luban (“A Theory of Crimes against Humanity,” Yale Journal of International Law, 29[1], 2004) argued in vouchsafing crimes against humanity, the (posited) global public’s feelings of outrage about human rights infractions demand intervention. “Shocking the conscience of mankind” (or humanity) is the standard term (see Margaret M. deGuzman, Shocking the Conscience of Humanity: Gravity and the Legitimacy of International Criminal Law, 2020), one that Graf expertly picks apart for its implicit hierarchies. Given that her object of analysis is less how such discourses work in practice or are deployed by influential political actors like, say, Samantha Power (when she was the US ambassador to the UN in the Obama administration) than by political theorists, the focus on the 1990s and figures such as Habermas is understandable. However, that choice comes at the expense of the more recent and equally dramatic cases of Libya and Syria, which are barely mentioned. It would be instructive to hear how Graf integrates the debates about them into her argument.

The author also makes a major point of distinguishing between the discourses of “enemies of mankind” who are beyond the law and can be killed by any party—typically associated with piracy in the early modern period and sometimes with slavers in the nineteenth century—and the discourses of those who breach the law and can be punished as members of humanity. Graf is aware of the extensive literature on the link between piracy and the “enemies of mankind” reasoning but devotes only a few lines to it. I am unsure why this distinction is necessary and why she did not undertake a more systematic discussion of this proto-genocidal rationale. After all, Locke himself used it in 1690 in his Second Treatise, although the following quotation is not cited in the book:

As Richard Ashcraft (Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 1986, 400) shows in his study of Locke’s work in the context of seventeenth-century English revolutionary politics, such rhetoric against tyrants was common at the time. And as Graf might have shown, it could easily be transferred to Native Americans with genocidal consequences. Her focus is crimes against humanity in the present moment, but as she knows, interventions to prevent genocide are justified in the same affective way. If that is the case, what is the efficacy of the distinction between enemies of humanity to be destroyed and punishable criminals who remain within the human family? Given that the rhetoric in the “global war on terror” approximates to that about pirates and colonial uprisings in the nineteenth century (Isaac Land, Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism, 2008), investigating connections between these discourses seems like an urgent task. Paul Silverstein, in The New Barbarians: Piracy and Terrorism on the North African Frontier (2005), has suggested some of these connections, and it would be interesting to know what Graf makes of such arguments.

Brimming with insights and finely grained readings of major thinkers from Locke to the present day (many of which I do not have space to delineate here), The Humanity of Universal Crime is a major achievement that deserves a wide readership in several disciplines.