Sinja Graf

The international crime of "crimes against humanity" has become integral to contemporary political and legal discourse. However, the conceptual core of the term—an act against all of mankind—has a longer and deeper history in international political thought. In an original excavation of this history, The Humanity of Universal Crime examines theoretical mobilizations of the idea of universal crime in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Sinja Graf demonstrates the overlooked centrality of humanity and criminality to political liberalism's historical engagement with world politics, thereby breaking with the exhaustively studied status of individual rights in liberal thought. Graf argues that invocations of universal crime project humanity as a normatively integrated, yet minimally inclusive and hierarchically structured subject. Such visions of humanity have in turn underwritten justifications of foreign rule and outsider intervention based on claims to an injury universally suffered by all mankind.

Foregrounding the "political productivity" of universal crime, the book traces the intellectual history of the rise, fall, and reappearance of notions of universal crime in political theory over time. It looks particularly at the way European theorists have deployed the concept in assessing the legitimacy of colonial rule and foreign intervention in non-European societies. The book argues that an "inclusionary Eurocentrism" subtends the authorizing and coercive dimensions of universal crime. Unlike much-studied "exclusionary Eurocentrist" thinking, "inclusionary Eurocentrist" arguments have historically extended an unequal, repressive "recognition via liability" to non-European peoples. Overall the book offers a novel view of how claims to act in the name of humanity are deeply steeped in practices that reproduce structures of inequality at a global level, particularly across political empires.

"This is a fresh and original reading of the powerful and now ubiquitous term, 'crimes against humanity'. The concept has been prominently developed in international criminal law. By tracing the genealogy of the broader concept of 'universal crimes', Graf offers an original and provocative reading, not only of 'crimes against humanity' but of key issues and ideas such as humanity, hierarchy, authority, intervention and imperialism, sovereignty, and rights. This superb book is a valuable contribution to some of the major debates of our times about global justice and international order." - Antony Anghie, National University of Singapore and University of Utah

"The Humanity of Universal Crime masterfully traces how the idea of crimes against humanity has become one of the fundamental idioms of modern politics. In imagining humanity as a collective subject through the register of crime, policing, and punishment, this idiom paradoxically fortifies global hierarchies and structures the terms of dissent. With great clarity and striking insight, Sinja Graf explores how 'universal crime' functions, from classical liberalism to abolitionists against slavery, from liberal cosmopolitanism to debates about the anthropocene. It is essential reading for scholars of international law, global politics, and international political theory." - Murad Idris, University of Virginia and author of War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought

"In this groundbreaking inquiry into the political productivity of the notion of crimes against humanity, Sinja Graf documents how both elements—crime and humanity—work to establish normative and legal hierarchies which, in turn, justify and legitimate forms of juridical and material violence. Drawing on and contributing to international human rights and criminal law, international political theory, and global politics and history, this brilliant book offers a wholly original formulation of the meaning and significance of crimes against humanity." - Helen M. Kinsella, author of The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian

"This beautifully written, historically rich book interrogates the circulation of 'crimes against humanity' in global discourse, exploring the idea's productive entanglements with European imperialism and international law. By shifting our theoretical gaze to the concept of 'universal crime,' Graf presents a bold, new approach to navigating the seeming disconnect between liberal universalism and the Eurocentric ordering of the world.At the same time, The Humanity of Universal Crime serves as timely warning for political movements drawn to the innocence of 'humanity as a whole' and presses all of us to ask more probing questions about the kinds of exclusions the term both produces and obscures." - Jeanne Morefield, University of Birmingham

"Including victims in 'humanity' ratifies hierarchy, Sinja Graf shows in this compelling book. Using the tools of political theory to reinterpret postcolonial critiques of humanism, the chapters follow the historical emergence of the notion of universal crime, from the days of John Locke to the apogee of European colonialism in the nineteenth century to the recent emergence of global policing. This is a must-read for historians, lawyers, and political theorists." - Samuel Moyn, Yale University

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ISBN: 9780197535707

This essay theorizes how the enforcement of universal norms contributes to the solidification of sovereign rule. It does so by analyzing John Locke's argument for the founding of the commonwealth as it emerges from his notion of universal crime in the Second Treatise of Government. Previous studies of punishment in the state of nature have not accounted for Locke's notion of universal crime which pivots on the role of mankind as the subject of natural law. I argue that the dilemmas specific to enforcing the natural law against "trespasses against the whole species" drive the founding of sovereign government. Reconstructing Locke's argument on private property in light of universal criminality, the essay shows how the introduction of money in the state of nature destabilizes the normative relationship between the self and humanity. Accordingly, the failures of enforcing the natural law require the partitioning of mankind into separate peoples under distinct sovereign governments. This analysis theorizes the creation of sovereign rule as part of the political productivity of Locke's notion of universal crime and reflects on an explicitly political, rather than normative, theory of "humanity."

This article theorizes the politically productive aspects of the term ''crimes against humanity'' in contradistinction to normative political theories that conceive of international law as applied ethics and to Schmittian approaches to law as the medium of depoliticization. I argue that the criminal against humanity must be distinguished from the enemy of humanity, because crimes against humanity provide a universal yet minimal normative recognition to the offender within a global legal order. Analyzing the distinct patterns of agency and authority that arise from rights and crime respectively, I outline the communal dimension of the criminal law and discuss the performative claim to humanity as a global body politic that attends pronouncements of crimes against humanity by international authorities.

Current debates on 'crimes against humanity' address its history and its potentially neo-imperial effects in international relations. In reference to these issues, this essay abstracts the idea of universal crime from the contemporary concept of 'crimes against humanity' and analyzes its mobilizations in early-modern perspectives on the legitimacy of European colonialism. First theorizing the easy union between notions of universal crime and arguments about European imperialism, I then draw on arguments by Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius. I find that they rely on the idea of an offense injuring all mankind to negotiate colonial relationships between European powers and peoples abroad as well as between European powers vis-à-vis one another, both within Europe and in non-European spaces. The essay concludes by offering three venues for inquiry into the concepts of universal crime and crimes against humanity, namely their political productivity, their historical circulation, and their contemporary neo-imperial character.