Worldmaking and Empire: Humanity and Universals Not Sought
A Conversation with Ayça Çubukçu, Adom Getachew and Darryl Li
A poster from the 2005 World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) in Istanbul reads: “Come occupier, Give Account!”
Karim Malak & Shaunna Rodrigues
Borderlines sat down with Ayça Çubukçu, Adom Getachew and Darryl Li to discuss their three books which deal with decolonization after the fall of Empire.
Karim Malak: Thank you all for agreeing to participate in this forum. Borderlines is thrilled to have you. Let me open with one small observation/question: All three books that we are discussing today seek to answer the question of how a new international order, or different kinds of universals could be conceived, by looking at key moments and alliances when building new global orders was possible after the fall of empire. Yet they seek to do so in different ways. What do the distinct and perhaps different approaches of worldmaking, cosmopolitanism, and an anthropology of the universal do to our understanding of a world that continues to be structured by forms of modern empire? How do these methodologies differ, but also intersect with one another through their unified object of analysis and inquiry, namely the international order?
Adom Getachew: I was trained as a political theorist and came out of a joint program in political science and African-American studies. I think of myself as working at the intersection of intellectual history and the history of political thought. And that is the way I arrive at this question with an interest in something that we might call a tradition of black political thought or black Atlantic thought.
The project I was engaged in is primarily focused on a set of texts, on a set of thinkers and the conversations between them. One of the things I really found productive in Ayça and Darryl's projects, is the way in which what they both name as an ethnographic method enables a different attention and orientation to the question of practices: How the universal might be enacted through a set of practices as opposed to—or in contrast to—a set of ideas or even international institutions.
For me, it was really productive to read these two books and to think about how the same object—the kind of work I was interested in doing in the book—might have been rendered differently through this orientation to practices of the universal. One thing I think that method particularly highlights is how difference and disagreements within a particular project are negotiated and managed.
In some ways the method I used was more interested in the question of continuity or trying to thread a particular position throughout and less interested, or not as interested, in the kind of internal differentiation of that political project. I think you get much more of the sense of internal differentiation and conflict in the ethnographic mode.
Ayça Çubukçu: Thank you very much for the invitation and for bringing us together. I also very much enjoyed reading both books and the process of thinking through what these three distinct books have in common. I appreciate your questions for trying to tease that out. I'm excited that we can think collectively about what it is that the books share. They share, definitely in my interpretation, among other things, an interest in alternative visions of world order and global justice.
Understood methodologically, my own approach was something I try to conceptualize as political philosophy in action. As an ethnographer and political activist in the global project I was writing about, I was interested in teasing out the implicit commonalities and implicit and explicit divergences between the two sides of the war of legitimacy over Iraq's occupation: those who opposed it and those who proposed it. I was very much interested in the common language that these two camps spoke, the anti-war and the pro-war camp, and their conflicting imaginations of what the task of universalism or human rights required in the case of the occupation of Iraq. But as Adom says, I was also interested in the internal contradictions and disagreements among this global network of activists, which I thought were very productive. My intuition was that they mapped onto longstanding philosophical disagreements. So I try to read theory and practice together—theoretical problems as manifested in political praxis and vice versa. The ethnographic method enabled me to do that, but I wouldn't call it ethnography with a capital E, because my situation was unique in the sense that I was a subject or I was an object of my own research as well. That gave me, I think, an intimate understanding beyond what a noncommitted anthropologist might have accomplished in comprehension. But this question I would very much like to speak with Darryl about, because of his own ethnographic position as a point of access to that imagination of the universal.
Darryl Li: Thanks so much, Shaunna and Karim, for bringing us together. I'm so excited to be in conversation with two people whose work I have long admired and I have regarded as excellent colleagues and friends, Ayça and Adom.
In response to the question about the international legal order, one of the really interesting contrasts that jumped out to me about these three books is that for Ayça and for myself we're both situated in the shadow of the end of the Cold War. We're interested in actors who are responding to a situation where decolonization -- or what I prefer to think of as the globalization of the state form -- has become rather normalized. And the actors that we look at are engaged in creative responses to this order. For Ayça and her interlocutors there is engagement with international legal discourse in a way that tries to expand the range of interpretive authority beyond states as the usual players, to show how international law doesn't belong to states alone. The transnational jihad actors I write about are engaged in a pretty radical critique of conventional international legal principles, but I try to nevertheless situate them within the logic of sovereignty in this order, in order to push back against discourses that seek to radically otherize them. In both of our books the protagonists are ultimately -- and I don’t mean this as a criticism -- engaged in a reactive sort of endeavor.
What's striking about the value of Adom's work is that because she's looking at this slightly earlier period, there is this sense of possibility, even hope, about what the state can accomplish as a vehicle. I think this is really heartening and very instructive in our current political moment, because there's this sense of insurgency and also a renaissance, but also potential co-optation around ideas of abolition that I think have not really figured out what they have to say about the nation state. I think a lot of our interlocutors are, and I include myself in this, predisposed to a kind of critique of the nation state in its totality, but I'm not entirely sure we've really thought out as thoroughly as we need to. The actors in Adom's story are confronting that, in a very concrete way, because they actually have some degree of state power. And I think her work really beautifully illuminates the sort of dilemmas and limitations that come out of that. It gives us some data to think with in terms of looking at these as strategic situations and dilemmas and not as slogans that one is sort of for or against in total.
Ayça Çubukçu: If I may add, in terms of Adom's work, I shared Darryl's expanded sense of possibility, if I didn't misinterpret what he was saying, when it comes to the state form. Having read Adom's book, I also came to think twice about my own opposition to the state form as such, having seen much more concretely all these visions and the creative investments in the state form, within a new imagination of a non-domination. It also helped me make better sense of some of the positions of my interlocutors, because I saw them as embedded in a long tradition of reinterpreting self-determination.
Adom Getachew: I think that one kind of commonality between the books, is that all of our actors, even if they're differently positioned historically and vis-a-vis the state, are repurposing old languages, old infrastructures. So, for instance, in Ayça's book, the participants in Tribunal don’t view international law and human rights as a language that's always already captured by imperial power. There's a sense that the actors see in it a possibility for remaking this language. And I thought that was very similar to the story I'm trying to tell about how self-determination gets appropriated and remade.
I also loved the chapter in Darryl's book about the Non-Aligned Movement and the ways in which older modalities of solidarity enable different kinds of politics at the moment of their collapse. This isn't fully fleshed out in my book, but we might think similarly about the varieties of interwar anti-colonial internationalism that figures like George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah and others were involved in, and the ways in which those projects had not yet decided that the state form would be the form through which they might try to realize their aspirations. But those networks enable this different engagement with the politics of decolonization and international institutions in the postwar period.
Even though we're differently positioned disciplinarily, we're all kind of interested in—the ways that ideas and institutions are mobile, that they can be reconfigured. You can't make anything and everything with them—but they are available for recapture and repurposing. To get at this, we are also all looking at moments in which a certain form of transformation is possible or these moments of repurposing are available to certain kinds of actors.
Karim Malak: I think that latches on directly to my next question. Having drawn out the similarities, I would like to draw out the differences in your approaches. Adom, one of the key terms that you introduced, which I was a big fan of, is worldmaking. Darryl, on the other hand, focuses on this idea of solidarity, and Ayça focuses on cosmopolitanism. And so I wanted to ask, how does the reclaiming of concepts like solidarity, and cosmopolitanism propose new horizons of emancipation?
These words have their roots in a decidedly different tradition of emancipation. And here's my philological bias: solidarity is often related to the idea of jus soli, the right of the soil, and making solidarity predicated on cohabitation of certain geographies and really limiting our understanding of how you can have solidarity with someone who you haven't shared soil with. Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, is related in its older meaning to cosmopolites, brothers of a metropolitan fraternity who are overseas but share a metropolitan bond. For example, church members and Freemasons were often thought of, very early on, as cosmopolites roaming the world while spreading their ideas. Missionaries too were one of the earliest cosmopolites. So how are these concepts reclaimed from their former conceptual histories to provide a new horizon for emancipation? To what extent do each of you think you have been successful in reclaiming those terms compared to, say, the formulation of a different concept, an idea rooted in a word such as Adom has, such as worldmaking?
Darryl Li: The way that I have been prompted to think about solidarity recently has been through etymological investigation, with that echo of the Latinate idea of soil and grounding. I want to think about solidarity as something that takes difference as its starting point and thoroughly integrates it and centers it, rather than presuming commonality or homogeneity. I recognize that the actual history of the term is more complicated. So solidarity, we can think of it in that kind of national welfarist sense, and what you mentioned Karim, this idea of cohabitation. But the way I think of it is as a way of imagining connection and cooperation across difference, but also taking into account the fact that people are engaged in solidarity while grounded in their specific contexts and practices. So for me, the reminder of that idea of soil and grounding is crucial for developing a notion of solidarity that is more supple, that is more realistic, perhaps, that could be more resilient and anticipates and welcomes tension and conflict and cooperation rather than engaging in a superficial assertion of commonality.
Ayça Çubukçu I think my interlocutors, fellow activists, World Tribunal on Iraq activists, were so diverse in their approaches to the problem of, what I prefer to call, transnational solidarity. Some of them were internationalists, some of them were liberal cosmopolitans, some of them were anarchists, some of them were really wedded to institutions of liberal cosmopolitanism, others were critical of it. So I tried to think about the contradictions and disagreements and the ideological diversity of these anti-war activists in conversation with official and unofficial forms of cosmopolitanism that supported the occupation of Iraq in the name of human rights, in the name of liberating an oppressed population from what they called Saddam Hussein the dictator, because I was interested in the overlapping visions of various strands of internationalism and cosmopolitanism at this historical juncture.
I didn't want to only call it cosmopolitanism or internationalism, but use the compromised phraseology of transnational solidarity to name that which was practiced, I think, by the World Tribunal on Iraq activists. In other words, they weren't, for example, straightforward liberal institutional cosmopolitans who imagined themselves as world citizens. They had a very complex relationship to their own locations, similar to what Darryl is describing here, as informing their politics of solidarity--so cosmopolitanism, no, but transnational in the sense of preserving the nation yet acting across it. This is the compromised phrase I would use for denoting the complexities in question here. Is it emancipatory? Is it an emancipatory vision? Again, it would depend on who you ask. Going back to Adom's point, I would like to discuss what it is about these historical moments that enables such creative possibilities—but that might be the topic of another discussion, another question we could respond to collectively.
Adom Getachew: Maybe I can just take up the question of world-making and how it sits next to in relation to these other concepts. In some ways I think the way that I arrived at that concept was in feeling a sense of dissatisfaction or inability to redeploy these other categories, whether those be cosmopolitanism, which is also in the book in another kind of way, but not transnationalism or internationalism. So this was a kind of way of trying to articulate or clear space for a different way of thinking about decolonization. And really what I was particularly interested in as Darryl's comment earlier made is, is there a way of thinking about internationalism that was not anti-national, and or anti-state?
This was my sense of the kind of political theory debate around cosmopolitanism and or transnationalism—these were projects at least as they are articulated in the contemporary world that have already decided that the nation state and nationalism are bankrupt political projects. These were terms that felt hard to fit my characters in, in some ways because they just don't have that. They have their own criticisms of the nation state, but not the ones that we share. Or not the ones that shape our horizon. So that's where the term comes from. I think perhaps what's generative for people about it is that it's kind of more evocative. It could mean many different potential things. And that might also be a certain kind of limit about it. One of the things I struggled about was, as I said, I think of myself as doing a certain form of history of ideas, and so what does it mean to use terms that aren't the actor's own terms? That was one kind of question that I dealt with. Whether it's non-domination, whether it's worldmaking, these are not the actor's own terms. And so that would be one kind of question, I guess, that is one limit of the term worldmaking.
The other is its purported novelty. Even if it seems like it's a new term, the basis of the project that I'm describing is one that's recuperating old concepts and institutions and reimagining them. So in that sense, I mean, one deep critique of the anticolonial project going back to the 1980s is that this is precisely the problem of anticolonial nationalism. That it never could actually create its own terms for itself, that it was stuck within the categories of modernity. And so in some ways, which the rest of the book illustrates, whether it's the term of self-determination, whether it's the appropriation of the American federalist as an example, all of these are ways in which they are kind of conscripted to the categories of the West. My own position on that is that this isn't a fatalistic problem. It's not the thing that dooms these projects, that actually there can be a lot of generativity in the moment of appropriation and of redeploying institutions and concepts. But then it raises, I think, a question that the book doesn't answer fully, which is why did these projects collapse? Can we write a story of the collapse of these projects in which it isn't just about the kind of political and economic forces, external, political and economic forces arrayed against them. What were the internal contradictions, either of their appropriations or other elements of the project that undermined itself? I think it was more about the systematic ways that they were embedded in and conscripted to the project of the nation-state, of developmentalism, etc.
Darryl Li: I just want to add to that part of what's exciting about Adom's framing of worldmaking -- I'm speaking for myself here, but I imagine I'm speaking for others as well -- is not simply that it's evocative, but that it's also ambitious.
The time that we came up in -- the late 20th century and early 21st -- was not really one whose theoretical aspirations matched the needs and the urgency of the moment. As Adom mentioned, there was so much theoretical despondency on the left and giving ground and being fed up with everything that I think that's part of what makes the framing of worldmaking so exciting. Also, the idea that one can criticize “worldmaking” as somehow not an emic concept invoked by the characters of the book is also a bit funny to me, because it instigates a difference between the observer and the observed that doesn't make sense in this context. Adom, you are also situated in this tradition of political thought and political action and of course you have every right to be generating new vocabularies and adding to it.
Ayça Çubukçu: I completely agree. I wish I had the concept of worldmaking in my apparatus before writing the book, I love it and it's extremely generative and it describes precisely what the World Tribunal on Iraq activists were trying to do. They were trying to imagine another type of world, other social and political and economic relations within a future that was anti-imperial beyond the international institutions that exist. So, yes, I wish I had that. Thank you, Adom.
Karim Malak: Wonderful. Thank you all for those responses. Following what Adom was saying about the alleged failure of these projects to generate their own vocabulary, I would like to speak to a related critique, if somewhat uncharitable. One which, at the same time, most of you hinted at in your responses. I wonder to what extent this theoretical shift, even if it follows the same object of study, namely the international order, at the same time just offers another side of the predominant international order, another side of the same coin —if so to speak. For example, it can be argued that Ayça's work exploring the World Tribunal of Iraq inscribes a belief in international world order and international law. Similarly, Adom's work on the New International Economic Order is just another side, for example, to the United Nations or other multilateral organizations that are products of the imperial order. And finally, Darryl's own work and ethnography of a universal and of jihad is the other side to a similar force that often necessitates international intervention and the use of force outside international law. Think of the responsibility to protect (RtP), for example. So how did each of you wrestle with these kinds of questions when you went about thinking of your conceptualizations? And how hard or easy was it to formulate an alternative that was not defined by its point of departure from the current international order?
Ayça Çubukçu: This was a very difficult question for me from the beginning. Initially, I did not want to be involved with the World Tribunal on Iraq because I thought it would totally reinforce categories of international law, reproduce faith in a system that is complicit in imperial reproduction. I was convinced otherwise, to participate and to study these actors, by a fellow activist who showed up one day to my apartment in New York with printouts of debates that were already happening within the World Tribunal on Iraq network, which was yet to be named, about the role of international law in perpetuating imperial occupation in Iraq. There was a very sophisticated debate early on in August of 2003, only a few months after the occupation had begun, that was very critical of the role of international law and human rights discourse in justifying the occupation. I'm not saying all activists were critical of international law, but—for me to get involved—there was enough debate within the group of activists that got me interested in dissolving my own politics of purity. In fact, in a review of the book, a scholar that I respect tremendously, Vasuki Nesiah of NYU, actually says at the end of a generous review that I still play the politics of purity vis-a-vis international law. She makes this claim because in the final chapter of the book, based on the analysis of, and an engagement with, Antony Anghie, Issa Shivji and other scholars of Third World Approaches to International Law, I basically said there is no distinction between empire's law and law's empire. Personally, my own judgment is that international law is thoroughly complicit in legitimizing, if not also legalizing, this occupation. But for example, certain critics have found that position a purist position and have said actually what the practices of the World Tribunal on Iraq show is a creative, subversive appropriation of the language of international law for pointing towards a future beyond it. I think that is true to the extent that in the final Istanbul session, the declaration of the Jury of Conscience actually finds international institutions and international law complicit in the occupation of Iraq. Nevertheless, there were many liberal cosmopolitans and legal cosmopolitans involved within the project that had no problem whatsoever with endorsing a narrative of international law, a history of international law, which Adom also takes issue with in her book, that thinks of international law as such as an anti-imperial project post World War Two. For my part, I was interested in the debate that ensued between the different parties that had very different ideological perspectives on international law coming together around the project. So that's what I thought was interesting, and it allowed me as a scholar to educate myself first and foremost about my own intuitive rejection of international law. After my praxis as an activist within this project and as a scholar who studied it and self-taught it to herself, I am much more critical of international law than how I began with this project, even more so now. So, one of the things that the book is interested in saying is that, well, there's a variety of ways that, from our vantage point, we can read the set of institutions of the postwar period. There may be a liberal reading, in which these were progressive institutions from their founding and all they had to do was just unfold the universal history of themselves and they were going to become inclusive and universal. So that's one reading. And then I think perhaps the opposite reading of them might be something like this: these were always going to be deeply repressive institutions. Thus, any attempt to engage them from within was always going to be doomed. I mean, one of the reasons to do historical work, and to look at times that feel far from our own, might be to unmoor us from our own kind of settled expectations about a historical moment. And so, one of the things I think that's really interesting is if you look from 1945 and from the perspective of the actors I'm interested in, but also other anticolonial activists around the world, neither of these things seem true then. They recognize that these organizations and frameworks are deeply hierarchical, that they're meant to maintain empire, but they also see them as potential sites for internal reconstitution and elaboration and different trajectories that they imagine they weren't necessarily created to enable.
Adom Getachew: I guess one way of putting the criticism that Karim brought up in a strong way is that the master's tools won't dismantle the master's house. And these set of actors were trying to, in some ways, use the master's tools. I think partly because of the figures I focused on, I came to see that dilemma in a different kind of way. Now, I do think that the kind of project they were invested in did disable certain forms of politics. Darryl's gloss of decolonization, as the universalization of the state form, makes this clear. This disabled their most internationalist ambitions by deciding that the state was the framework through which they needed to go through. But at the same time, it wasn't totally clear that there were many other options available to them. And this is the thing that makes the post 1945 period very different from the interwar period where the Communist International and other kinds of political formations, the League Against Imperialism, offer as yet an undecided and open space for thinking about institutional forms and political visions. I guess going back to the post-1945 period—yes, this is a space of constraint and limitation. But I think it was also in the course of 30 years of decolonization, the politics of the UN is so radically transformed that the United States doesn't think it can control its own creation anymore. And I think that's deeply powerful and a completely cynical reading of it as always, already doomed really misses the kind of challenge decolonization and post-colonial states were able to mount in the institutional structures of the postwar period. What we do with that in our contemporary moment is a different question. This isn't to say that we should try to reclaim organizations or that this is the most successful way of waging an anti-imperial internationalism in the contemporary moment. But it doesn't help us think imaginatively about the different strategies and tactics and forms of mobilization that we might take in the contemporary moment. That is we should not foreclose certain kinds of strategies or certain kinds of spaces because they don't appear to be necessarily anti-imperial spaces.
Darryl Li: I think one major point of contrast between my book and Adom's and Ayça's is that you both are looking at people explicitly and intentionally engaging with ideas of international law and international organizations. The transnational jihad fighters that I am looking at are not. They're enmeshed in the international system and they're not as implacably opposed to it as is often assumed, but they aren’t trying to get a seat at the table of the UN. The challenge that I had in this book was in crafting a form of legibility that would enable certain kinds of juxtaposition and comparison that would otherwise seem outlandish, if not outrageous. For that reason, I didn't worry that writing about these people would somehow provide support for RtP. For hegemonic powers to engage in that kind of appropriation -- look, jihadis agree with us! -- would already concede so much in terms of the kinds of assumptions that they want to normalize. Insofar as the angle of approach of these juxtapositions and these engagements was so potentially unexpected, I think that element of surprise, as it were, was part of what made the project interesting and potentially generative.
Karim Malak: The irony, of course, is you do have one case, one subject that was part of a humanitarian peacekeeping mission, but then he “went over to the other side”, showing that juxtaposition and the cross pollination.
Darryl Li: Yeah, absolutely.
Shaunna Rodrigues: Can the reinvention of conditions of self-determination, non-domination and solidarity as universals, or forms of worldmaking and humanity, proceed entirely within a secular episteme? Does secular discourse cause, as Darryl argues in The Universal Enemy, a flattening of the multiple modes by which ideas that are considered religious perform the work of processing difference and contesting international hierarchies?
Karim Malak: In a way Darryl’s book really is the one that offers the antidote, right? It is the ethnographic application of non-secular forms of what political science could crudely call nationalism. But it's obviously something beyond that, and gestures to a common unit of belonging, in some cases, the umma.
Darryl Li: Although my book does not explicitly raise this point, it is departing from a lot of the current thinking on secularism through a focus on international order. There is a chapter in there on peacekeeping as a universalist project in Bosnia parallel to the jihad. It focuses in particular on Pakistani UN troops who saw themselves as engaged in both solidarity with fellow Muslims and upstanding members of the international legal order all at once. And such an imperative could draw together Pakistanis who might otherwise antagonize each other as “secular” or “religious” nationalists.
Separately, the book also speaks to the need to push the preoccupation with liberalism in the secularism literature by thinking with state socialism, which also has significant ramifications for how we think about international order. And this connects to something I was thinking about in the conversation about the prior question: one important element of recovering that sense of contingency and thinking about international institutions, the post-WWII moment and so on, is the immense role that was played by state socialist regimes in shaping all of these ideas about human rights and international law that in today's era we tend to gloss is sort of unproblematically liberal.
Similarly, I think that textured sense of the socialist role in internationalism and international law, one can sort of go a step further in thinking about notions of secularism as something that potentially united east and west in the Cold War. But even here the story is much more complicated when we think about the entailments of, for lack of a better term, political Islam. The histories of overlap and antagonism between Islamists and left movements all the way from Central Asia through down to the eastern coast of Africa are a really exciting area of historical investigation at this moment precisely because the story is one that is not well understood. And I don't think we can jump to any conclusions about any sort of automatic enmity or unproblematic solidarity.
Adom Getachew: I don't really have a direct answer to this question, but for me, this also raises the question of scale. I mean, all of these projects are interested, of course, in internationalism, universals and world scaling projects. But the level or the space at which the question is posed really makes it possible to answer certain kinds of questions and not answer others. So what's interesting, again about the ethnographic mode which allows us to think about practices of the universal, is that you can begin to see these kind of overlapping spaces in a different way than when your primary space of thinking is the kind of state-to-state relations that that I'm primarily focused on.
One thing I think putting these books in conversation together helps us to see, is that we might be interested in questions about the international, about global order, but just because we are interested in those questions doesn't mean we have to answer them at the scale of the international or global world order. We can think that different scales or different geographies can answer those questions in different kinds of ways. And I think these projects, like Ayça's network of the World Tribunal on Iraq , is one kind of space and scale. The UN is another. The space of jihad, and the ways it intersected and interacted with older forms of the Non-Aligned Movement and peacekeeping, is another different scale of thinking that opposes this question of the global in a different way. I wonder if, as Darryl is suggesting, that thinking about different spaces, or reimagining what our spaces of inquiry are for posing these questions, can help get at this question of secularism in a different way.
Ayça Çubukçu: I've also been influenced by the anthropologist Talal Asad, who was my teacher, and his inquiries into the theological aspects of international law, the adjudication of legal versus illegal war being situated within a history of just war theory. I mean, the apparent secularity of international law, even of human rights discourse, I don't think can be taken for granted. I was fascinated by Darryl's exploration of Islamic internationalism because it took me a while to understand internationalism itself beyond the secular presumptions that many of us bring to the table when we talk about internationalism--it is as if it's a contradiction in terms, but it obviously is not. This brings me to the question of what we actually mean, Darryl, Adom, and I, by the word internationalism. I was thinking, reading their books, even when we use the same terms, sometimes I wondered, do we mean the same thing? So beyond the question of secularism and what we take to be the secular in relation to international law or international institutions, there's the question of commensurability of our terminologies, even when we use the same concepts across different political moments and scales, as Adom said.
Shaunna Rodrigues: Adom argues that decolonization cannot be limited to securing independence from the colonial master alone. It also includes international anti-colonial alliances, federations, and institutions that are built to address the background conditions of international hierarchy, military interventions, and enforced economic dependence that facilitate neo-colonial domination. Can decolonization, theorized on such a scale, be extended as an analytical lens to times and spaces that are deeply affected by neo-colonialism but usually do not typically come under the ambit of anti-colonial thought?
Ayça Çubukçu: For me, a question remains, what is Iraq now? What kind of state is Iraq now? It's an equal, sovereign nation state, supposedly. So how do we think of the problem of decolonization and self-determination in a context like that? All the questions that Adom's interlocutors raised in a very different historical moment, apply, to my mind, to the sovereign status of Iraq. Once the US was no longer supposedly the sovereign power over Iraqi territory, it challenged the practices of transnational solidarity that were exercised in response to the occupation of Iraq. How was the global antiwar movement to relate to a situation where sovereignty, legally, was transferred to the occupied? I found Adom's analysis completely contemporary when it came to the appearance of the neo-colonial situation in Iraq. I don't think we are beyond the questions that were confronted at the time that decolonization was advanced through anticolonial nationalism.
Adom Getachew I think it's important to remember that Iraq was a mandated territory. It's the only mandated territory that actually gained independence through the structure of the mandate system. And you might think of it actually as an exemplary mode of post-colonial sovereignty. This is connected to something Darryl mentions too at the end of his last chapter of the book when he asks how do we think about empire, in the contemporary moment? Is it the US exercising state of exception everywhere? Or is it actually deploying the structure of sovereign equality, formal sovereign equality, to evade various kinds of responsibilities to actually pass off its mandate and directives onto this kind of network of state actors that are sovereign? And in some ways, thinking back to Iraq's early history, you might tell a story of continuity about the form of post-colonial sovereignty itself.
Darryl Li: Yes! There were different categories of mandates under the League of Nations, roughly corresponding to different civilizational categories. And Iraq not only gained independence, but one could argue that it effectively graduated from one category of civilization to another. Not only did Iraq obtain independence, but in the very act of independence, it was compelled to sign a treaty for the protection of minorities, which is basically how the former territories of the Russian and Austrio-Hungarian empires gained national independence after WWI. And it's also a reminder that there's already so many different gradations of subjugation or domination, to borrow Adom's terms, in the international legal order that we tend to miss out on when we think of a binary between kind of sort of colonized and non-colonized.
The other interesting thought I had here was with Bosnia. I completely agree that contemporary Iraq is a reminder of the enduring presence of these concerns around neocolonialism. Bosnia is a different case because it's a situation of explicit alien rule even while claiming national independence. Yet you don't see a significant anticolonial movement emerging because the idea of peoplehood is already deeply contested by the war and a deeply divided polity. Now, far from serving as a justification for Western intervention, I think it's actually quite damning. Instead of building a peaceful society, Western intervention has locked in structures perpetuating ethno-nationalist division, such that one of the few things that's probably most unifying across folks of all national categories in Bosnia-Herzegovina is a shared desire to get the hell out of there. The migration rates for younger people are incredibly high across all of the national groups, especially with the desire for labor mobility to the European Union.
Adom Getachew: I mean, one thing that this last set of comments makes me think about is that one thing I suggest in the book, but don't fully flesh out, is how we might think about the international and domestic features of colonialism and/or neo-colonialism together.
If we think that, taking Partha Chatterjee's point that imperialism is the rule of difference, we can map a terrain that connects domestic and international. Hierarchies of difference are managed in the international sphere through arrangements of neo-colonialism or outright alien rule and are linked to the rule of ethnic and racial difference within post-colonial societies. I think this is a really important way of thinking about the nexus between the domestic and the international. So this is just to say, I do want to lay out this ambitious agenda of what decolonization was as a globe transforming project, but I think the more analytic point is to get us to think about what are the places and spaces in which the domestic and international or the national and the international intersect and reproduce certain cycles of domination. And to think perhaps that also those might be spaces and sites of potential political and critical leverage.
Shaunna Rodrigues: Ayça turns our attention to the sources of legitimacy for global alliances, solidarities, tribunals, and civil society, arguing that when agents act for humanity at large, their thought and action is fraught with complex tensions. She captures these tensions via debates on legalist imaginaries, shaped by the content and procedures of international law, and political imaginaries, where enactments of popular justice demonstrate the injustice of neo-colonial intervention. How do these tensions affect how legitimacy is built, communicated, and gained for anti-imperial contestations?
Ayça Çubukçu: That's a very complex question. But I should say that, after all is said and done, I don't think the World Tribunal on Iraq acted on behalf of humanity. Its motivating animus might had been a love or concern or care for humanity, but it was too aware of the pitfalls of speaking in the name of humanity, and precisely because it was committed to what Darryl called negotiating diversity or processing diversity within its own process of acting on a universalist register, it was aware that humanity as such and even the people of Iraq as such, were divided politically, ideologically into, to speak schematically, pro-war and anti-war camps. So for imagining the ground of solidarity, it couldn't simply be humanity. There were people who were pro-war and who were against war in the so-called international community, even if one didn't understand the international community as a collection of states. It had to be much more sophisticated in carving out or trying to articulate a ground for legitimacy for itself that did not replicate problems of representation or imputation, authority, authorization, etc.
I tried to theorize this through Arundhati Roy, who was the spokesperson of the tribunal’s Jury of Conscience in Istanbul. I say what she articulated for the World Tribunal on Iraq, along with a significant number of other activists, is what I call “partisan legitimacy.” It is a kind of legitimacy for transnational solidarity, which is not based on universal identity or presumptions of commonality, either through in essence or in ideology, but is invested in a political positioning par excellence. Even then, it wasn't a legitimacy that claimed to represent the global anti-war movement, but one that more imminently insisted we are part of the global anti-war movement and we're constituting this worldmaking project, to use Adom's language, not in the name of humanity, but in the name of all those around the world, or as a part of all those around the world who oppose this occupation and who oppose this horrendous war that was waged partly in the name of humanity, in the name of liberation and other universalist concepts. So to respond more directly to your question, I don't think a priori--and I would be very curious to hear what Adom and Darryl think about this--a basis for internationalism or transnational solidarity, however we want to name it, can be given in the abstract. I'm not convinced that it can be given either through human rights or humanity or even the umma. I don't think so. I think all of our work showed the complicated negotiations and confiscations and the invention, the sheer creative force of the very attempt to act legitimately.
On the other hand, I want to underline Arundhati Roy's perspective on the legitimacy of the World Tribunal on Iraq. In her closing remarks, and this has haunted me since she pronounced this fifteen years ago, she said: asking us why there's a World Tribunal on Iraq and what legitimacy we have in doing it is like asking me if I have the legitimacy to write a novel. She said: we are who we are and whether we are one million or five million or fifty, surely, we have a right to do what we're doing. I mean these are not exactly her words, but I worry of being interpallated as activists and scholars by this call to justify political action across borders--and Darryl's work complicates this really well, how to be legible in this secular, state centric international order. What pains do these activists go through to be legible to others in their own language? Maybe that's not necessary.
Adom Getachew: I really liked the language of partisan legitimacy and the explicit claiming of a political position against a legalistc neutrality. I think that does speak to an important convergence among these projects. They are universalist, but they're situated universals or universals that speak from very particular positionalities, and that articulate themselves as particular kinds of universals. So for me, just beyond this project, I am very interested in how black thinkers and actors make new universals, understand themselves to be parts of universal projects, but do so in and through blackness, or in and through, in this case, colonization.
And partly for me, it's about how terms of disenfranchisement and denigration get remade in that project, I think that is probably the most important legacy of Pan Africanism and Black internationalism. Its institutional projects didn't come to fruition, but it remade the terms of oppression into a category of new forms of identification. And I think Ayça's comments right now just remind me also of contemporary projects around reparations that's being kind of articulated from the Caribbean. That too is a universal project about what historical redress means and what it requires, but it's one made in and for the Caribbean, from a particular experience of enslavement and genocide.
I'm really drawn to actors and thinkers who are very clear and cognizant about their political position, about their historical subjectivity, but yet, from that position of specificity, try to articulate a broader vision of the world. And so for that reason, I can imagine that something like the reparations project, though of course is connected to and tries to repurpose various kinds of international discourses, whether those be human rights or whether those be particular kinds of institutions. But it's not one super interested in speaking for or in the name of humanity. It's speaking for and in the name of what it means to be Caribbean in the contemporary moment and to have been a product of a particular legacy of empire.
Darryl Li: I’d just like to add that there's a very special passageway between the notion of speaking for humanity and the notion of speaking to it. It’s productive to dwell in the tensions and subjectivizations that occur in that space. And to ponder the possibilities that emerge when one is trying to do one, but not the other, versus when trying to do both and the different moments where that happens.
Back to this question of legitimacy, I want to respond to the partisan point. When Ayça brought up this Arundhati Roy anecdote, I was reminded of a conversation I had with one of the protagonists of my book. This former jihad fighter said, “I heard that the United Nations is going to criminalize the act of going and participating in armed conflicts overseas.” And I sort of replied, “I wouldn't worry about it because at the end of the day, powerful countries don't want to rule it out completely because sometimes it will be in their interest to encourage this.” And he wasn't satisfied with that answer. He was just really upset, outraged really. “This is a human right,” he insisted. “My ability to go and participate and help other people and fight alongside them, this should be a human right.”
This is sort of a reminder for me of Marx's old line about people making history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. When it comes to the legitimacy question, Ayça's absolutely correct that these preexisting discourses that are ready at hand -- whether rooted in Islamic or international law -- they're never really going to do the trick by themselves. But at the same time, I think legitimacy is something that is often forged out of specific contexts and especially contexts of struggle. In those situations, we are never acting in a vacuum. So these a priori ideas do circulate and they become convenient or not convenient depending on what's going on. Like when Malcolm X says “we want human rights and we don't want civil rights.” I think it would be a bit shortsighted to say, oh, well, now he's just being a liberal, right? That wouldn’t make sense. There's something about these ideas that can be used in very different ways under these contexts of intense contestation that I think provides some window into how legitimacy is constructed in this context.
So even for the people I'm looking at, yes, they come in the name of "Islam" or "Ummah." But even within that universe, there are so many different discourses of legality, of legitimacy, different interpretations of Islamic law, different arguments that people are kind of working through and encountering and picking and choosing from, even in that one very specific and kind of narrow context. So I think it's a reminder that even our vocabularies of legitimacy have a kind of contingency that emerges out of the context. Part of what these three books are doing is trying to give an expanded sense of possibility in terms of what languages of justice look like and to provide some way of thinking about how those languages are learned and enunciated.
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018), and co-editor of Humanity journal, Jadaliyya-Turkey, and the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.
Adom Getachew is Neubaur Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and co-editor of the forthcoming volume W. E. B. Du Bois’s International Writings.
Darryl Li is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member of the Law School at the University of Chicago, and an attorney licensed in Illinois and New York. He is the author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity.
(Suggested Chicago citation: Malak, Karim, Shaunna Rodrigues, “Worldmaking and Empire: Humanity and Universals not Sought, An Interview with Ayça Çubukçu, Adom Getachew and Darryl Li,” Borderlines, February 5, 2021, <https://borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/2/5/worldmaking-and-empire-humanity-and-universals-not-sought>)