Acting beyond the state: towards a cosmopolitan awakening?

Abstract

Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity1 theorises the global anti-war movement occasioned by the Iraq War of 2003 around her experience of involvement in an elaborate global initiative culminating in a tribunal established by ‘world citizens’ that held its final session in Istanbul. Beyond question, the Iraq War Tribunal (WTI) was an extraordinary undertaking from start to finish, a worldwide non-hierarchical network of civil society activists that prior to the Istanbul finale in 2005 had organised separate tribunal sessions devoted to the Iraq War in major cities around the world including London, Seoul, Copenhagen, New York, Stockholm, several in Japan, Rome, Frankfurt, Genoa, Barcelona and Lisbon. Although there are many examples of prior citizens’ tribunals on a variety of controversial issues, none before achieved this global scale or was guided by such a grand visionary ambition. The acknowledged inspirational origin of the WTI was the Bertrand Russell Tribunal organised in 1967 to document American criminality in the Vietnam War. Relying on the prestige of the great British philosopher and on his influential moral voice, this innovative tribunal based its credibility on the participation of celebrity Western left intellectuals, with Jean-Paul Sartre serving as President.2 What was most notable about the Russell Tribunal was the novel appropriation of a statist legal framework by private citizens for the purpose of conducting a comprehensive legal inquiry into the Vietnam War. The Tribunal secretariat gathered the testimonies of witnesses and commentaries of experts, but based its authority to pass judgment largely on the reputation of its 24 prominent members, mostly men, including such iconic cultural figures as James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and Peter Weiss. Among its members was Lelio Basso, a prominent Italian jurist and legislative figure who later, on the basis of this experience, founded, in Rome, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT), which has held many comparable sessions over the intervening years on a variety of issues that governments and the UN found too hot to handle.