‘A wrong done to mankind’: colonial perspectives on the notion of universal crime

Introduction

Proudhon famously quipped ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’. Such longstanding concerns about ‘humanity’ as a universalist normative cover for particular power interests ¹ have been complemented more recently by critiques of vague uses of the term in international relations scholarship. These criticisms have noted that international relations theorists are content with invoking humanity as a self-evident moral grounding of their arguments, while failing to substantiate the term in two important ways. First, theorists do not clarify whether they are using the term in an empirical or a normative sense. ² Second, they rely on the charisma of the concept without explaining the precise nature of its normative authority that is necessary to substantiate their arguments. ³ The first creates confusion, the second entails a certain shortsightedness and both ultimately undermine the conclusions drawn from arguments articulated in the register of ‘humanity’. ⁴

These critiques put pressure on contemporary arguments for legitimate coercion in international politics that rely on the language of humanity and humanitarianism. To illustrate, the ‘military humanism’ that was first criticized in the wake of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) operation in Kosovo ⁵ has arguably persisted through the crises in Libya and Syria. ⁶ The complications of both have also not diminished interest in the ‘Responsibility to Protect’. ⁷ Given that the vocabulary of humanity is alive and well in political and academic discourses on international politics, we require a more nuanced account of the work it can do in International Relations theory.

The argument set forth here contributes to concretizing the uses of ‘humanity’ by focusing on the conceptual connection between humanity and criminality in historical texts of international political theory. To analyze the nexus between the notion of mankind and the concept of a crime or an offense, the article abstracts from the contemporary norm of ‘crimes against humanity’ to the notion of a universal crime. I treat ‘universal crime’ as an umbrella term for various historical expressions of the idea that certain acts injure the entirety of mankind. ⁸ The value of making the distinction between crimes against humanity and universal crime is that the latter allows for an analysis of the idea of a single act injuring all of mankind that is not tied to the particularities of ‘crimes against humanity’ as codified in positive international criminal law. There seems to be, after all, no compelling reason to constrain analyses of the notion of a universal injury as it circulates in political discourses over time by the twentieth-century legal definition of crimes against humanity. ⁹ To do so would not only ignore the ways in which the term crimes against humanity contemporarily circulates beyond legal scholarship and court proceedings, but would also overlook a rich history of the idea of universal crime that predates the formalization of the current international crime.

This article examines how-late medieval and early-modern international political theorists have actually used the term ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’ to discuss a range of political – and colonial – relationships. Given that the universalist vocabulary of offenses against mankind is a signature of international thought as it developed in the context of European colonialism, the perspective adopted here follows Martin Wight’s argument that the ‘“theory of humanity” […] verges upon a theory of colonial administration’. ¹⁰ The historically colonial setting of notions of universal crime throws a critical light on the contemporary reliance of the vocabulary of humanity to lay claim to the authority to exercise political coercion across sovereign boundaries in the name of a universal humanity. ¹¹

In analyzing how the concept of humanity structures arguments on colonial relationships via the notion of universal crime, the article focuses on the concept’s political productivity. I argue that late-medieval and early-modern thinkers mobilized the idea of an offense against mankind in order to make claims about the appropriate ordering of a variety of colonial relationships. While I follow Wight in his observation that the vocabulary of humanity is part and parcel of the early-modern European colonial project, I extend his and the more commonly held assumption that the vocabulary of humanity structured relationships between colonizers and colonized. I show that the language of humanity and the idea of a universal injury against it was equally productive of claims about the (il-)legitimate ordering of imperial powers vis-à-vis one another as they competed for imperial control outside of Europe. The approach taken here therefore turns away from studies that make arguments about humanity’s meaning as a value. Moreover, I do not seek to find out what the thinkers under study here meant by the term ‘mankind’ or what practices they considered to injure mankind, nor do I question why they considered the concept to hold moral authority. Instead, I focus on how these thinkers have mobilized notions of universal crime in order to debate the proper arrangement of colonial relationships.

The article discusses the political productivity of the notion of universal crime by theorizing how it lays claim to a legitimate hierarchy between actors. Those who call others universal criminals at the same time construct a normative hierarchy between themselves and the others. Those claiming a right to punish in the name of mankind thereby place themselves in a position of superior authority over the alleged universal criminal. The claim to legitimate political hierarchy that emerges from the framework of crime and punishment illuminates how the notion of universal crime can constitute arguments about the legitimacy of colonial relationships. One feature of the political productivity of the notion of universal crime, then, is its authorizing effect. Naming the actions of another a universal crime is at the same time a claim to authority over them. ¹² Analyzing the notion of universal crime therefore speaks to the question of anarchy versus hierarchy in international politics. ¹³ Introducing concepts of crime and punishment into theories – and practices – of international politics cuts across the distinction between the international sphere of anarchy and enmity on the one hand and the domestic sphere of hierarchy and criminality/law enforcement on the other.

It is within these parameters that I present a more detailed theoretical picture of the notion of universal crime. Drawing on canonical texts of the ‘rationalist tradition’, ¹⁴ specifically on arguments by Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius, I show that they rely on a vocabulary of a universal humanity to make claims about the appropriate structure of a range of colonial relationships. The variety of their positions shows that the notion of universal crime can address relationships between a colonial power and indigenous societies (Vitoria), those between colonial powers with regard to political relationships within Europe ¹⁵ (Gentili) and colonial rivalries in non-European spaces (Grotius). Arguments about mankind as the subject of the law of nature and nations therefore lent themselves to more than just defending or attacking the legitimacy of colonialism, as they also served to negotiate colonial rivalries.

Before proceeding to the analysis of these competing theories of universal crime in the context of the European colonial expansion, I offer a rationale for turning to the notion of universal crime in the late-medieval and early-modern periods in order to theorize the relevance of the vocabulary of ‘humanity’ for international politics. To make the point that our thinking about humanity as a norm ought not to be limited to the twentieth century, I detail the somewhat arbitrary relationship between the designation ‘crimes against humanity’ and the content of the international crime thus named. Based on this brief discussion of the codification of the norm in the twentieth century, I explain why early-modern texts offer better resources for analyzing the role of universal crime in international theories as opposed to the nineteenth century. The article concludes with reflections on how analyses of the political productivity of universal crime can inform theoretical and historical scholarship in the field of international relations.

Conceptual and historical framing

Universal crime and early-modern European colonialism: from Vitoria to Grotius

Based on the above clarification of the time period under study here, this section reconstructs three sets of arguments built around the notion of universal crime in early-modern theories of natural law in colonial context. These arguments evaluate relationships between a colonial power and indigenous societies (Vitoria) as well as those of colonial powers vis-à-vis one another with regard to inner-European political relationships (Gentili) and with regard to colonial rivalries in non-European spaces (Grotius). Taken together, they portray the different functions humanity can assume as the subject of universal crimes in normative accounts of international relations. The notions of universal crime discussed here contribute to arguments on the ordering of imperial relationships that surpass the relationship between colonizer and colonized as noted by Wight in his ‘Theory of Humanity’. A normative vocabulary of mankind allows not only for reflections on the hierarchy between those two actors, but also for contesting or relativizing claims to predominance and hegemony in imperial politics.

Vitoria’s international theory applies the Thomist conception of natural law ³⁷ to the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Overall, he allows a narrow yet malleable ground ³⁸ for the Spanish interference in the ‘new world’. ³⁹ Having rejected several arguments providing legitimacy to the Spanish claims to possessions in the Americas, ⁴⁰ Vitoria recognizes the American peoples as equal subjects of the natural law and God’s creation, thus affirming their original ownership of their lands and of themselves. He thus had to clarify the conditions under which Native American peoples could forfeit public and private dominium, thereby lending legitimacy to the Spanish conquest.

Vitoria distinguishes two types of actions that are universally wrong, yet do not injure the Spanish directly, namely crimes against nature and institutionalized practices that kill the innocent. ⁴¹ Importantly, he argues that crimes against nature do not provide grounds for just war, and thereby neither for the legitimate subjection of peoples in the Americas, because if crimes against nature could be remedied by unaffected third parties, instability would befall Europe, where such crimes routinely occur as well. Part of Vitoria’s argument against punishment across independent political communities in response to universal crimes is that Christian princes neither rule over the American ‘barbarians’, nor over other Christian princes, because punishment attaches to a superior power over the punished. Vitoria divorces crimes against nature from the right to punish across political boundaries. He thereby dissociates universal injury from universal jurisdiction and locates the normative hierarchy between punisher and punished within the domestic political relationship between rulers and ruled. Yet, while he rejects punishment across political communities due their political independence from one another, this does not mean that he altogether opposed coercive force wielded by foreigners. Vitoria excludes universal crimes as a source of legitimacy for colonial interference, arguing instead that only the ‘defense of the innocent’ can authorize Spanish coercion against American peoples in the new world. He argues that the use of force by unaffected parties is legitimate to save innocent people from unjust deaths resulting from tyrannical and oppressive rule, laws or customs. ⁴² ‘Defending the innocent’ ⁴³ differs from punishing crimes against nature in that it is directed at the victims and not the perpetrators. Vitoria singles out the cases of cannibalism and human sacrifice as forms of injuries to innocent men that are unjust rather than simply unlawful, a violation of justice (inuiria), rather than of right (ius). ⁴⁴ The injustice of such deaths incurs a loss of dominium, which authorizes the Spanish to react with force in behalf of the innocent. ⁴⁵ While Vitoria does provide for the legitimacy of foreign coercion over peoples in the Americas, he excludes universal crimes from the sources of such authority, noting that punishment cannot be exacted beyond the hierarchy of relationships between rulers and ruled.

Gentili and Grotius take a different route than Vitoria. They dismantle his prohibition of international punishment. With different points of emphasis, Gentili and Grotius derive their arguments on universal jurisdiction from the concept of a violation of mankind’s universally applicable law. In contrast to Vitoria’s theorization of universal crime as it limits punitive power as a source for justifying imperial coercion over foreign peoples, Gentili’s reliance on the notion of universal crime addresses a different set of political relationships, namely the legitimacy of imperial expansion in light of its potential consequences for other European imperial powers, including England. We therefore ought to consider the connection Gentili construes between ‘wrongs done to mankind’ and the universally equal right to punish in light of his concern over the expansive ambitions of the Ottoman and Spanish empires. Here, mankind as the injured subject of universal crime, with its connection to universal jurisdiction, fuels an argument on the management of the relations between imperial powers, rather than between imperial powers and the people they sought to subject to foreign rule. Gentili’s reliance on the nexus between universal crime and universal jurisdiction provides an argument for the universally equal entitlement to wield force on behalf of mankind, thereby counteracting Spanish claims to universal empire. The connections Gentili establishes between the idea of mankind governed by a universally valid law and an expansive conception of just war, which pivots on the authorizing effects of his notion of universal crime, show that universalist constructions of law can not only defend or attack the normative standing of indigenous peoples vis-à-vis foreign powers, but can also address inter-imperial rivalries. ⁴⁶

Gentili’s theory of the law of nations includes a notion of universal crime firmly linked to universal jurisdiction, ⁴⁷ which probes the question on what theoretical grounds he can elevate mankind as the subject of an enforceable law. Naming mankind as the injured subject of certain universally prohibited actions provides for unaffected third party action, because if mankind is offended, then all of members of it are. This aspect brings to the fore the authorizing function of a legal vobabulary of humanity. Gentili presents the law of nations as the content of the natural law, which is his strategy for claiming the universality of the law of nations such that it binds, and obligates, all mankind. He imbricates ⁴⁸ the law of nations and the natural law in that he considers the law of nations as he finds them in the Roman Corpus Iuris Civilis as the material content of the law of nations. ⁴⁹ Gentili differentiates himself from the theologians, whom he cites, by conceiving of the law of nations not as a largely positive law between autonomous polities, but as the empirical expression of a natural innata lex ⁵⁰ that is illustrated by the practices of the majority of nations. ⁵¹ As a result, Gentili could derive claims to political authority from his notion of universal crime and argue that warfare in the name of mankind was granted to every member of mankind on the occasion of a violation of the law of nature and nations. ⁵²

Importantly, in light of Gentili’s concerns over Spanish claims to universal empire, he had to make an argument that would extend the universally equally distributed authority to enforce the law of nations to the Americas. This endeavor was complicated by his reliance on the Roman compilation of civil codes of all nations that Gentili considers as the content of the natural law, which of course did not include information on the American societies. He therefore claims that ‘the New World […] has always been known to remote India’ ⁵³ and therefore part of the Ancient world. Yet, at the same time, he argues for the sufficiency of majority consent for identifying the universal law of nations, while noting explicitly that there are nations not yet found in the world. ⁵⁴ The lack of actual consent does not thwart the inclusion into the law of nations as the law governing all mankind, thereby extending responsibilities and liabilities globally beyond a requirement of consent.

Addressing the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest over the ‘New World’, Gentili also misconstrues Vitoria’s argument. ⁵⁵ Sidelining the fact that Vitoria claimed the justice of Spanish force against Native Americans on the grounds that their actions harmed fellow human beings, rather than on grounds of offenses against natural law, Gentili maintains that Spanish conquest was legitimate due to its quality as punishment of crimes against the natural law. ⁵⁶ Combined with his argument that universal jurisdiction, or unaffected third party intervention, attaches to the commission of universal crimes, Gentili here again makes an argument that can be interpreted to counterbalance Spanish claims to empire. If conquest can be justified by universal injuries, which anyone may reprimand transnationally, then the Spanish are only one among a potentially limitless number of agents of humanity who may act with legitimate violence on behalf of humanity in such cases. This multiplication of entitlements to the use of force in far away places comparatively diminishes Spanish claims thereto. Gentili therefore misrepresents Vitoria’s argument on the relationship between mankind, the law of nations and the authority to enforce against violations thereof in order to object to Spanish claims to dominion in America. But he does so on the grounds that the Spanish are a threat to other European powers, rather than to the Native Americans, who, as offenders against the law of nations governing all mankind, have forfeited their dominion. ⁵⁷ Here, we can see how Gentili’s argument on universal crime and punishment sets out to contest, and relativize, the claims to superiority and predominance of a particular colonial power. In sum, Gentili’s notion of ‘wrongs done to mankind’, and the theoretical framework that allows for it, works to address inter-imperial relations by equally distributing the entitlements to aggressive foreign policies among powers of the core among one another. The language of humanity, and the notion of universal crime, therefore does not only lend itself to establish the legitimate hierarchy between ‘barbarians’ and ‘colonial administration’, as Martin Wight put it. This universalist vocabulary set in the key of crime and punishment can likewise address rivalries between powers with imperial ambitions and as such contest claims to hegemony via the equally distributed right to punish in response to universal crimes.

Grotius’s treatment of the nexus between universal crime and universal jurisdiction likewise addresses inter-imperial rivalries, yet not with an eye towards Europe, but towards colonial competition abroad. ⁵⁸ Against the background of colonial discord in the East Indies, he introduces the idea that punishment in response to acts that violate the interests of all mankind is legitimate between formal equals in a condition of anarchy. Tasked with defending Dutch maritime actions against the Portuguese claims to a trading monopoly in the Straits of Malacca, ⁵⁹ Grotius’s theory of international justice in De Iure Pradae allows for a notion of universal crime that relies on the ideas of a unified community of mankind governed by natural law, the universality of which directly confers the authority to punish its violations in the name of mankind to any private or public actor. Importantly, Grotius’s concept of universal crime addresses relationships of rivalry among colonial powers as it seeks to lend legitimacy to Dutch imperial activities in Southeast Asia.

The challenge to theorize the Dutch actions against the Portuguese in the East Indies may contribute to explaining why he allocated the right to punish under the natural law and the category of universal justice. In order to construct an expansive theory of international punishment animated by a notion of universal crime, Grotius had to develop an argument for a universal and immutable law independent of practice applying to all of mankind, violations of which could directly confer the egalitarian entitlement to punish without above and beyond sources of political authority. The concept of an offense against an objectively valid set of laws applicable to all humans everywhere could set the stage for justifying violent acts beyond the limits of self-defense and thereby counteract claims to exclusive authority. ⁶⁰ The law providing for such authority for Grotius is the natural law, under which everyone enjoyed the right to punish because its violations affect everyone. ⁶¹ Breaches of the natural law therefore injure the interests of all mankind: ‘persons who have inflicted universal injury, no less than those who have injured a single individual, ought to give proportionate satisfaction. […] [A]n injury inflicted even upon one individual is the concern of all’. ⁶²

Grotius here points out the authorizing function of the notion of universal crime. He can therefore argue that it is legitimate even for states untouched by injuries to wage war ‘against those who offend against Nature’. ⁶³ Such punitive action, Grotius suggests, benefits humanity at large. ⁶⁴ Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that ‘it is so much more honorable to avenge other peoples’ injuries rather than their own […]’, which also helps to prevent excessive or mal-intended punishment. ⁶⁵ He further makes his argument that the right to punish emerges directly from violations of the natural law in opposition to the theologians, to whom he ascribes the argument that punitive power solely attaches to civil law. ⁶⁶ Placing the entitlement to punish globally under the law of nature dismisses the limits of punitive power as much as it undoes sovereign autonomy or political independence as a barrier against foreign coercion. Grotius explicitly liberates issues of crime and punishment from the real of domestic politics and transposes them to the international state of nature by arguing that only those not subordinate to the powers within civil society may execute the natural punitive right. Punishment can legitimately be practiced between formal equals. This is how Grotius blends anarchic relations on a global scale with a claim to legitimate hierarchies via the right to punish in the state of nature:

Kings, and those who are invested with a Power equal to that of Kings, have a right to exact punishments, not only for injuries committed against themselves, or their subjects, but likewise, for those which do not peculiarly concern them, but which are in any person whatsoever, grievous violations of the law of nature or nations. For the liberty of consulting the benefit of human society, by punishments, which at first […] was in every particular person, does now, since civil societies, and courts of justice, have been instituted, reside in those who are possessed of the supreme power, and that properly, not as they have an authority over others, but as they are in subjection to none. ⁶⁷

Grotius here underlines the nexus between universal crime and universal jurisdiction as much as he squares anarchy and hierarchy in global politics. He goes on to affirm the validity of the natural right to punish ‘before the foundation of governments’ and ‘in those places, where men live in tribes of families, and are not incorporated into states’. ⁶⁸ The natural law governing the state of nature includes ‘tribes and families’, thereby covering the colonial world, and as such extends to global, rather than just international, politics. Based on the equal recognition of all actors in international politics under the natural law, including tribes and families, this argument provides grounds for legitimately hierarchical relationships that do not spring from sovereign rule but solely from the enforcement of the natural law that is valid above and beyond consent, thereby leaving broad options for colonial wars. ⁶⁹ Therefore, inclusion in the purview of ‘humanity’, and in the natural law that governs it, at same time introduces the possibility of subjecting ‘tribes and families’ to the punitive authority of any agent wishing to punish universal crimes.

The punitive right therefore springs directly from violations of the law of nature that governs the universal community of mankind and requires no prior consensual ⁷⁰ or other relationship of authority between punisher and punished. That only those subject to no other power may punish across political boundaries points to the idea that it is the violation of humanity’s law itself that creates the legitimate hierarchical relationship between parties that is definitive of punishment. The violation of a universal law that crafts humanity as its injured subject therefore injects portions of hierarchy in the anarchic relations between equals in the international state of nature.

The range of arguments about universal crime presented here shows that, independently of its content, the concept is productive of arguments about how different types of colonial relationships out to be arranged. This comparative analysis of the workings of the notion of universal crime in early-modern colonial context illuminates the political productivity of the notion of universal crime. Gentili’s and Grotius’s twin arguments about universal injury and universal jurisdiction endows particular actors, in these cases the English and the Dutch respectively, with the legitimate entitlement to act globally in the name of mankind. They can make claims to such an entitlement by positing mankind as the subject of a non-consensual universally valid law, which can hence be injured anywhere and by anyone. The source of punitive authority therefore lies in the violation of the universal law, rather than in prior political relationships established by convention or agreement. Gentili and Grotius ground the universality of law in an association of the law of nature with the law of nations, thereby developing a conception of a law that binds and renders liable all mankind as much as it empowers certain actors to wield legitimate coercion to enforce that law anywhere in the world.

Conclusion

The above discussion has clarified why the early-modern period, rather than the nineteenth century, offers resources for interrogating the political uses of ‘humanity’ and of the idea that certain acts injure the entirety of mankind. Specifically, I have noted the authorizing function that emerges from theories that elevate humanity as the subject of a universal law that is applicable globally and above and beyond sovereign consent. Moreover, we have seen the ways in which notions of universal crime reflect on, contest and claim relationships of superiority and hierarchy in international politics. This analysis therefore throws light on arguments for justifying political coercion in the name of humanity that speak to contemporary debates on humanitarianism and military force. ⁷¹

We can take away three insights for developing further questions from this endeavor. First, we certainly need a more sophisticated theoretical account of the normative vocabulary of humanity in international politics than Proudhon’s phrase ‘however invokes humanity, wants to cheat’. And we need a still more precise understanding of the concept’s role in arguments about international politics than to say that is an ‘an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion’ ⁷² or that all appeals to humanity converge on a ‘linguistic drive towards occupation’. ⁷³ Similarly, our understanding of how the term ‘humanity’ operates in international politics should go beyond considering it as a normative value. ⁷⁴ Here, the directions into which research can take such specification vary. Since anyone ‘may appeal to Menschheit’, Koselleck notes, it is ‘necessary to define exactly who and what Menschheit might be so that the concept can be qualified in political fashion’. ⁷⁵ This is of course correct, but not all. Apart from specifying ‘who and what’ mankind refers to in given contexts, we also ought to clarify what the concept of mankind does in politics and theory. ⁷⁶ Towards this end, the above discussion of canonical arguments analyzed the notion of universal crime primarily independently of the content assigned to such crimes. We saw that the notion of universal crime not only lent itself to arguments attacking or defending colonial power over peoples abroad, but also to addressing the relations between powers of the imperial center from different angles. Therefore, much can be gained by focusing less on justifications of what international crimes prohibit and focusing more on how they create and order relationships between political actors. Given the generally self-authorizing function of notions of universal crime that resides in the very idea that anyone may act on behalf of an injured mankind, we always ought to pay close attention to those who gain political agency over others, rather than protection and victimhood, from the concept.

Second, the above discussion prompts us to revisit the much belabored distinction between ‘men’ and ‘citizens’ or between humanity and citizenship in scholarship on international relations critical of the normative priority of the sovereign state. ⁷⁷ Linking humanity with criminality in notions universal crime under the natural law voids the normative priority of political independence and sovereign autonomy. At the same time, the nexus between criminality and humanity articulates renewed claims to normative hierarchies of actors on the global stage. Given that the concept of humanity takes on different forms when coupled with other concepts, such as criminality, it in itself is no guaranteed source for a better world politics. The union of a vocabulary of humanity and the theoretical management of imperial relationships detailed here questions on what terms Andrew Linklater, in his search for a ‘radical critique of the state’ as a ‘particularistic moral community’ placing ‘impediments upon human freedom’, ⁷⁸ can claim that:

it may be contended that only within an international political association, which aims at maximizing human freedom, can the species express its unique capabilities while recapturing morally integrated lives. ⁷⁹

Furthermore, assessing Linklater’s argument that the tension between the modern inter-state system and a ‘pre-existing world morality’ of mankind came in full view in international thought in the late 18th century, ⁸⁰ we should note that the notion of humanity was at that time already deeply contaminated with Europe’s colonial project. Once we cease considering ‘humanity’ as a value or a ‘capability’ and turn to how the vocabulary of mankind has actually been mobilized prior to the time period Linklater draws on, the alleged tension between ‘men and citizens’ is not as easily resolved in favor of humanity as Linklater argues. ⁸¹ Consequently, scholarship on the location of humanity in international politics can be enhanced by turning away from the normative issue of what we owe one another as human beings rather than as citizens, and turning towards humanity’s political productivity by focusing on the political projects theorized by means of its universalist conceptual inventory.

Relatedly, given the findings of this article, we ought to more carefully evaluate the promise of ‘humanity’ as harboring greater inclusivity and recognition than the international system of sovereign states. Calling on mankind as a global community does not clarify the terms on which actors will be included in such a community. This problem is particularly well illustrated by the notion of universal crime. The concept of crime, unlike a tort, in itself depends on a collective that is injured, not just an individual an individual. As such, ‘crimes against humanity’ posit a claim to commonality and community in injury. ⁸² Yet, the gesture to human commonality inherent in ‘universal crime’ is accompanied by the claim to legitimate authority and hierarchy above and across political communities. In other words, community and hierarchy both emerge from the concept of crime when inserted into a vocabulary of humanity. Therefore, the terms of inclusion, whether in an international society of states, or in a politically governed community of humanity, must always be scrutinized. ⁸³

Finally, taking a long historical view, we ought to ask in greater detail when and why the vocabulary of humanity, and with it that of universal crime, circulates in political and theoretical texts and when and why it subsides. As much as political theories of the early-modern period are rife with notions of universal crime, as much does the concept of crimes against humanity structure contemporary debates on the legitimacy of violence in international relations. The hiatus of the idea of universal crime and a juridical concept of mankind in the nineteenth century, as discussed above, further ought to refine our understanding of the contexts and sensibilities in which appeals to a universal humanity flourish.