The global anti-war movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq crystalized on February 15, 2003, when millions of people simultaneously demonstrated in six hundred cities around the world. The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from this global anti-war movement “to tell and disseminate the truth about the Iraq war.” Between 2003 and 2005, in the absence of official institutions of justice willing or able to perform the task, the WTI established a globally networked platform where the reasons and consequences of the war could be investigated, and those responsible for the destruction of Iraq could be publicly judged. Based on two years of fieldwork with WTI activists around the globe, this lecture will examine the transnational praxis of the World Tribunal on Iraq to address challenges of forging global solidarity through an anti-imperialist politics of human rights and international law.

Bio: Ayça Çubukçu is an 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.” Before LSE, Çubukçu taught for the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. A transdisciplinary scholar by training, she holds a B.A. in government with distinction in all subjects from Cornell University and a Ph.D. with distinction from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Çubukçu co-edits the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press and is a member of Humanity Journal’s editorial collective. Her research interests are in social, political and legal theory with a focus on internationalism, cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, political violence and transnational social movements. In Spring 2020, Çubukçu will be based at Princeton University as a Senior Fellow with the Fung Global Fellows Program.