Criminalising social and political violence internationally

The problem of defining moral culpability, especially for violence, is inex tricably linked to the problem of defining 'life' itself. In contesting the current ways in which social and political violence is being criminalised internationally through the resurrection of the Nuremberg principle of indi vidual responsibility for war crimes, this paper does not contest answerabi lity as such. Rather, it contests the 'life' that criminalisation's account of answerability invokes; specifically, the jurisprudence of criminalised subjectification. The point is not to argue that individuals are released f rom responsibility for what they do because they are necessarily historical individuals at play in the play of power relations that is politics, altho ugh they are. it is to insist, conversely, on the necessity of locating tha t responsibility within the historical and political processes of which it is a part in order to insist on the necessity of always having to bring eff ective political and historical critique to bear upon those processes. The criminalising of social and political violence internationally seeks to est ablish a moral order curbing the incidence and ferocity of violence by brin ging it under the authority of some transcendent or supra-circumstantial or der, but it has done little to confine the spread and destructiveness of vi olence. It powerfully invokes a moral and political order, and an ideal of answerability, that even on its own account is radically insufficient to so cial and political life locally and globally. Indeed, it is implicated in t he very processes productive of modern violence and the progressive disappe arance of intelligible politics associated with them. That complicity arise s through the definition of life that criminalisation shares with the pract ices of what the paper calls global liberal governance. That way the humani tarianism sympathies of criminalisation become increasingly conditional upo n and deeply implicated in the contested effects of global liberal governan ce without developing a thinking politically in respect of them. A highly c onditional humanitarianism intimately allied to the opening up of markets, the casualisation of labour, the globalisation of production, the extension of liberal governance, and the conduct of strategic policy is clearly also in operation in the global liberal governance of which criminalisation of social and political violence internationally forms an integral part. This stimulates a powerful scepticism about humanitarian intervention and crimin alisation of violence internationally.