Ethics of Witnessing

My dedication to ethics-based inquiry and scholarship dates back to my first Ph.D. thesis, Sovereign Utopias (1998), where I addressed questions concerning how to deal with displacement, dispossession, trauma and erasure of historical memory across South Eastern Europe, otherwise known as the Balkans. My involvement with this particular region continued for the next ten years, and extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims and survivors, refusing detachment from their suffering. I became a self-professed collector and transmitter of testimonies of loss. My work on dehumanization of the refugees and the dispossessed exposed the limits of such ‘sovereign utopias’: the lack of collective and societal responsibility ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape of emergent societies, leading to a repeat of yielding to similar impulses of mass violence.

In 2018, as I completed my second Ph.D. (JSD/PhD in Law), I returned back to the same question, albeit from a different point of entry. This latter work is a concerted attempt to achieve an informed interpolation between ethics, politics and legal scholarship on international law, with reference to the specific category of universal jurisdiction as it pertains to crimes against humanity, and its scope is global rather than region-specific. It posits that critical perspectives from the Global South exemplified by the TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) approach and reflexive law debates, combined with a transnational understanding of international law and a committed inclusion of political judgment and collective responsibility for mass crimes, would create a radically different framework for understanding the normative underpinnings and procedural qualities of universal jurisdiction in international criminal law. In this work, which is now being published as a manuscript on Crimes Against Humanity, I brought together three distinct areas of scholarly endeavour: jurisprudential debates on international criminal law and in particular crimes against humanity jurisprudence, international relations and international law scholarship on state sovereignty, and applied political philosophy. By doing so, I offered a compelling view of the future of international legal reasoning and legal theory concerning the workings of accountability regimes in the Global South.

My legal scholarship on mass crimes and state criminality purports a critical analysis of the prescriptive norms and institutions of modern international criminal law in the area of universal jurisdiction, and I argue that international law has the capacity to advance values concerning the sanctity of human life, as long as it is not regarded as a closed and rigid system leading to the perpetual victimization of states and societies in the Global South. Ascertaining litigation for crimes reaching the dimensions of crimes against humanity remains an elusive quest. This is despite the precedents set by post-WWII trials in international criminal law and post-conflict justice. Specifically, I re-examine the Nuremberg legacy from the perspective of collective responsibility for mass crimes. Concurring with Karl Jaspers, I argue that the judgment alone cannot emanate from the courtroom for such crimes. Instead, I revisit theories of collective responsibility and culpability to bring the ethics component back into this crucial debate. Due to the extensive nature of harm involved in historic injustices, I posit that the individual responsibility argument waged against historic justice claims carries forward a great deficit. Historic injustices and the harms they generate are best understood as collective harms. The response to such harms must also have a collective component, and the remedies offered are only meaningful in a social and political context. I thus urge that we make room for considerations pertaining to collective responsibility as a moral obligation, thus providing a context within which legal judgment for egregious crimes could be firmly situated in ethical terms as well as being historicized.[10]

The second dimension of my involvement with ethics concerns my dedication to normative questions concerning how we engage with scholarship and our positionality as scholars in society at large. Reflecting on more than ten years of work in conceptualizing and building a network for refugee research, we are constantly faced with the challenge of “ethical networking” for research and practice. A key question driving my work with the Refugee Research Network (RRN) was how to collaborate ethically.[11] Moreover, through our work together, we sought to generate and disseminate knowledge in ways that are directly accessible to multiple audiences. How do we carry out research with displaced, displaced, and stateless people and communities, as well as other harmed and victim groups? Ethical questions surrounding work on forced migration loom larger than guiding principles on practical issues. My new work on Ethics of Witnessing, which is being prepared as an open-source website with international access, proposes ways forward to spark new ways of engaging with human suffering systematically. My multi-media and online work is increasingly recognized as a high-utility interdisciplinary platform to openly address difficulties and opportunities in ‘the field’.[12]

I began a new collaboration with the Institute of Human Science, Vienna, Austria, to develop a larger project on ethics of witnessing and collective responsibility in line with post-Arendtian thought in 2021, ongoing.