Ayça Çubukçu on state sovereignty and the political theology of humanitarian intervention, with regard to the ongoing crisis in Libya, at Jadaliyya:
If I have raised the theological dimensions of cosmopolitan theory and practice as a question, this is not only to observe how the editors of the Christian Science Monitor may be cosmopolitans as Christians, or to note, along with the historian Thomas Mastnak, that medieval crusaders, too, may have been “true cosmopolitans.” I raise the question of theology to also emphasize how, at least since the sixteenth-century colonization of the Americas, “religion” has been integral to the cultural logic through which the modern international legal order has been constituted, and international relations practiced. In fact, scholars have meticulously revealed how Euro-Christian colonialism, and the theological, as well as racial, cultural, moral, and political supremacisms that accompanied colonial practices, are the actual foundation of contemporary international law. Without such a historical perspective, it is difficult to appreciate fully the significance of recent advances and retreats in the battlefield of cosmopolitics — where the sovereignty of Libya is once again contested.
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