Public invocations of international law and legacies of the Iraq War

Abstract

This essay reads three texts: Charlotte Peevers’s The Politics of Justifying Force: the Suez Crisis, the Iraq War and International Law, the 2016 Report of the UK Iraq Inquiry, and Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal On Iraq. It explores what each of the texts tells us about the role of international law as a public language and suggests how we might think of the texts as creating one legacy of the Iraq War.