‘Negative Capability or Dealing with the Complexity of the Iraqi War’

Abstract

The paper develops an argument that the growing complexity of information and the widespread distrust of such information have created a need for a new foundation for the development of political action and that this demand has recently been satisfied with the help of the human rights discourse. On the surface of it, the global public's ability to judge and protest against the Iraqi war can be described with the help of Keats's concept of negative capability. The paper suggests that the unity of the anti- Iraqi war movement was illusory and made possible because of the availability of language in which people can express their opposition to the war, namely a human rights discourse. It concludes that only if we have a global public and an effectively working international system, are we able to respond to threats in a non-simplistic way.