This book celebrates recent developments in the institutionalization and juridification of what it calls cosmopolitan norms. It treats genocide as a synecdoche for several new legislative and normative trends in human rights, especially in Europe. The book seeks to reclaim universalism for a post-metaphysical politics, but its reclamation is marked by traces of earlier universalisms that promise moral guidance from above to a wayward human world below. The author opens and closes these lectures by invoking Hannah Arendt, the democratic theorist (...) to whom she is very much indebted. Arendt was relentlessly insistent on the politicality of the trial. Through it, the still-new Israeli state sought its own legitimation as a nation state by casting itself as protector of international Jewry and seeker of justice for the crimes of the Holocaust. It is in this context that her other two criticisms, wrong charges and wrong setting, are significant. (shrink)