Thursday 23 February – 6-7.30pm
RHB 137, Goldsmiths College
The Human Right to Dominate
A lecture by Neve Gordon
While human rights are generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices, in the past two decades they have also been deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as a case study, Neve Gordon describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. Gordon will conclude the talk by asking what remains of human rights after their appropriation by right wing political projects, and offer suggestions on how to liberate human rights so that they can become a weapon of emancipation in the age of Trump.
Bio
A Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS, Neve Gordon’s research focuses on international law, human rights, the ethics of violence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and political theory. His first book, Israel’s Occupation, was published in 2008 by the University of California Press, while his second book, The Human Right to Dominate (written with Nicola Perugini) was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press
All welcome – but please register!
For any queries contact: s.farris@gold.ac.uk
Sponsored by: The Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy
