Previous events

Saroj Giri, Xenos Visiting Fellow, gave two talks on communalism, secularism and the Left in India: Critique as Ideology: The Dissident Left and Maoists in India (organised with the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Politics) Wednesday 12 November.

Hegemonic Secularism, Dominant Communalism: Imagining Social Transformation in India (organised by the Xenos Research Group) Thursday 13 November.

The Invisibility of the Commons A talk by Peter Linebaugh
Organised by the Xenos Research Group, Department of Sociology, and the Department of Anthropology, Tuesday 11 November

Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century and coauthor (with Marcus Rediker) of Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
[find out more]

Terror / Torture
Karima Bennoune
Rutgers University School of Law
plus respondents
Tuesday 6 May 2008
For further details, please download a poster [pdf - size 97.8KB]

5 June 2007: Limiting Sovereignty or Producing Governmentality? Human Rights as a Double-Edged Concept
Nicolas Guilhot, Dept. of Sociology / Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE

The sociology of international norms has often focused on human rights in order to illustrate the 'power of ideas' to inform policies: as the story goes, the successful institutionalization of human rights principles under the Carter administration forced the Reagan administration to adjust its policies to principles it could not uproot or use for purely legitimating purposes. These approaches ignore the contested nature of political-legal concepts and the fact that their very definition is the stake of struggles between contending groups of actors seeking to use such concepts in order to legitimate different policy courses. In the late 1970s-early 1980s, the concept of human rights recovers two different definitions, each corresponding to specific social groups and policy interests: one that sees human rights as a limitation of sovereignty through legal instruments; another that turns human rights into an anti-juridical concept primarily concerned with the production of democratic forms of governance. This latter version, promoted by neoconservatives and leading to ambiguous policies of democracy promotion, is still with us today. Download a poster for this event [PDF, 104k]

7 December 2006: The Clash of Barbarisms & the Middle East Wars
Gilbert Achcar

30 November 2006: Geographies, Cities, Terror
Derek Gregory & Stephen Graham

16 November 2006: Israel / Palestine Space & Conflict - a seminar
Eyal Weizman & Laleh Khalili
[ Download the PDF - File size 120K ]

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