The Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent is pleased to announce its Annual Lecture, to be held on Tuesday 26 November at 6pm. This event is open to all and no registration is required. Professor Costas Douzinas will be speaking on ‘States of Exception and Resistance’. The event will be held at the Wigoder Moot Court building, and directions can be found here. 

The Annual Lecture will also be livestreamed on Microsoft Teams. You can find the link to the Teams meeting on the attached posters. 

Professor Douzinas was a Member of the Hellenic Parliament, and Emeritus Professor of Law at Birkbeck Law School. He also founded the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in 2004. He has published many books, including Justice Miscarried: Ethics and Aesthetics and the Law (with Ronnie Warrington, Edinburgh University Press, 1996), The End of Human Rights: Critical Thought at the Turn of the Century (Hart Publishing, 2000), Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice (with Adam Gearey, Hart Publishing, 2005), The Meaning of Human Rights (co-edited with Conor Gearty, CUP, 2014), The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law (co-edited with Conor Gearty, CUP, 2013), Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis: Greece and the Future of Europe (Polity, 2013), The Idea of Communism (co-edited with Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2012), and New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political (co-edited with Matthew Stone and Illan rua Wall, Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2012). Douzinas has served as an editor for Law & Critique, his books have been translated into thirteen languages, and he has written extensively for The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, and other global publications.

His latest book, The States of Exception: Biopolitics, Human Rights, Utopia is published by Edward Elgar Press. In this book, Professor Douzinas assesses and critiques the ways in which governments responded to three recent emergencies: the 2008 economic crisis, the large flows of refugees and migrants since the 2010s and the COVID-19 pandemic.