Wednesday 8 May 2024, 6.30–8.00pm Hosted by the LSE Human Rights LSE LECTURE THEATRE, CENTRE BUILDING, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, WC2A 2AE This event is open to all and free to attend, no registration is required. Seats will be allocated on a...
Roman Priest (Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Reading British newspapers' commentary on the Ukraine war gives a sense of deja vue. We have a return of the ‘West’, of the ‘Free World’, of the exreme demonisation of the opponent. Commentators are...
alan hunt, intellectual, academic, radical I met Alan in the summer of 1979 at the Communist University in London. The University, partly Alan’s idea, was a week-long series of lessons organised around the main academic disciplines. I was carrying out my doctoral...
Emilios Christodoulidis, The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market Capture (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Page reference in brackets refer to the book. The Redress of Law is a major achievement. Major in every sense. It is large, a...
Date: 30 June 2017 Time: 18.00 - 20.00 Venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Malet St London WC1E 7HX. Malet Street main building (Torrington Square entrance), Room B34 Speaker: Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck, University of London and Syriza member of the Hellenic...
This is the foreword by Costas Douzinas to Law and Critique in Central Europe: Questioning the Past, Resisting the Present, eds. Rafał Manko, Cosmin Cercel, and Adam Sulikowski (Oxford: Counterpress 2016). I am writing this preface in the Chamber of Hellenic...
The human rights movement can be seen as the ongoing but failing struggle to close the gap between the abstract man of the Declarations and the empirical human being. Has it succeeded? Yes and no. 2015 and 2016 have been marked by the heart-breaking images of a moving...
The left in power? Four enticing words. The most important thing here, however, is the question mark at the end. For what does the left mean today as ideology and vision, as organization and party, as movement and government? No single or simple answer exists. We have...
According to an oft-repeated cliché, the recent Syriza victory has historic significance. Its place in history books as the first elected left government in Europe is assured. But its importance goes further. The Syriza victory is an important marker in three...
In 1914, at the beginning of WWI, Cardinals Mercier of Belgium and Billot of France had a heated argument about the sacred nature of pro patria mori. For the Belgian, a soldier who dies defending his country is assured eternal salvation. Such martyrdom is the highest...
Against imperial arrogance and cosmopolitan naivety, we must insist that global neoliberal capitalism and human-rights-for-export are part of the same project. The two must be uncoupled; human rights can contribute little to the struggle against capitalist...
Liberal theories from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls present the self as a solitary and rational entity endowed with natural characteristics and rights and in full control of himself. Rights to life, liberty, and property are presented as integral to humanity’s...
Rights form the terrain on which people are distributed into rulers, ruled, and excluded. Power’s mode of operation is revealed, if we observe which people are given or deprived of which rights at which particular place or point in time. In this sense, human rights...
[image style="polaroid"]https://criticallegalthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Guernica-Sun.jpg[/image] The debate about the meaning of humanity as the ground normative source is conducted between universalists and communitarians. The universalist claims that...
The School of Law, Birkbeck presents 2013 Annual Law Lecture IS THERE A RIGHT TO DISOBEDIENCE AND RESISTANCE? Professor Costas Douzinas Birkbeck, University of London 'The ‘new world order’ announced in 1989 was the shortest in history coming to an abrupt end in...
Why and how did this combination of neoliberal capitalism and humanitarianism emerge? Capitalism has always moralized the economy and applied a gloss of righteousness to profit-making and unregulated competition precisely because it is so hard to believe. From Adam...
We will explore the strong internal connection between these superficially antagonistic principles, at the point of their emergence in the late 18th century here and in the post-1989 order in the next part. The religious grounding of humanity was undermined by the...
If ‘humanity’ is the normative source of moral and legal rules, do we know what ‘humanity’ is? Important philosophical and ontological questions are involved here. Let me have a brief look at its history. Pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of...
Delivered at The Southern Europe Crisis and Resistances, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 25 November 2012. Listen to the free podcast. In the summer of 1918, Constantin Cavafy met E. M. Forster in Alexandria. Cavafy compared the Greeks with the English. The two...
The debate over the future of the Human Rights Act ('HRA') has been somewhat surreal. The Labour position is schizophrenic. Labour introduced the Act but was justifiably accused of violating most of its principles in its obsession with security. But schizophrenia is...
On 22 November 2012 academics from Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain gathered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities to discuss the economic, political and humanitarian crisis austerity has created in South Europe. But PIGS can fly. The widespread protests of 2011...
This talk is inspired by Professor Douzinas’s recent work on the crisis in Greece, and by his time in Athens during recent months. Professor Douzinas has been an outspoken critic of the Greek bailout, of the political elite in Greece which has signed up to the...
At 1.00 pm today (Saturday 25 February) Occupy London invites you to hear and speak with notable guest speakers at the steps of St Paul’s focusing on one of the world economy’s hot topics – Greece. As potential eviction looms for the Occupy the London Stock Exchange...
The unexpected announcement by Greek PM Papandreou yesterday that he is to call a referendum and ask people to vote about the October 24 agreement is the opening salvo in the endgame of the Greek tragedy. Is this extraordinary gambit a genuine request for a popular...
The workers of a small bakery and corner shop in central Athens announced yesterday (Weds) that while they would not close because they are serving many vulnerable people they are joining the 2-day general strike by charging all products at cost. It must have been an...
When Stéphane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage! that indignation with injustice should turn to "a peaceful insurrection" perhaps he did not expect that the movement of indignados in Spain and aganaktismenoi (outraged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon...
As the world follows the north African revolutions with bated breath, a less public north African revolt and tragedy is taking place in Athens and Thessaloniki. Three hundred non-documented migrants, mostly from the Maghreb, have entered the 35th day of a hunger...
The hunger strike in Greece is now on the 25th day. Three hundred sans papiers immigrants are on strike in Athens and Thessaloniki. The majority come from North Africa and have been living and working in Greece for periods of up to 7 years. This is Egypt in Athens and...
Greek Minister for Public Transport Reppas stated last week that the government will not let ‘Greece exposed to the risk of international disrepute and marginalization, destinations of countries characterized by anomie. The attack on the social acceptability of the...
What is the role of legal education, what does it mean to learn the law? The law teacher’s first duty is to understand and teach the language of justice, the breath, spirit and equity that should move the body of law. A law without justice is dead letter, body without...
Tizian – Rape of Europa 1562 Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck enthused about the European model and prophesied its exportation to the world. Many were the successes of the Union, they claimed.Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity, 2006) 43; Ulrich...
I first realised that there is something strange about the term ‘Humanities’ when as the Director of my University’s Humanities Institute I participated at a meeting to set up a European Consortium of Humanities Centres. Except for the host centre in Utrecht and mine...
1. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, Marxist intellectuals, shaken by the Gulag revelations and the collapse of the communist states, started welcoming human rights. Claude Lefort, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Etienne Balibar and Jacques RancièreClaude Lefort, The...
How different does Europe look today from ten years ago. In 2000, influential commentators hailed the dawn of the ‘new European century’ to replace the atrocious ‘American’ 20th century. Europe was on the way to becoming the model polity for the new world. The...
In this month of the ‘Greek passion’ one thing is certain. The country will never be the same again. But while the commentators, academics and ‘experts’ discuss endlessly the economic crisis, the deep political malaise has gone unnoticed. The three ‘waves’ of...
Few events in recent European political history have baffled analysts and commentators more than the widespread insurrection or ‘riots’ (according to right-wing commentators) that took place in Greece in December 2008. The catalyst was the unprovoked police killing of...
A sense of deja vu has dominated the Greek election campaign. The protagonists, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and leader of the opposition George Papandreou, have been repeating earlier skirmishes between Costas Karamanlis senior (uncle of the prime minister), the...
What surprised me most in the Guardian New Politics articles was that the majority have little to do with politics. They are suggestions for changes in constitutional law - some relatively minor (reducing the number of MPs, shortening their holidays or abolishing the...