Between 8–9 February 2018, the Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy Graduate School of Law (University of Hamburg) in conjunction with Professor José Manuel Barreto Soler (Universidad de los Andes, Universidad Externado) will hold a conference on the history of...
José-Manuel Barreto
Six Books: International Law, Human Rights and the Politics of the Turn to History
What do we mean by the turn to history in international law? We are speaking about a growing body of scholarship that is engaged in the task of bringing history to international law in a number of ways: telling the history of international law, contextualising...
Decolonising the Theory and History of Human Rights, Conversation Berlin 10 June 2014
A Conversation marking the publication of the book Human Rights from a Third World Perspective: Critique, History and International Law, edited by José-Manuel Barreto. Date: 10 Jun 2014 Time: 13:00–15:00 Place: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät,...
Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights Field
Some Christians encountered an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother’s arms and flung it still living to the dog, which proceeded to devour him before the...
United for Global Democracy: A Manifesto
On 15 October 2011, united in our diversity, united for global change, we demand global democracy: global governance by the people, for the people. Inspired by our sisters and brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, New York, Palestine-Israel, Spain and...
OCTOBER 15TH: UNITED FOR #GLOBALCHANGE
On October 15th people from all over the world will take to the streets and squares. From America to Asia, from Africa to Europe, people are rising up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy. Now it is time for all of us to join in a global non violent...
In Commemoration October 12, 1492: Manifesto of Decolonial Aesthetics
A transmodern world has emerged, reconfiguring the past 500 years of coloniality and its aftermath, modernity, postmodernity and altermodernity. A remarkable feature of this transformation is the creativity in/from the Non-Western world and its political...
Mass Political Defiance: A Conversation with Gene Sharp
Gene Sharp, the most important theorist on non violent struggle, accepted to answer various questions about his work for the blog cosmopolita and the printed edition of El Espectador (20th of May 2011). In this interview Sharp speaks about his theory and also about...
War Crimes after the War Ended
The history of war crimes is one of the sites of the politics of memory par excellence. The arrangements of world politics today still seat on the consequences of the Second World War -the permanent members of the UN Security Council being one of the more visible. The...
The Suppression of the Arab Spring in Syria
Syria video released by Amnesty International “Images of unarmed civilians shot in the head help explain why there have been so many fatalities. Together with footage of soldiers celebrating deaths, they document what appears to be a ‘shoot to kill’ policy,” said...
What we are reading… I have no enemies: My Final Statement | Liu Xiaobo
This text was read at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize 2010, which was awarded to Liu Xiaobo 'for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China' "Twenty years on, the innocent souls of June Fourth are yet to rest in peace, and I, who had...
Charter 08
Charter 08 was written by China's Human Rights Defenders including Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo. A hundred years have passed since the writing of China’s first constitution. 2008 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal...
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: A Cannibal, Surreal & Subaltern Approach to Human Rights
This paper explores – briefly – four ideas: the concept of the ‘turn to emotions’, the notion of a cannibal theory, legal surrealism and the subaltern perspective on human rights. How we are to think and feel human rights today? This question is situated in a specific...
Human Rights and the Crisis of Modernity
‘Truth’ emerges when a victim, from his present catastrophic position, gains a sudden insight into the entire past as a series of catastrophes that led to his current predicament. (Walter Benjamin) The horrors of the Second World War and, in particular, the ‘real...