2018-19 Excluded Voices and Suppressed Narratives

Unblinding Justice for Social Change

We live in a hugely polarised world in which, for many, life has become longer and better than in any other time whereas, for many others, it is still “nasty, brutish and short.” Even those who would supposedly fall into the privileged side of the divide increasingly feel their lives and the world are getting worse, not better. They point to the rise in inequality experienced almost everywhere in the world in the past few decades, the growth of suffering and displacement in bloody conflicts, the migration and refugee crisis, the resilient brutality and corruption of authoritarian regimes, and the ever more visible effects of environmental destruction and climate change.    

Speaker: Professor Ratna Kapur, Queen Mary University of London

Title: Human Rights, Freedom and Excluded Epistemologies

Abstract: The talk draws on Professor Kapur's very recently released book, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl, Edward Elgar 2018. In the book, Professor Kapur interrogates the claim that human rights produce freedom and draw attention to how they have been deployed to advance political and cultural intents rather than bringing about freedom for disenfranchised groups, focussing on gender, sexual and religious minorities. Campaigns for same-sex marriage, ending violence against women and the Islamic veil bans in Europe, demonstrate how such interventions have at times advanced neo-liberal agendas, new forms of imperialism and enabled a carceral politics rather than producing freedom for its constituencies. 

In her talk she will draw attention to how human rights emerge as a project of containment and as incapable of producing meaningful freedom. The analysis requires a turn away from liberal freedom on which human rights are based, and a turn towards non-liberal registers of freedom. These alternative epistemologies have often been excluded or suppressed. Professor Kapur provides examples of the possibilities of non-liberal freedom by offering reflections on Saba Mahmood's work on the Islamic veil, Foucault’s turn to political spirituality and the revolutionary potential of Shia Islam, and Eve Sedgwick’s engagement with Mahayana Buddhist epistemology. Professor Kapur will conclude with remarks on the relevance and significance of non-liberal understandings of freedom to the futurity of human rights. 

The 2018-2019 Signature Lectures at the Transnational Law Institute at King’s College London are dedicated to these broad topics of inclusion and exclusion and, in particular, to the longstanding contention that law is both complicit and instrumental in silencing critique and empowering resistance and change. Cloaked in transcendent principles of universality, law should be and often is able to help, but also often fails the most vulnerable, most marginalised and most disempowered people.

This failure is often of law’s implementation, but also of law’s blindness and deafness to the plight of vulnerable groups, whose stories are rarely told and heard.

Building on the approach of KTLS18 (www.transnationallawsummit.org) we are inviting not only legal scholars, but academics, thinkers and doers from all quarters to join the debate and help us uncover and publicise the suppressed stories that may lead to legal developments and social change.

The 2018-2019 lectures are made possible by the generous gift of Sir Dickson Poon in support of the Transnational Law Institute and are open to the interested public.

All events are followed by a reception.