Hannah Arendt Center and Human Rights Project present:
Ayca Cubukcu: Libya and the Responsibility to Protect": Notes for an Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Authority.
A Lecture
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Olin 102
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
This event occurred on:
The Hannah Arendt Center in co-operation with the Human Rights Program Invites you to a Lecture by Ayça Çubukçu
Libya and the Responsibility to Protect": Notes for an Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Authority.
You can read an essay which offers and early and polemical version of her talk here.
And an excerpt of her essay:
"If sovereignty is the recognized privilege of an “autonomous” state within the international legal framework, it is neither conferred indiscriminately, nor maintained indefinitely. In fact, throughout history, various standards have been formulated and applied in deciding the sovereign status of a given entity. While international lawyers developed “the standard of civilization” in the nineteenth century to discriminate sovereign from non-sovereign or quasi-sovereign entities in the context of colonization, in the twenty-first century, countless other practitioners and theorists have specified and elaborated “universal standards” which an entity such as Libya should meet if its sovereign status is to be affirmed by the international community. Some cosmopolitans are less humble, and project their vocation as the articulation of “universal principles which must shape and limit all human activity”; these universal principles are thus the designation of “necessary boundaries which no human activity should cross.”
Professor Çubukçu currently teaches at Harvard University as a Lecturer on Social Studies. She has had post-doctoral fellowships at the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2009-2010).
She is at work on a book manuscript, "Humanity Must be Defended"?: Paradoxes of a Democratic Desire. Her publications include a forthcoming article, "On Cosmopolitan Occupations: the Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq" in the journal of postcolonial studies, interventions (2011), and "Few Prime Fragments for a Radical Title" in the journal of critical theory, parallax (2010).
Professor Çubukçu holds a Ph.D. with Distinction (2008) from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and a B.A. in Government with Distinction in All Subjects (2001) from Cornell University. At Harvard University, Ayça Çubukçu teaches on the "Cosmopolitics of Human Rights" and the history of social and political theory.
Libya and the Responsibility to Protect": Notes for an Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Authority.
You can read an essay which offers and early and polemical version of her talk here.
And an excerpt of her essay:
"If sovereignty is the recognized privilege of an “autonomous” state within the international legal framework, it is neither conferred indiscriminately, nor maintained indefinitely. In fact, throughout history, various standards have been formulated and applied in deciding the sovereign status of a given entity. While international lawyers developed “the standard of civilization” in the nineteenth century to discriminate sovereign from non-sovereign or quasi-sovereign entities in the context of colonization, in the twenty-first century, countless other practitioners and theorists have specified and elaborated “universal standards” which an entity such as Libya should meet if its sovereign status is to be affirmed by the international community. Some cosmopolitans are less humble, and project their vocation as the articulation of “universal principles which must shape and limit all human activity”; these universal principles are thus the designation of “necessary boundaries which no human activity should cross.”
Professor Çubukçu currently teaches at Harvard University as a Lecturer on Social Studies. She has had post-doctoral fellowships at the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2009-2010).
She is at work on a book manuscript, "Humanity Must be Defended"?: Paradoxes of a Democratic Desire. Her publications include a forthcoming article, "On Cosmopolitan Occupations: the Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq" in the journal of postcolonial studies, interventions (2011), and "Few Prime Fragments for a Radical Title" in the journal of critical theory, parallax (2010).
Professor Çubukçu holds a Ph.D. with Distinction (2008) from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and a B.A. in Government with Distinction in All Subjects (2001) from Cornell University. At Harvard University, Ayça Çubukçu teaches on the "Cosmopolitics of Human Rights" and the history of social and political theory.