Public Seminar

Anthropocentrism causes political injustice and ecological destruction. But an inverted anthropocentrism, in which the nonhuman is granted rights, is not the solution. Only by redefining the human can democracy be about the conditions of shared life.

A reductionist definition of democracy as ‘people power’ fails to grasp democracy’s political evolution as guarantee against tyranny. Giving a voice to the biosphere extends this principle and is not to negate democracy’s own conditions.

In his sweeping survey of ‘democides’, John Keane associates democracy with all that is deserving of respect, including nature itself. But ‘true democracy’, as Marx put it, is much less polite. Can we really invoke it to save the planet?

Sudden death stories of democracy do us a disservice. The truth is that democracy can be destroyed in multiple ways, at different tempos. The slowest of these – environmental degradation – is a consequence of the anthropocentric ideal underlying democracy itself.

Two decades of speculative building and misuse of earthquake funds set Turkey up for disaster. Erdoğan’s AKP failed to plan or react, but will do anything to hang on to power.

Lives are being lost in a brutal government crackdown on protests for women’s rights after Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody. Can the long-standing control of Iran’s morality police on women be unsettled by a majority already resisting the dress code?

Giorgia Meloni could become Italy’s first female prime minister. Her political rise is no isolated case: ‘femonationalism’ is flourishing throughout Europe, disguising extremes as the next socially acceptable, mainstream choice.

The US Supreme Court has overturned two landmark cases that protected a woman’s rights over her own body for 50 years. How did ‘fetal politics’ — a political movement that has turned embryos and fetuses into ‘unborn children’ endowed with unique and inviolable civil rights – gain such momentum? And what will be the outcome of this new ruling?

It was only after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 that NATO broke off cooperation with Russia. Until then, Ukrainians themselves were largely against NATO membership. To frame NATO as a security threat to Russia caters to Kremlin propaganda.

Prison was a central pillar of communism and an experience shared by generations of eastern Europeans. The USA today can also be described as a carceral society, its prison system the expression of a ‘new Jim Crow’. What does the comparison mean for the definition of the ‘political prisoner’? A conversation.

Beyond fact-checking obviously false claims, of what use can professional historians be to society? In an age of denialism, one has to embrace history’s political potentials instead of reducing them to the task of safekeeping facts.

A virus and its impact described in closed terms: when under pressure, socio-political narratives often become divisive; perceptions can become negatively transfixed. To understand what has gone wrong right now, we need look at how the problem is framed.

Trumpism treated the US constitution as means to an end: the assertion of white supremacy. But to respond by venerating the constitution is to misunderstand Trump’s anti-elitist appeal. If the US constitution is to be claimed for democracy, it must be democratized itself.

The veneration of the US constitution is directly connected to America’s emergence as global hegemon. As the US’s democratic dysfunctions become ever more apparent, this culture is coming under strain. Why the end of the American Century coincides with the collapse of the country’s constitutional consensus.

Comparisons to the evacuation of Saigon fail to account for the speed and scale of the Afghanistan collapse and the shock it has caused the US public. However, the post-war history of the Vietnam war may point to how the Afghan refugee issue offers the US a chance to redeem itself, and how, despite persistent hostilities, diplomatic relations could normalize.

Public displays of dissatisfaction against leading politicians make for striking headlines, especially when they expose a blatant inability to discuss key topics. Racism in France, hidden by a colour-blind society on both the left and the right, benefits Le Pen’s self-professed defenders of the Republic. So how can race and immigration take a more positive centre-stage position?