Brown Bag Lunch Series
Speaker: Chase Madar, civil rights attorney and author of The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
Human rights institutions and doctrine have grown up since the 1970s. No longer limited to freeing prisoners of conscience, human rights doctrine now busily intermingles with the practice of counterinsurgency warfare, ‘humanitarian intervention’ wars and the newly minted ‘Responsibility to Protect’ casus belli. Prominent human rights attorneys and advocates are also charter members of the foreign policy elites in their respective countries, and have not hesitated, in and out of high office, to push for wars of choice–always, of course, for the sake of human rights. Has the militarization of human rights doctrine and institutions spread liberal freedoms to such places as Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq? Has military force become newly sensitized to human rights concerns–or is it the culture of human rights that has been altered?
Chase Madar is an attorney and journalist who writes about foreign affairs for Le Monde diplomatique, the London Review of Books, Al Jazeera,The Nation, The American Conservative, TomDispatch and Jacobin. He is the author of The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower (Verso, 2013).
Kosher pizza will be served.
An audio recording of this talk is available above and here: https://soundcloud.com/leitnercenter/the-weaponization-of-human-rights
Photo credit: U.S. Army/Creative Commons
Brown Bag Lunch Series