Conversations

In a series of conversations the participants, along with the audience, will make connections between the questions that arise from examining the nation-state system. The question of how it might be possible to achieve an actual protection beyond the human rights supposedly enjoyed by every human being will be raised. The conversations will examine where to locate political agency between national governments and transnational corporations and institutions and take a second look at the cosmopolitanism of the old empires. A variety of zones of exclusion–from free trade zones to deportation camps–will be put in relation to one another. Participants will view the past from the perspective of its futurity and vice versa, and examine the disconcerting “new machismo” that has been spreading in key positions of global power.

With Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Samar Yazbek; Arjun Appadurai, Cemil Aydin, and Rana Dasgupta; Keller Easterling, Bernd Kasparek, and Kim Rygiel; Arjun Appadurai and Slavenka Drakulić; Antony T. Anghie and Susan George; In Koli Jean Bofane and Brigitta Kuster