Join the School of Humanities and Languages for Bodies in/of crises: responses, resistance and reconfigurations, the second workshop of the Power in Crisis Research Conversations series.
In recent years, former political leaders have characterised our world as being in a state of ‘permacrisis’, while historians have called our present situation a ‘polycrisis’ - a set of cascading emergencies that challenge the foundations of our societies. This series of conversations across the disciplines in the School of Humanities & Languages seeks to interrogate the idea of crisis and the politics that emerge from the apparently incontrovertible assertion that we are in a time of unprecedented peril, politically, ecologically, socially, economically and more.
It is hard to imagine a country facing a more profound polycrisis than Germany in the aftermath of World War II. It had suffered total defeat. Its cities were destroyed. It was occupied by its enemies, who exacted retribution, extracted reparations, and pondered whether it should even have a future. Swathes of its territory were transferred to other countries, contributing to a mass exodus, which exacerbated a humanitarian crisis. Germany’s government had collapsed. Its economy came to a standstill. Black markets and scavenging proliferated, intensifying perceived crises of law and order, morality, and the family. Germany’s crimes, foremost the Holocaust, prompted a sense of moral, even civilisational crisis. Amid diagnoses of a spiritual vacuum and pervasive powerlessness, the Christian churches comprised a rare source of power but also faced their own crises. The paper will explore their leaders’ responses. How were the various crises understood and explained? Which were seen as most urgent? What solutions were envisaged and adopted?
Arturo Escobar, a prominent expert on the remote Cauca department on the Pacific Colombian coast, has hypothesised that the region is a peculiarly good place from which to study resistance towards the current polycrisis. Yet, my own years working within the Yurumanguí community just to the north in the Valle de Cauca suggests that the concept has limitations. While there are elements of the current crisis faced by the community that are new—the globalisation of the drugs’ trade and its violence, and advances in machinery that make ecological destruction easier for their enemies to covertly inflict—the viewpoint through which they understand and resist these threats is not new at all. Their structures of resistance are inherited from their rebel slave ancestors. The crisis is part of a 300-year war; their defiance centuries old.
In this presentation I will argue that the time for mere critique is over and that what is desperately needed is images and conceptions of an alternative form of life to the current one. In other words, we need to reinvigorate utopian imagination. Yet, to be actually helpful and thus serious, an utopia needs to be “immanent” in the sense of drawing on real motivational sources, rather than mere images of something “completely other”. Also, to really address the global nature of the intertwined crisis we are living through, an utopia needs to be sufficiently universalizable, not bound up with any particular cultural context (western or other) nor a particular political system (liberal or other). I will present some ideas for such utopia, drawing on a philosophical conception of the human life-form and what I call its “fundamental ethics”.
Amnesty International’s April 2024 report bemoans that the world “is hurtling backwards past the 1948 promise of universal human rights”. This paper examines the claim that we are currently witnessing the crisis of the international human rights system and the increasingly “shameless” abuse of human rights. In recent decades, scholars and activists have argued that the international human rights system is threatened by a new generation of authoritarian leaders who brazenly display their contempt for the very idea of human equality. Yet they have not explained why such leaders have come to power at this moment, or why the established tools of human rights law and activism seem so ill-equipped to challenge them. I argue that diagnoses that stop at the rise of a new generation of shameless characters obscures the political and economic context of their rise. Understanding today’s assault on human rights must reckon with the end of the political and economic conditions in which human rights became hegemonic, and naming and shaming had purchase. Specifically, we cannot adequately account for the contemporary crisis of human rights without situating it in the context of the shift from neoliberal globalisation to neo-mercantilist economic war.
