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SUMMARY:Russia’s War on Ukrainian Heritage\, Yet Another War Crime
DESCRIPTION:Originally published at https://katoikos.world/analysis/russias-war-on-ukrainian-heritage-yet-another-war-crime.html \nBy Tom Weiss\, RBI Emeritus Director \nThe nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine’s words inspired Raphael Lemkin\, the drafter of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “Burning books is not the same as burning bodies…but when one intervenes … against mass destruction of churches and books one arrives just in time to prevent the burning of bodies.”[1] \nLemkin’s immediate reference was the November 1938 Kristallnacht crimes\, the coordinated program and cultural destruction in the Third Reich\, but there are far too many other instances across time and space. While Vladimir Putin’s docket in The Hague is already lengthy\, the war crime of destroying cultural heritage is yet another reason to say “nyet” to Russian recolonization. \nThe UN General Assembly’s condemnation and decision to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council reflected the continuing and contemporary relevance of what former UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova labeled “cultural genocide” with reference to Iraq and Syria. This expression is not a legal term\, but UNESCO applies it to connote cultural removal akin to “ethnic cleansing”—a term coined in the early 1990s to describe mass atrocities in the former Yugoslavia\, which also has no formal legal definition. Cultural cleansing and ethnic cleansing are evocative; both capture dramatic crimes that shock the human conscience. \nScholars have paid only fleeting attention to this emphasis in Lemkin’s work—the relevance of biological and cultural genocide\, [2] but it certainly applies to Ukraine. UNESCO has compiled a growing list that in mid-November counts 210 sites that have been damaged or destroyed since Moscow’s invasion began on 24 February 2022. It includes 91 religious sites\, 76 buildings of historical or artistic interest\, 18 monuments\, 15 museums\, and 10 libraries. \nUnfortunately\, recent history is replete with similar tragic examples. Shortly after ISIS (or Da’esh) took the city of Palmyra in Syria in the summer of 2015\, they exploded the 2\,000-year-old Temple of Baalshamin. For informed observers\, the destruction was linked to the group’s ongoing murder\, human trafficking\, slavery\, and terror in Syria and Iraq. Mass atrocities also accompanied the destruction of cultural heritage when insurgents deliberately shelled the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993\, destroyed the fabled mosques\, mausoleums\, and libraries of Timbuktu in Mali in 2012\, as well as when the Taliban dynamited the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. \nSocial scientists are taught to ask\, “so what?” Moreover\, we should add\, “Can anything be done?” Affirmative responses are suggested by the history of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a remarkable human rights achievement despite its contested application and nonapplication—e.g.\, in Libya but not in Syria\, Myanmar\, and Ukraine. \nThe concepts applied by the commission mirror those of cultural specialists—the essential responsibilities are to prevent\, to react\, and to rebuild. The heightened attention in academic and public policy discourse to the demands of coming to the rescue of people now also characterizes the challenge of protecting cultural heritage. \nIn fact\, the intimate link between attacking bricks and attacking blood\, or murdering history and people\, provides means to unite the tasks of protecting heritage and humans because the international political disputes about when and where to intervene in specific crises to protect people do not characterize the protection of cultural heritage. Rogues that destroy heritage—such nonstate thugs as ISIS\, such pariah states as Taliban Afghanistan\, and such major powers as China in Xinjiang—are immediate targets for external opprobrium. Widespread if not quite universal international condemnation erupts rather than endless debates about whether outside interveners are neo-colonialists or cosmopolitans. \nIronically\, many iconoclasts who destroy heritage and murder people can use social media to help recruitment. Ironically\, such performative destruction constitutes a “benefit” for them\, which is dramatically overshadowed by the costs borne by local residents and the rest of us. \nCould reframing intervention to protect heritage make it easier to reach a consensus about robust international action that would also protect the people whose culture is under siege? That question animated a research project and the resulting open-access publication of the J. Paul Getty Trust\, Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities. \nAmidst the political gloom that dominates the present moment\, there is a bit of good news. The public’s awareness and shock about the destruction of such renowned sites as the Bamiyan Buddhas\, Mostar Bridge\, Palmyra\, Sana’a\, and Timbuktu\, also lay behind the nearly universal international revulsion and outrage in January 2020\, when Donald Trump mindlessly threatened to target 52 Iranian cultural sites when Tehran menaced retaliation for the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. \nIn short\, protecting heritage has become visible on the international public policy agenda. It is no longer a “niche topic\,” the exclusive domain of cultural specialists. If any further indications were necessary\, the failure to protect adequately Iraqi cultural heritage during the initial US occupation suggested the need to broaden perspectives and participation. The rescue of individuals caught in the crosshairs of violence and menaced by mass atrocities invariably are amidst conscious cultural heritage destruction. Indeed\, for those of us who analyze politics and design responses\, including military ones\, it is important that insiders at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) speak increasingly of the “security-heritage nexus.” \nIt is essential that we be preoccupied not only with visible World Heritage sites recognized by UNESCO but also less well-known\, everyday structures—Uyghur mud-brick temples in China\, Christian village cemeteries in Iraq and Syria\, local Rohingya mosques in Myanmar\, and Russia’s campaign since 2014 to eliminate Tatar traces in the occupied Crimea. While they do not make for media coverage\, these more commonplace sites have become a daily bill-of-fare of destruction\, another indication of the widespread onslaught against the people whose heritage they represent\, as part of efforts to eliminate histories along with human beings. \nThe core R2P ethical framework is to halt mass murder and mass forced displacement\, actual or anticipated. Its emergence reflected an altered political reality. Although specific decisions about exactly when and where to invoke R2P remain controversial\, few observers question whether global responses to mass atrocities are justified. Instead\, the debate centers on precisely how best to achieve R2P’s lofty aims. \nSo too is the intersection between violent attacks on humans and heritage. The protection of immovable cultural heritage is not a distraction for proponents of the robust protection of people. There is no need to add another crime to the four mass atrocities agreed by the UN’s 2005 World Summit. Rather\, protecting cultural heritage is a fundamental aspect of protecting people from genocide\, war crimes\, crimes against humanity\, and ethnic cleansing.[3] In addition\, emphasizing such protection within the R2P framework has the potential to widen support for the evolving norm and its evolution in customary law as well as contribute to ongoing conversations about legitimate sovereignty. \nResponsible states view mass atrocities as an international concern and not merely one of domestic jurisdiction. The destruction of cultural heritage should be viewed similarly because of the universal value and the intimate links between attacks on cultural objects\, structures\, and monuments and attacks on vulnerable populations. \nWhile destroying cultural heritage is not new—examples go back to antiquity—neither is the impulse to protect and preserve it; the contemporary convergence of two factors has altered the politics of protection and the feasibility of international action. First\, the destruction of cultural heritage has riveted the attention not only of curators\, archaeologists\, historians\, and activists but also of major media outlets and popular audiences. Second\, they find themselves in the company of a cottage industry of social scientists\, international lawyers\, and military officers exploring R2P’s application to the protection of cultural heritage. \nThere is no need to split hairs between safeguarding people and the cultural heritage that sustains them. Trying to establish a priority between them constitutes a false choice\, reminiscent of juxtaposing development and the environment. The staff from the Middle East Institute\, the Asia Society\, and the Antiquities Coalition evaluated the widespread devastation in Asia and concluded: “The fight to protect the peoples of the region and their heritage cannot be separated.” \n  \n[1] Quoted in Robert Bevan\, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War\, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books\, 2016)\, 15. \n[2] Raphael Lemkin\, “Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations\,” (1933); and Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation\, Analysis of Government\, and Proposals for Redress (Washington\, DC: Carnegie Endowment\, 1944)\, xiii. \n[3] UN\, 2005 World Summit Outcome\, General Assembly resolution 60/1\, 24 October 2005\, paragraphs 138–140.
URL:https://ralphbuncheinstitute.org/event/russias-war-on-ukrainian-heritage-yet-another-war-crime/
LOCATION:NY
CATEGORIES:Archive
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SUMMARY:Limitarianism from a Global Perspective
DESCRIPTION:Limitarianism from a Global PerspectiveIngrid Robeyns (Utrecht University)Tuesday\, November 15\, 6:30 p.m. (ET)GC Room 9205 And online via Zoom\nWe are excited to welcome philosopher Ingrid Robeyns as our third colloquium speaker of Fall 2022. The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the speaker.This is an in-person event that will allow for virtual participation via Zoom. The in-person talk will be followed by a reception with wine and snacks.If you plan to attend virtually\, please register in advance for this meeting. After registering\, you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining.Members of the public who wish to attend should email us. They may enter the GC if they show proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test taken within 7 days prior to the visit. \n\n\n\nAbstract\nLimitarianism is the view that there should be an upper limit to how many resources a person can appropriate; in most cases\, the focus is on economic resources\, and the claim is that there should be a limit to how rich a person can be. Limitarianism is thus a view in the wider family of egalitarian proposals\, but urges us to focus explicitly on the harms and bads done by extreme wealth concentration.However\, most of the reasons given for limitarianism are focusing on the effects among a political community of voters. Similarly\, most of the institutional proposals that have been put forward on how one could move in the direction of a limitarian world focus on the  possibilities given by the fiscal system. In other words\, in the existing literature there is a significant focus at what this means for political actions within a country. In this talk\, I ask what the limitarian view needs when considered from a global perspective. Does limitarianism become implausible if we consider the realities of an interconnected world? Or does it require us to make modifications or put additional requirements to the institutional proposals to advance limitarianism? \nSpeaker Bio \nIngrid Robeyns holds the chair in ethics of institutions at Utrecht University. She works mainly in normative political philosophy\, but also engages in interdisciplinary research. Some of the topics on which she published are the capability approach\, concepts of wellbeing\, gender inequality\, methods in normative political philosophy\, climate justice\, as well as specific institutional proposals\, such as universal basic income or inheritance taxation. Her most recent work is on limitarianism\, on which she is writing a book aimed at a broader audience (in North America\, forthcoming with Astra Publishing House).
URL:https://ralphbuncheinstitute.org/event/limitarianism-from-a-global-perspective/
LOCATION:Graduate Center\, Room 9205\, 365 Fifth Avenue\, New York\, NY\, 10016\, United States
CATEGORIES:Archive,Events
ORGANIZER;CN="Center for Global Ethics and Politics":MAILTO:pcipollitti@gradcenter.cuny.edu
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20221129T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20221129T213000
DTSTAMP:20260427T035156
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SUMMARY:Subjective Security
DESCRIPTION:Subjective SecurityOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown University)Tuesday\, November 29\, 6:30 p.m. (ET)GC Room 9205-06And online via Zoom\nWe are excited to welcome philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò as our fourth and final colloquium speaker of Fall 2022. The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the speaker.This is an in-person event that will allow for virtual participation via Zoom. The in-person talk will be followed by a reception with wine and snacks.If you plan to attend virtually\, please register in advance for this meeting. After registering\, you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining.Members of the public who wish to attend should email us. They may enter the GC if they show proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test taken within 7 days prior to the visit. \n\n\n\nAbstract\nThe distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedom focuses on the political and ethical subject’s relationships with herself and with other people. Materialists have tended to focus more on the direct contribution of the social circumstances in which the subject finds herself (e.g. her relationship to the means of production and the means of subsistence). In this talk I try out one strategy for reconciling the former focus with the latter\, one rooted in the political ideal of self-determination\, which I associate with the latter group of thought. I’ll attempt to describe subjective security as a resource that allows a person to extend herself across time\, institutions\, and persons in ways that are vital for securing her freedom\, and sketch some political implications of this view. \nSpeaker Bio \nOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. His work focuses on Africana and social/political philosophy and emphasizes themes and figures from anti-capitalist\, anti-colonial\, and Black radical traditions of thought and practice. He is also the author of Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford University Press\, January 2022) and Elite Capture (Haymarket Press and Pluto Press\, May 2022).
URL:https://ralphbuncheinstitute.org/event/subjective-security/
LOCATION:Graduate Center\, Room 9205\, 365 Fifth Avenue\, New York\, NY\, 10016\, United States
CATEGORIES:Events
ORGANIZER;CN="Center for Global Ethics and Politics":MAILTO:pcipollitti@gradcenter.cuny.edu
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